Death, Grieving, Humanity

 I have found out in the past week I have now 2 dead cousins and a sister of two of my friends has died. T2 called me macabre, I was too concerned with death. Well, that happens when you do not see much reason for living.

Around 30, 35, years ago my father commented on people who went for direct cremations were missing the ability to grieve out of worrying of paying too much for a funeral. He said they would wind up paying more to psychiatrists. I wish dad were around to read Grief Worlds: In Conversation With Philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe. 

The introduction may feel a deep, but it does give a link to his book:

In his book “Grief Worlds,” philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe explores a host of philosophical questions raised by grief, showing how philosophical inquiry can enhance our understanding of grief and vice versa. Throughout the book, which is available in a free open-access edition, Ratcliffe focuses on the phenomenology of grief: What do experiences of grief consist of, how are they structured, and what can they tell us about the nature of human experience more generally?

From the actual interview, I found this pertinent to my own thinking:

Many first-person accounts of bereavement state that it is somehow like losing a part of oneself — some even make specific comparisons between bereavement and losing a limb. In the book, you write that there’s more to this than metaphor, that the two experiences are structurally similar in specific and philosophically informative ways. How so?

That’s right. I think the two experiences are — or, at least, can be — similar in important ways. I further maintain that our bodies and our interpersonal relationships contribute to the structure of experience in ways that are inextricable. In the book, I take my lead from Merleau-Ponty’s brief discussion of grief and phantom limbs in his 1945 book “Phenomenology of Perception.” He suggests that the possibilities we experience as inherent in our surroundings reflect, among other things, our bodily capacities. That the stairs appear climbable, the glass of water as something to be picked up, the keyboard as something to type with — all such possibilities imply the possession of a more or less specific set of bodily abilities.

According to Merleau-Ponty, the experience of a phantom limb is not localized or image-like. Instead, it is constituted by the retention of experienced possibilities and, more specifically, patterns of habitual expectation that imply the capacities of an intact limb. Although one might see that the arm is gone and also know full well that it is gone, one’s surroundings as a whole continue to offer various possibilities, which together comprise a sense of the arm’s enduring presence.

Merleau-Ponty suggests that something very similar applies in the case of bereavement. You assent to the proposition “the person is dead” and yet continue to experience all of those possibilities that depend upon them and point to their potential presence. So, you know full well that they are gone while expecting them to walk through the door at any moment.

I do not simply endorse Merleau-Ponty’s view. In fact, I emphasize that phantom limb experiences are quite diverse and also that many of them do involve image-like phenomena. But I add that the same can be said in the context of bereavement. As well as having a diffuse sense of continuing presence, one can have more localized, image-like experiences of the person who has died.

I add that other people and our own bodies contribute to the significance of our surroundings in ways that are often indissociable. For instance, pursuing a project (in the context of which things appear significant in various ways) may depend upon being able to act upon the world in a certain bodily way, while at the same time requiring or presupposing a particular person — it might be something that I can only do with them, or something that I do for them.

So we can see why people so often describe bereavement as like losing part of oneself, undergoing an amputation, or losing a limb. Another person can be integral to the orientation through which we encounter our surroundings, think, and act, just like our own bodies.

Meanwhile, the day also brought the Times Literary Supplement, which included Skye C. Cleary's Searching for the good life How to cope with the fear of death and other anxieties:

Life is short and life is hard. Such is the message of two illuminating new books, both offering intellectual tools to fortify us amid the onslaught of life. In Life Is Short Dean Rickles aims to provide a panacea for those facing death anxiety. In Life Is Hard Kieran Setiya offers strategies to combat infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity and hope.

Rickles’s short book begins with Seneca’s essay “On the Shortness of Life” (around AD55). The average life-span in our time is far greater than it was in Seneca’s. But Rickles’s frustration is that “life is still too damn short”. In the first few chapters he explores why some people feel exasperated over the shortness of life and how to alleviate that vexation.

Having just seen another school shooting, more children dead, and a nation too selfish to give credit to others freedom from shot at my military-grade weapons, I wish we had more belief in the following:

Still another consolation is that it’s good that the world in which we are participating will outlive us. Rickles likens life to a sandcastle: “We build a grand structure on the beach, lovingly carving moats and so on, and we would like it to continue. We get rather disappointed when it is taken by the sea or, worse, is destroyed by other beachgoers”. Knowing that others will continue to build and preserve the sandcastle of humanity after our death means that being human and doing human things are worthwhile.

About the other book, a different problem:

 Setiya opens with the claim that “Life, friends, is hard – and we must say so. It’s harder for some than it is for others”. He substitutes goadings of positive thinking with “the patient work of consolation”. Imagine you go to a friend with a problem. The friend tells you: “Don’t worry; it will all be fine!”. Why does positivity not console? Setiya’s answer is that such a response disavows your concerns: “Worse than denial, even, is the urge to justify human suffering. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ – except, of course, it doesn’t”.

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How might we cope with grief? For Setiya the “goal is to grieve well, not to extinguish grief”. To grieve well it’s important to know that it is rational to grieve over loss. “Grief is not weakness but a token of persisting love.” You grieve because you love, and loving is part of living well.

How do we live with failure? Start with knowing that failure is not an identity. Even the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, whose life is full of fiascos, isn’t defined by failure: “He is defined instead by his refusal to condemn the despised, his unerring modesty and truthfulness, his generosity, his will to believe and expect the best of others”. That’s what makes even a tough life worth living.

How do we live well amid injustice? Given the relentless cacophony of horror, including mass shootings, wars and pandemics, it’s understandable that some people try to ignore what’s going on. They think: “If I cannot save the world, maybe I should save myself”. The problem with pursuing individual happiness at the expense of justice is that “happiness is not the only thing worth wanting”. Living well is worth wanting. And living well means being connected to and caring about other people.

While Rickles proposes that the continuation of humanity after our death is important so that our lives aren’t reduced to sandcastles that wash away with the next tide, Setiya proposes that it would be a travesty if we were to end human history on a sour note: “What would be terrible is for human history to end – a history of prejudice, slavery, misogyny, colonial violence, war, oppression, and inequality, along with fitful progress – with our potential so far from being realized”. We can’t change the past, but we can improve our future. Human life may not have inherent meaning, but Setiya suggests “its meaning could be to limp slowly, painfully, contingently toward a justice that repairs, so far as it can, the atrocities of the past”. The author urges us to start small. Pick one issue. Join one group. Setiya helped to organize a faculty protest against MIT’s fossil-fuel investments. MIT has not (yet) divested, but an action such as protesting “adds its fraction to the odds of change”.

I suspect neither book on its own would be satisfactory, but I have read the full review. We can succumb to the weight of the world and try to destroy ourselves - I did - but we are not alone, and suicide is the ultimate repudiation of responsibility to others. A failed suicide brings this home in a hard and very uncomfortable ways. We grief because we are connected to others makes sense to me - those we are connected to extend back and forward in time.

sch 3/30