The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

Think of the countless opportunities we all lose in life as precious moments vanish forever into the past. Weren’t we, for example, unavoidably stuck in Philadelphia on business the night our daughter played the role of Anita in the grade-six production of West Side Story at her Toronto middle school? Well then, in what sense would it matter, would it be any more a loss, if we missed our great-great-grandson’s performance as Officer Krupke because we were dead? What difference is there between a loss due to your being out of town and a loss due to your no longer being on the surface of the earth? You lose the same thing in either case. No difference might be apparent even to the one with whom you lost the opportunity to spend time. It seemed to Didion not that Dunne had died, but that he had simply gone somewhere else—annoyingly out of town, in Los Angeles, say, when she, remaining in their New York apartment surrounded by his chair and desk and shoes, needed to ask his advice on a literary or household matter. In Jim Crace’s novel Being Dead, a daughter imagines her departed father reassuring her with a similar thought: “Death is nothing at all. I have slipped away into another room. All is well.”5

  But if we can so easily analogize death to an unavoidable business trip when our daughter performed on stage, or an unfortunate slipping away to the bathroom just when our infant son took his first step, then is there really any difference between what we lose when we die and what we necessarily lose countless times while alive? Simply add up all the past moments when we couldn’t be with our children because they had to be in school—when the joke they made broke the class up, say, or they made a priceless remark to the teacher or showed the first blossoming of moral courage in taking an unpopular stance—and we had to be at the office. In life itself, we miss precious moment after precious moment, surrendering them forever because we cannot be in all places at the same time. And so why rip our hearts out over all the future moments we lose because, thanks to death, we can’t be in the same place with our children for all time? As the philosopher Charles Hartshorne once put it: “To be finite or limited in time is no more an injury than to be finite in space.”6

  So lost moments are continually slipping into the past, second by second, gone forever. Meanwhile, we ourselves and those we love continually forge ahead, year by year, into the future. But then isn’t it inevitable that, sooner or later, life itself will part us and we will irrecoverably lose one another? Are we not, after all, kidding ourselves if we think that our sweet children, once they blossom and mature, will always want to stay with us—or even have anything to do with us?

  People grow apart. Someone who exists for thousands of years cannot expect his grandchildren to still be calling him every week, as Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man ruefully observed, or even every millennium. Live long enough (and long enough might not be all that long) and we will all become Lears abandoned by Regans. Or Helmers by Noras. Even in our current mortal life spans, as Didion says, “Husbands walk out, wives walk out.” When Rosemary Clooney began singing “We’ll Be Together Again,” she “was imagining the end of a love affair; she later sang it thinking of the friends who’ve died too young”7—just as if the two kinds of losses, the one due to the ebbing of love during life and the other to the finality of death, were cut from the same cloth. But let Shelley’s celebrated words make the point:

  All things that we love and cherish,

  Like ourselves must fade and perish;

  Such is our rude mortal lot—

  Love itself would, did they not.

  If we didn’t lose others due to death, we’d lose them due to life. What’s the difference?

  So we have on the table the consoling (if hardly cheering) thought that the most devastating losses we sustain in death, its excruciating ultimate goodbyes, would come with life anyway. Even while we are alive, we lose countless moments with loved ones, moments that disappear irretrievably into the past. And we will or would eventually lose those loved ones themselves when, as our respective selves move ever forward into the future, we grow ever increasingly distant. The consoling thought, then, is that the losses that life brings, at least for those of us who value human relationships above everything else—for we people who need people—are ultimately no different than those that death inflicts.

  Does this consolation for mortality ring true?

  Suppose that you missed your son’s performance in Toronto, although you were able to close the biggest merger deal of your life, because you were in Philadelphia that same evening. Is this any different from missing his musical performance in 2020, although you were able to close the biggest merger deal of your life in 2018, because you died in 2019? Life itself necessitates your being finite in space. Death simply returns the compliment by necessitating that you’re finite in time. What’s the difference?

  It’s simply this: Life itself might make it impossible for you to be in two different places at the same time. But it doesn’t prevent you from being in the same place with your son at a different time. You might have missed his performance in Toronto because you had to be in Philadelphia that evening. But you can still be with him when he graduates later that year. As the old Harry Chapin song has it, “We’ll get together then, son.” But suppose you missed his performance in 2020 because you died in 2019. Then you can never make up for it.

  If we didn’t die, then we’d eliminate a kind of loss that goes over and above anything that life itself imposes. In this sense, life’s losses do not and cannot intimate death’s.

  What about the observation that even if we somehow never lost opportunities to be with our loved ones, we would sooner or later grow ever more distant from them, and so lose them that way? Wouldn’t life’s losses then ultimately match death’s?

  But again, “distant” is a spatial concept. While two people can move apart in space, whether due to estrangement or for some other reason, they cannot move apart in time. Your fed-up spouse can leave you behind in Toledo by moving to Pittsburgh. But she cannot leave you behind in 2016 by moving to 2017 or 2117. While the two of you might no longer occupy the same spatial location for the rest of your lives, you will still always occupy precisely the same moment in time, millisecond by millisecond—until one of you dies. In Mrs. Dalloway, the critic Victor Brombert notes, “Big Ben can be heard throughout, solemn and majestic, marking the irrevocable hour, accompanying Clarissa and Peter Walsh on their separate walks through the city, providing a sense of simultaneity and a link between one isolated consciousness and another.”8

  As long as we live—we and our lovers, spouses, or children who have deserted us for different far-flung places in space—we will always remain enveloped in the same moment in time, the same temporal environment, the same events of the world, events of the culture, events of the family, all of which provide innumerable possible points of psychological closeness. Crooning “Are you lonesome tonight?” Elvis wonders whether his absent lover misses his presence in her home, her living room, her porch. Life’s losses, Elvis tells us, are spatial. We grew apart, and what remains is an empty chair and a bare doorstep. Life’s losses, though, are not temporal. The question “Are you lonesome tonight?” assumes that Elvis and his lover still share the exact same “tonight,” the exact same moment and always will—until one of them dies. For as long as they live they can never escape one another in time.

  So yes, life itself makes it all too possible for you and your lover to be in two disparate places at the same time; life itself can and does separate us in space. But nothing about life makes it possible for you and she to be at two different moments in time, she stopping in 2019 while you move on to 2020. Only death can force that kind of parting. In that sense, too, life’s losses can never intimate death’s.

  Statues and Trophies

  At first glance, it would seem as if we can make short work of the idea that life’s losses resemble death’s. Yes, husbands walk out, wives walk out, and there have been countless moments when we were separated from our sweet children. But those losses will never rival the ones that deat
h imposes. As long as we live, we will always be at the same moment in time as our wayward spouse even if at a different place. And as long as we live, we can always be at the same place with our sweet children at other moments.

  But let’s press this a little further. Who really thinks that even if we always occupy the same moment with our wayward spouse as we move forward in time together, that that has any meaning at all if we can’t also be in the same place? And sure, we can always be at the same place with our child at a later moment. But who really thinks that our doing so would compensate for the irreplaceable loss of missing his first step or his recital or any number of other precious moments, watching them slide irrecoverably into the past? “How many fathers haven’t been around for their children’s birthdays, or their first step, because they were working,” Spike Lee ruminates, or “OK . . . at a Knicks game. And when you miss it, it’s gone. That’s a lot of guilt.”9

  What precisely, then, is so wonderful about our mortal condition—in which we all move forward together second by second in time while the moments of our lives slip ceaselessly through our fingers back into the past? It seems quite compatible with heaping helpings of loss, even if they don’t exactly resemble death’s.

  But actually, there is something wonderful about our condition.

  Let’s think, for a moment, about what the world would be like if we weren’t all compelled to move forward together, second by second, in time. On first glance, it might seem to have its attractive features. Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of marching into the future moment by moment in lockstep, temporally manacled to all our fellow existing human beings—Elvis to his lover, Clarissa to Peter—we could somehow move freely in time just as we can in space? Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could continue forging ahead in time if you wanted to, while I could hang back for a bit—or indefinitely—at my favorite age or year, if that suited me? We enjoy such freedom of movement in space. Why not in time?

  Think of how we imagine people who cease moving ahead in time while others continue on. We can’t seem to do it without envisaging those who choose to stop moving—who opt to get off of time’s conveyor belt—as statues. Recall those TV commercials showing a busy executive moving briskly toward her rental car while everyone around her, having foolishly chosen to rent from a competitor, is paralyzed. Or the nonaging hero in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, who’s described as a “statue,” his hand “as cold as that of death.”10 Or what about Dorian Gray, who ceases to age while his picture, along with everyone else, continues to grow older? Dorian “never carved a statue,” his frenemy Harry says, “or painted a picture . . .” Instead, Dorian himself is a statue, or a picture, having stopped moving forward in time.

  A statue is not—nor is it meant to be—an attractive image for the self. No, it is a cautionary conceit designed to ward us off of thinking that anything other than our common, inescapable movement forward in time is desirable. Note that Dorian never literally stops moving forward in time while others continue on. That would require some fancy metaphysics. Rather, he stops in some ways but not in others. He stops physically aging, even as he continues to accumulate more experiences and memories as the years pass. That physical stasis, however—and this is the point—is enough to open up a complete rupture between him and his fellow human beings. It’s enough to wrench him out of the common experience of humankind. It creates an ever-widening gulf between him and all others, who do continue to move ahead in time and grow old. Dorian loses them, and he in turn becomes lost to them. He becomes dead to them. Like a statue.

  And that makes sense. After all, in our human experience thus far, there’s only one way in which two people can part in time, one continuing to move ahead and the other ceasing to do so. It’s if the second one dies. Had we the freedom to move—or not—in time the way we do in space, we would simply take a form of loss that only death can inflict and make it a part of life.

  In fact, we have seen this idea before—the idea of a self ceasing to move forward in time if it so chooses—in Chapter 1. No one, as the philosopher J. David Velleman points out, thinks of a statue as traveling inch by inch through space from its feet toward the top of its head. In like fashion, we needn’t view our selves as traveling moment by moment through time from our births toward our deaths. Instead, just as no part of a statue—and of course a part is all that exists at any given point in space—can be said to be moving toward the ceiling, no part of our self—and, after all, a part is all that ever exists at any given moment in time—can be said to be moving toward our death.

  Suppose we adopt this mindset. Just as a statue’s nose grows no taller than its knee, the 10–11 AM, August 8, 2020, part of our self—as we see it—will grow no older than the 10–11 AM, August 8, 2000, part did. If only we can bring ourselves to look at things this way then we will cease to age, at least psychologically, just as Dorian does physically. And thus far from looming ever larger on the horizon with each tick of the clock, death will become utterly irrelevant as long as we live: just as Epicurus’s first consolation claims it is.

  But now consider one added feature of Velleman’s view of the self. It’s a feature that Velleman finds attractive. But in fact it carries a hidden danger.

  Say that the 4–5 PM, June 23, 2014, part of your self experiences pain. Even so, Velleman says, it needn’t suffer. Suffering comes only from a sense that there is a self that moves ever onward in time, so that the pain it sustains this hour will be compounded by the pain it sustains the next, and the next, and so on. Suppose, however, that you believe that this particular hour’s pain is experienced only by that part of your self that occupies this particular hour, and that the next hour’s pain is none of its business but is, rather, a burden for the next hour’s part of your self to deal with. Suppose you truly live only in the moment—or hour. Then all that you will ever feel at any given moment will be that moment’s pain, not any broader suffering.11

  This sounds good, I guess. But there’s a problem. Suppose I adopt Velleman’s recommended psychology. Suppose I do begin to treat each hour of my life as occupied by its own distinct part of my self. I leave the previous hour’s pain behind and have no concern with the next hour’s. Not only do I not age, I don’t suffer either. But as Velleman himself acknowledges, most of humankind do not—and probably cannot—look at themselves this way. Most other people, including those closest to me, will continue to see themselves as moving ahead in time, accumulating the previous hour’s pain and dreading the next: suffering. Even if I somehow manage to follow Velleman’s advice and see myself in the psychologically nonsuffering way he recommends, they won’t. And so if I really, truly do come to view my self in the way Velleman proposes, will I not simply write myself out of the common experience of humanity, which in major part is to suffer? Will others not become strangers to me, and me to them? Dead to them, in a way, because numbed to suffering? Even Dorian “suffers” greatly, we are told, because at least he continues to move ahead in time psychologically, if not physically.12

  By stopping in time while others forge ahead, both Dorian’s self (who ceases to age physically if not psychologically) and Velleman’s self (who ceases to age psychologically if not physically) lose contact with their fellow human beings. They become statues, or paintings. They lose us and we lose them—in ways that begin to mimic the kind of loss of one another that only death itself, which currently is the sole phenomenon that can part us in time, inflicts.

  And so it’s an unheralded blessing that we must all move through time together, always occupying the same moment, until we die. If we didn’t, aspects of death would come to enter life itself.

  Yet although I am glad that we have no alternative but to move ahead in time moment by moment with everyone else, wouldn’t it be nice if the precious events in our lives didn’t have to vanish back in time moment by moment as they happened? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if treasured events, whether we missed them or not, stuck around—as if they were objects like tr
ophies or jewels—for us to cherish and savor and relive?

  No, because there’d be a high price to pay. As it is, when a precious event disappears forever into the past—say it’s an event I missed, like my daughter’s recital—I certainly do feel a sting of regret, perhaps permanently. But I don’t feel grief. I know that an event has a life span of whatever moments it takes to happen. But when a precious object like a trophy or a jewel disappears into the past—when, after years or decades, it’s destroyed or lost and becomes an artifact of yesterday—then I feel grief, not just regret. Grief is the emotion I experience when something valued that persists in time, not an event that immediately vanishes back with time, perishes: dies. And so if events were like objects, with the capacity to remain with me over time at the cost of sooner or later dying to me, disintegrating or losing their sheen just as objects almost always do—then life’s losses would, for me, come to resemble death’s. There’d be far more grief in my life.

  I might feel wistful that the summer in Europe I spent with H in 1983, the moment or experience, is long gone. But it’s nothing compared to how I would feel if the churches and museums we visited—objects that have lasted centuries—to say nothing of H, who has lasted decades, were suddenly also extinguished. Tom Townsend, the main character in Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan, suffers pangs about all the precious moments his parents missed to be with him when he was a child. But what really gets him is when he sees that they have thrown out his toys—when he sees that precious objects that have somehow managed to survive ever since his youth have finally met their end.

  If events persisted in time the way objects do, then their eventual demise would be just as killing. As it is, objects and events relate to each other in a complex emotional ecology. We need them both. Cherished events are with us alas but momentarily, but then while we may feel wistful about their passing, we understand that they are transient and don’t usually mourn them.13 Cherished objects—including other selves—are, thankfully, with us much longer. But when they perish, we feel grief. It’s good that we have the mixture.14