Of Judging of the Death of Another

When we observe a man dying — when we see him pale, trembling, in apparent agony — we conclude that he is suffering dreadfully, that death is a terrible thing to undergo. We carry this image away with us and it feeds our own fear of dying. But I question whether what we see is what is happening. We see the outside of a process we have not yet undergone, and we interpret it through our own imagination of what we would feel in such circumstances. This is not knowledge. It is projection dressed as observation.

I have sat with dying men. Some who appeared most distressed reported afterward — when they recovered — that they had been nearly insensible, that the apparent struggle was of the body proceeding on its own business, while whatever was most themselves had already withdrawn to some distance. The great cry and the convulsion may be the body’s final argument with itself, which the person inside it has already ceased to follow with close attention. We grieve for the performance without knowing whether the performer is still present for it.

“When I see both the dying and the dead, I am apt to think that they mock us; they seem to settle down in peace and rest, while we are in a hurry to lament and weep for them.”

There is also this: we who stand at the bedside are not disinterested observers. We watch another’s death partly as a rehearsal for our own, and this private anxiety distorts everything we see. The dying man’s suffering seems unbearable because we are already rehearsing bearing it ourselves. Our pity is contaminated with terror, and our terror with a kind of guilty relief that it is he and not yet we who must undergo it.

Only the experience of one’s own death — and we have access to this only once, and then cannot report it — could teach us what dying is. Everything else is literature, imagination, the testimonies of those who came back from the edge and say it was not so bad, which we half believe when we are calm and wholly disbelieve when we are frightened. I have made my peace with the fact that I shall die ignorant of what dying means, until the moment when the ignorance itself dissolves.