Wojciech Eichelberger: To some extent, yes, especially if the author had in mind the most difficult dimension of death: the humiliating helplessness and pain. A long and painful death will always be difficult. But the moment of death itself? No exaggeration. It is true that I have not died yet, but I have had a clinical experience of death that has taught me a few things.
Under what circumstances did this happen?
– There was nothing heroic about them: I was sitting in the dentist’s chair and my body was not responding well to anesthesia, so the doctor gave me injection after injection. At one point I thought I was fainting, only then was I surprised to learn that I had died. Breathing, heart rate – everything stopped. I collapsed. And then I experienced everything that has been described in countless books and articles on the subject. There was a tunnel, there was light, but also the sounds of joy from my loved ones who had passed away before me. “Ah, Wojtek is coming!” – it seemed like the welcoming party was about to begin.
Everything else, that is, everything that had happened to me before, lost its meaning. I felt as if suddenly, in the theater where I was sitting alone, the curtain had fallen and the lights had gone out. There was something liberating about that. It certainly wasn’t terrible. The most difficult moment was a little earlier—when I was struggling with my body, trying to stay conscious. I was doomed to failure, because the force of this process resembled a tsunami. I realized then that resisting death was as absurd as trying to prevent childbirth. It is better to simply surrender to this force, agree with it, and let go with confidence.
Giving up on anything is probably not our strong suit. When I say “our,” I mean Western societies.
– That is true. There are more and more people among us with an obsessive need for control. I remember a person who told me during a psychotherapy session that he had difficulty falling asleep because he was afraid of stopping breathing while he was asleep. This is undoubtedly an example of selfishness devoid of any humility, a desperate attempt to control the ocean through a tiny molecule of seawater. And falling asleep is not only an opportunity to regenerate the body, but also an excellent practice before dying. Just like flying a plane, when we are completely dependent on the machine and the pilot. Sleep, flying, and death – these are experiences in which it is good to surrender with trust to what happens to us. Learning to let go of what we cannot control is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves.
Where does this obsession with control come from?
– We have eliminated death from our lives and persistently pretend that it only happens to others. Never to us. Dying has become something abstract, removed from public view, hidden away in institutions that treat it professionally: hospitals, hospices, nursing homes and funeral homes. It has even become a disease that we are ashamed of and that we must prevent at all costs. This denial of death also manifests itself in the attempt to transform life into a constant party. It has to be fun, there is always something going on, you have to constantly buy, travel and consume something. Of course, this desperate and false euphoria must be sustained by various obsessions and addictive substances: pornography, alcoholism, shopping addiction, gambling, substance and drug abuse, workaholism… The number of substances and behaviors to which we can potentially become addicted in the name of our desperate escape from the awareness of death is almost limitless.
Or maybe this is the right strategy? Since religion has lost its power to collectively calm our fears of death, perhaps it is worth giving in before something happens to us that we cannot prepare for at all.
– The escape strategy may seem appealing at first glance, but in reality it is a waste of life. It is utterly inhumane. It deprives us of the opportunity to experience true, deep satisfaction in life – in every moment of it, not just in the special, awesome, joyful moments. It also deprives us of the opportunity to prepare for the inevitable. And when death comes, we wake up with our proverbial hand in the chamber pot. Unprepared, scared, desperate.
So is it better to spread this fear evenly than to panic in the end? This view is a bit cruel.
– It’s not that we should be afraid of death! The goal is to make the prospect of death more realistic and to get used to it. It’s worth accepting the idea that one day this wild and chaotic party that surrounds us will end, and asking ourselves: how should we live in such a situation, what values and goals should be considered the most important? Should we continue to be trapped in this manic frenzy that is also destroying our planet? Or can we live calmly, carefully, humbly and with gratitude for life in general, for life as such? This realization has nothing to do with anxiety – in fact, it is its opposite. After all, constant partying does not solve the problem of the fear of death, it only numbs it and allows us to forget about it for a while.
In Western Europe, but also slowly in Poland, professions are emerging whose representatives help people deal with death – their own and that of their loved ones. We are talking about mourning companions or dying doulas. Will they help us create new rites of passage that are currently missing?
– Such services may prove useful, although of course everything depends on the maturity of the people offering them. Only an internally mature person is capable of dealing with such a situation. If the dying companion is like this, I see no reason why he should not help the dying person.
But on the other hand, it is sad that the alternative to a cruel death in a hospital is to die in the company of a professional “dying coach.” The right companions in such a situation should be people close to us. There are still such communities and places, usually far from big cities, whose inhabitants die among relatives and friends. After death, their bodies remain “in a coffin” in their own home for some time, a relative takes care of the deceased, and everyday life continues around them. I think that such a natural acceptance and experience of death results from the close contact of these communities with nature. After all, nature is the perfect teacher of the inseparability of life and death. Therefore, I consider the increasingly widespread human fear of nature and the aggressive exploitation of it in the name of increasing profits and consumption as yet another manifestation of the desperate and universal escape from the awareness of death and transience.
Who, other than nature, can teach us a wise approach to death?
– Mystics. They are the best experts on dying. Because mysticism is an experience, a living faith, and not an uncritical assimilation of religious dogmas and metaphors. From the mystic’s point of view, the story that after death a person goes to heaven or hell is just an inaccurate metaphor. Because where and why would any of us go? Death does not end anything, and life is constantly reborn in countless forms. In the experience of mystics, death is one of the manifestations of eternal life, and the human fear of death comes from our illusion of separation from life itself and our usurpation of a unique status among all its other manifestations.
But it’s hard to find comfort in that.
– It is comforting that, according to the mystics of all religions, when we die, the only thing that dies is what is not true, that is, our illusions about ourselves. This also includes the most important, fundamental to all others, that is, the illusion of separation from other manifestations of life, resulting in our selfish and self-aggressive way of existing on this planet. In this sense, death is an opportunity for us to awaken to true life.
