Death and Dying

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Death and Dying

Death is an event that demands explanation. Every human society has recognized the importance of orienting its members to the phenomenon of death, the process of dying, and death's aftermath. So powerful is the event of death, with its demand for interpretation, that it may well have been one of the first causes of religion and philosophy in primitive people.

Ancient Views on Death and Dying

The Hindu religion views life as connected not with concrete personal, historical existence as such, but rather with the concept of being, which is contrasted with both life and death. Life and death are a form of existence, which is not real in the sense that being is real. Therefore, death is not the loss of being as such, but merely the end of the illusion of life as existence in time.

For the Buddhist, the self exists as a sheer moment of becoming in history. Life and death as a process of time and history are fictions that prod the self to discover the liberation of the self from reflection and feeling alike. Death is not an enemy in Buddhist theology; instead it is a goal, which produces a liberation from the cravings and sensations of life.

In ancient Greek philosophy we see a quite different answer to the question of death. Here there is a concern for immortality as a specific object of philosophical reality. Whereas Jews find continuity in the purpose of history as a dialogue with God, Hindus in the Atman as the reality of being, and Buddhists in the contentless moment of not knowing, Greek philosophers seek continuity in knowledge as the eternal reality. Death has been dissolved of its power to destroy the self; because all of life itself in its bodily form is only of passing significance, death, too, is viewed only as a passing away of that which is unnecessary to the true personality of the soul. "True philosophers," Socrates suggested, "make dying their profession."

A common assumption among the Hindu, Buddhist, and Greek concepts of death is a fundamental dualism with regard to the reality of the "otherworldly" and the unreality of this present temporal existence. The individual dying in such a culture, whether an ancient, preindustrial one or a contemporary one, is thus equipped with a religious or philosophical system that transcends death and that can offer experiential training in altered states of consciousness, including symbolic confrontations with death. The approach to death may even be accompanied by the nourishing context of extended family, clan, or tribe, and may even include specific guidance through the successive stages of dying.

A Judeo-Christian theology of death stands in stark contrast to the dualism of the Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist theology of life and death. A theology of death within Judaism builds on foundations that are unique to the beginnings of Israel as a historical community, set within the temporal bounds of a created world. For Hebrews, death comes from the hand of God and has no power of its own. Death does not have an arbitrary power to break the continuity of life, because life is related to the continuity of God's purpose in history. The Hebrew understanding of the meaning of death lies with the affirmation that death marks an absolute end of personal existence on earth. Continuity consists, therefore, not in a theory of personal immortality that extends the individual's life beyond death, but instead in the assurance of a future in which there is continuing conversation and relation between God and his people.

There is no concept of an immortal soul in Hebrew anthropology as presented in the Old Testament. The critical issue in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is the continuity of the self through the dissolution of the body in death. In the biblical view, this continuity resides in the continued power of God, who created the human person in his own image and likeness and who upholds that person in a relation that guarantees life, even in the face of being mortal by nature. In the Christian tradition, continuity of life beyond death in terms of the essential unity of body and soul is strongly supported by the biblical teaching on the nature of the resurrection of the body as well as the soul to eternal life.

There is a close affinity between the Christian and the Jewish perspectives on death. There also remains, however, a fundamental difference. The Christian tradition, building on the foundations of ancient Israel's belief in God as the creator and sustainer of life, answers the question of death through its testimony to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Contemporary Views on Death and Dying

The typical Western view of death has become more pragmatic and dissociated from religious or philosophical worldviews. Aging and dying are seen not as integral parts of the life process but as reminders of our limited ability to control nature, despite technological and scientific achievements in this regard. The educated Westerner tends to regard belief in consciousness after death as a manifestation of primitive fears and relics of religion. Nietzsche even went so far as to say that fear of death is a "European disease," and attributed it largely to the influence of Christianity. Ernest Becker, in his classic work The Denial of Death (1974), argued that an attempt to deny human mortality leads to neurotic patterns of behavior, while accepting the reality of our mortality through faith in a transcendent source leads to faith and mental health.

Death is becoming more difficult to define. Advances in medical science in the last half of the twentieth century have made the moment of death more ambiguous. The empirical sciences explain death in terms of mechanistic and organic processes, with loss of brain function taken as a sign of clinical death. To provide the dying with the maximum benefits of scientific medical research and technology, they are usually institutionalized under the assumption that the vital processes of life are essentially organic and physical. In our contemporary Western society, while the costs of dying and burying the dead have increased dramatically, there is also a denial of the reality of death and a tendency to separate the moment of death from life.

Having compartmentalized death so that we no longer live in continuity with the dead, our contemporary culture is nonetheless preoccupied with an awareness of death such as never before (Bregman 1992). Anecdotal accounts of "near death" experiences give many reason to believe in the possibility of life after death. Persons lying unconscious in wrecked cars or on operating tables awaken and report seeing and hearing events from a perspective that suggests an "out of body" experience. Some report moving through a tunnel toward a bright light, which includes appearances of figures representing persons who have died or supernatural beings. While these experiences are sometimes said to defy scientific explanation, they also fall short of providing evidence for the existence of life beyond death, for they are not "after death" accounts but "near death" experiences.

An encouraging sign of the development of a human ecology of death and dying is the modern hospice movement. The hospice movement, with a focus on caring for dying persons, had its beginning in the founding of St. Christopher's Hospice in London. Dr. Cicely Saunders, founder and director, traces the antecedents of the modern hospice back to medieval hospices, but more recently to Mother Mary Aidenhead, who used the concept of the hospice when she founded the Irish Sisters of Charity in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dr. Saunders's work at St. Christopher's began in 1967, and since that time the hospice movement has developed in England and has spread to the United States. At the center of the hospice community is the concept of a body coexisting with a belief. The body is the dying patient, and the belief is that the patient is something more than a body. The hospice community embraces patient, family, and close friends, not only during the final days and weeks of the patient's life but also long after death, offering consolation and support during the time of bereavement.

The universality of the human experience of death is finally an individual experience that has not changed from the beginning of human history. Philosophers seek to comprehend it with wisdom, poets inspire us to face it with courage, priests clothe it with sacred ritual, psychologists offer inner healing, and religion weaves the fabric from which we shape our shroud. In the Bible, the tormented Job cries out in his agony, "If mortals die, will they live again?" ( Job 14:14). Jesus, the crucified messiah, promises, "I am the resurrection and the life. . . . I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever. . . ." ( John 11:25; Revelation 1:18).

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