Life and Death: When It's Time, Let Go

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Death is an enigma. It is impossible to define life without death. Up to its very last link, life is a bio-chemical chain reaction. Once life is launched, like a bullet it must reach its final destination, which is death.

Death is less frightening, however, when we concede that life attains maximum fullness only when it is guided by an ideal, by something for which we are willing to die if necessary. Whatever incites us to die also incites us to live with greater intensity.

That's why the lives of heroes, mystics and martyrs are more intense than the life of an ordinary mortal. That's also why love and the pleasures of the senses are felt more intensely by people who are facing death in a war or revolution.

When I was young, a World War II veteran who was lucky to escape many bomb attacks in Burma (now Myanmar) told me that for those of them who were living in the expectation of dying at any moment, everything - a day of sunshine, the warm clasp of a friendly hand, a pretty face, a colourful bird, a rose - acquired a sublime and unexpected value.

A noble example of a serene attitude towards death is to be found in the last letters that Dr Wilson, physician, naturalist, artist and Antarctic explorer, wrote to his wife from the icy wastes of the South Pole. The men in Scott's ill-fated expedition - of which Dr Wilson was a member - were starving, had no fuel with which to keep warm.

Dr Wilson's letters were found near his ice-sheathed body. "Don't be unhappy", he wrote. We are playing a good part in the great scheme arranged by God himself... We will all meet after death, and death has no terrors..."

The roots of fear of death are fear of pain and of the feeling of anguish that is implicit in dying, and the sadness of leaving loved ones and joys that bind us to the world. Third, and perhaps most important, is fear of the unknown.

Death, with exceptions, is not accompanied by physical pain. Rather, it is suffused with serenity, even a certain well-being and spiritual exaltation, caused by the anaesthetic action of carbon dioxide on the central nervous system.

Science reveals that the sensation of dying is like that of falling asleep. And if a person accepts his death as an act of service to an ideal, or as the end of his life's work, it could be a blessing. It could be accepted more willingly if we knew that we had fulfilled our duty in life.

Fear of the unknown is similar to the childhood fear of darkness. Does our protoplasm simply dissolve into its primordial elements and return to the universe, or does the complex system of images that we call consciousness survive?

Carl Jung said, "The decisive question is: Are we related to something infinite or not? Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance".

Just as we cultivate the will to live, we should cultivate the will to shed our mortal coils properly. We desire death only in moments of utter desperation. Were we to deem it a physiological necessity like hunger or thirst, we would aspire to die, as Nietzsche said, "like a torch which dies exhausted and glutted with relief".

Even as a coin attains its full value when it is spent, so life attains its supreme value when one knows how to forfeit it with grace when the time comes.

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See also: Life and Death, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)