Getting old and dying, secular style

Young people feel as if they will live forever. Of course we all know on some level that we won’t, but the young find this easy to ignore. Feeling like you will live forever is an important trait in human beings because it allows for long-term planning. That sense of limitless time lets young people put up with a lot to pursue their goals.

For example, a young person might be willing to embark on a decade-long project, like becoming a doctor. It would actually be realistic for a young person to consider the possibility of dying during the next ten years before undertaking such a course of action. But it would be the rare 22-year old who would weigh the possibility of an early death against taking pre-med courses.

No more time for tedium

In contrast, old people are no longer willing to put up with a lot. They demand more immediate payoffs for their actions. You can see this in retirement for those fortunate ones for whom retirement is a choice. I often hear the sentiment that “I retired because I couldn’t put up with the crap anymore.”

Earlier in life, these people were likely more willing to put up with it. In fact, putting up with things you don’t want to do in order to do the things that you consider important is generally a sign of a mature and healthy personality. In my case, if I wanted to teach, I had to attend faculty meetings, design and grade tests, oversee papers, write time-consuming reports and engage in other administrative tasks. Having to do all those things was part of the reason I retired from teaching. Old people cannot put up with such things as well as younger people. They feel they don’t have the time.

What causes this change from feeling like you will live forever to knowing you will die in a relatively short time? Like Hemingway's famous quote about bankruptcy, it happens gradually and then suddenly. When I was 71, I wrote an optimistic opinion piece entitled The Secular Satisfaction of Death. Even at that age, death was not quite real to me. Today, at 74, death has become more real and I am not writing so optimistically.

Hard reminders

Partly, the change comes simply from the facts of life. When I read that the International Olympic Committee is currently choosing the site of the 2036 Summer Games, I realized that I may not live to watch them. That never occurred to me before. I am also reminded of my death by the increasing number of funerals I am attending.

Biologically, old people become aware of death through the experience of physical decline. You cannot do the things you used to do. Even if you can do them, you lose the grace and joy that physical activity used to bring. This hits athletes especially hard. People like me, who fell apart physically much earlier, are lucky at this stage of life. Decline feels more normal.

I also wonder if there is a psychological or biological link that kicks in at a certain age. When I turned 60, I remember a powerful feeling that my life had changed. I felt that I would never again begin something genuinely new. I'm very satisfied with the work I've done in the last ten years, but all of it was carrying forward work that I had already begun. Maybe our bodies tell us to weigh our options more carefully as our time winds down and runs out.

Religion and the denial of death

Is all this tragedy? Should we, as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote, “rage against the dying of the light?” Part of the traditional role of religion is to reassure people that death is not a tragedy, particularly death after a long and fruitful life. Christianity does this to an extreme degree. In Christian thought, we don’t actually die at all, but live forever in heaven. Islam echoes this promise of eternal life. Hinduism and Buddhism also have concepts of continuation like Nirvana and reincarnation. Even Judaism, which is notoriously ambiguous in matters of an afterlife, has plenty of suggestions that we will live on in heaven.

In many accounts, the form of continuation in Christianity and Islam is specifically personal. “I” continue with my personality intact. Tellingly, the New Testament is aware of how problematic this conception is. In the three Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, the Sadducees, who reject the idea of resurrection, ask Jesus whose wife a woman will be after resurrection if, in her previous life, she had more than one husband. Jesus responds that in the resurrected life there is no marriage because people are like the angels of heaven. Jesus is reminding us that we are not the same after death. People who think about heaven as a simple continuation of human life are being overly literal about what is best thought of as religious poetry.

For most secularists, death is the clear and simple end of life. We cease to exist in the same way that we did not exist before conception. If we take the view of some scientists that consciousness is the basis of the universe, we might say that at death, our individual consciousness dissolves into the cosmic consciousness field, much the way electrons dissolve into a quantum field when not observed. We cease to be particles and become waves.

That process is not personal. Everything that makes me me ceases to be. Secularism has not yet figured out a consistent attitude toward this ending.

Life readies us for death by gradually reducing our capacities. At a certain point, many old people simply tire of life and accept death. "Rest in peace" is an insightful phrase for death.

Links in an endless chain

The circle of life is also a comfort for the old. If human beings lived forever, there would be no new life. In evolutionary terms, life would lose its dynamism and become stale. Literally, life would still be one-celled creatures in the sea without death.

When I hold my new granddaughter, I know I must make way for her. I have had my time. She must have hers. One day, hopefully, she will make way for my future descendants. I am one link in an endless chain.

Then there is the political side of death. Accepting death is part of a general acceptance of limits. Death is a piece of a more ecologically sustainable attitude toward existence. We could think of death as the last chapter in Bill McKibben’s 2003 book, Enough. We could think of death as one form of nature’s rejection of capitalist accumulation.

I am in the process of becoming certified by the Center for Inquiry as a secular celebrant. Unlike other secular groups that register themselves as religions in order to qualify with states that only allow government officials and religious leaders to marry people, CFI insists that its celebrants do not conduct religious ceremonies when they preside at weddings and other life-cycle events. CFI engages in litigation to lift these marriage restrictions.

One of the reasons I want to become a secular celebrant is to serve the non-religious community by performing funerals. Many of us know of persons whose family members arranged religious funerals that they would not have wanted.

But there is also a philosophical context for my project. It is at the funeral that stories about the meaning of human life inevitably surface. It is in the encounter with aging and death that secularism will develop its new vocabulary of human flourishing—of what it means to live a fulfilled human life. One can already see the dueling narratives that will compete for our consideration. Is the goal of life to define oneself and make one’s own way in the world? Or should we think of our lives as a small part of a grand tapestry? Is it to be Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” or Walt Disney’s “Circle of Life?” Or some combination? Or something else entirely?

I don’t know how secular civilization will ultimately come to view these things. But I do know that they will be worked out at the gravesite.