On Death and Loss

My dad died, and that has led me to the grand insights that death is weird, and losing a loved one is hard. I know: not exactly insightful. But I’ve been trying to think about why death is weird and loss is hard. I’ve been thinking about Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time focuses in part on mortality as the foundation of human experience, and why I find his analysis unhelpful in dealing with my own dad’s death. And why I find Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality more helpful. Why does thinking about birth help me process death? I want to start by considering Heidegger’s notion of human beings as being-toward-death, what I find helpful about it, and what I find lacking.

For Heidegger, death is an individualizing experience, in part because he is focused on someone confronting their own death as a real possibility in the world rather than the vague notion that we will all die some day. He argues that we tend to flee death—we find ways to distance ourselves from the inevitable by speaking in abstractions—everyone dies—or by projecting our death into the future—we acknowledge that we will one day die, but we assume it won’t happen for a long time. Our culture encourages this fleeing. Consider the ways in which tragic deaths are reported: we are given statistics and numbers, as with catastrophic weather events (3 killed in a tornado in the south) or with war dead (some news agencies report over 20,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza since the war began). These numbers allow us to distance ourselves from our own mortality, positioning death as something that happens to other people or in distant places. Even when we are given profiles of the victims of tragedy, they are not meant to remind us that we, too, will die; rather, they serve to put death “over there,” a tragedy to be sure, but not one that touches us personally. We might feel a vague sadness but nothing more. These ways of thinking and talking about death make us feel safe, removed from our mortality.

If I do confront my own death as a here-and-now possibility, Heidegger says, I am ripped out of these everyday ways of thinking and talking about death. Without the safety of common notions of death, everyday understandings of all kinds of things—what I should believe or value, how I should behave, etc.—fall away; I no longer rely on others to tell me how to live. I see myself as the only real foundation of my life. This experience, should I have it, enables true freedom, Heidegger believes, allowing me to make my own choices for my life rather than allowing others to dictate those choices to me.

Now Heidegger’s analysis seems right as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes very far. It can help explain the stereotypical mid-life crisis, perhaps: someone hits middle age and gets the sense that they won’t live forever, so they make some changes to how they live. They might get a divorce and marry someone younger or buy a sports car; these changes perpetuate the fleeing of death, where you try to convince yourself that you really aren’t getting older. Or someone might make a big change in career, giving up making lots of money in order to help others; these changes require stepping back from the values and beliefs of those around you so you can redefine yourself on your own terms. That’s more in line with what Heidegger means by freedom.

So Heidegger’s analysis can help me understand what it means to truly embrace my own mortality to an extent. But his analysis doesn’t help much in understanding or coping with the death of a loved one, with the need to live with loss. This is so, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, he doesn’t see that the death of a loved one can have a similar disorienting effect as confronting my own: the foundation of my life is gone here, too, and I can respond to that experience by rethinking my entire life. Losing a parent can certainly have that kind of an effect—our parents are often considered the foundation of our lives, even when we no longer live with them. Losing a parent thus means losing a central part of oneself. But second, the death of loved one is hard, and I don’t think Heidegger’s focus on individuality can explain that fact. To exaggerate my point: if I am the foundation of my own life, why would the death of another person gut me? Wouldn’t it be easy to just “get over it”? It is here that Hannah Arendt’s analysis of natality is helpful.

In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that natality is important for at least two reasons: birth brings something new into the world, and that new person interacts with others in a way that has the potential to disrupt and alter existing relationships. How does birth bring something new into the world? Because each individual is unique; though we human beings have things in common by virtue of being human—the kinds of bodies we have, for instance, or the fact that we all need sleep—we are each different from each other in ways that are often difficult to explain. Since my dad’s obituary was published, some people have responded by noting what a great teacher he was. Being a teacher wasn’t unique to him, but how he taught, his presence in the classroom, etc., did distinguish him from all other teachers, and it can’t really be described—it had to be witnessed. Losing a loved one is hard, then, because of their uniqueness. We aren’t just losing an abstract individual; we are losing that specific other person, in all their particularity, which can include goofiness, seriousness, being principled or annoying, or all of the above. I don’t miss a dad; I miss my dad—the one who inspired me to start running, who went to all my track meets, who encouraged me in getting my Ph.D., who read my dissertation, and my book, who loved language and word play and puns, who made apple pies, who took me and my siblings to the theater and to Vermont for a picnic on a beautiful autumn day, etc. I miss his goofiness and his commitment to justice.

I wouldn’t miss my dad if he hadn’t been a central part of my life—there are plenty of people who are/were not close to their fathers or parents. But I was close to mine. This point gets to another aspect of natality: we are each born into what Arendt calls a web of relationships, a cluster of others with whom we live and share the world. My birth altered the existing family of my parents and older sister, which was then further altered by my two younger siblings’ births. We might say that birth is the opposite of an individualizing experience: it connects us to others in ways that ground our lives and who we become. And the web expands as we live and grow, including other family members, neighbors, classmates and teachers, members of whatever religious community our family may be associated with, workmates, etc. I think of the web of relations as like a spider web: the center is dense with those who are most important to us, less so the further from the center you get, where we find those who are less central to our lives but who are still connected to us in some way (sometimes in ways we can’t see). Who we find in the center will differ from person to person and change across our lives. I count my nuclear family, some cousins and close friends as part of the center; others have severed family ties and have close friends or alternative communities at their centers. Those further out could include a vast array of other people, from those we encounter at the grocery store to the people who grow our food, build our houses, and make our clothes—they are very important to our lives, even if we never meet or interact with them in any meaningful way.

We human beings are thus fundamentally interconnected rather than isolated individuals. When someone in our web of relationships dies, a connection is severed, the web breaks. The break is more acute the closer to the inner circle the person is, which is one way we can distance ourselves from death. I don’t experience the uniqueness of the those on the periphery of my web, so the loss is less important to me, the break less disruptive. I can acknowledge it without feeling it except in a general sense. The loss of those closest to me, though, breaks the web in irreparable ways, both because of my deep connection to a unique individual who is no longer in my life, and because of the ways the web structures my life and who I am. Figuring out how to continue living when my web of relationships has broken is hard, in part because the break can indeed never be repaired. I will always want to talk to my dad about the state of the world, and I will always want to hear his groan-worthy puns; I suspect I will expect those interactions less and less, but the desire for them will remain with me until the end of my days. I spent some time helping to care for him in his last weeks, and that care defined my daily routine; now that he is gone, I will need to restructure my days. Because I lived far away for many years, I have other routines I can fall back on. Doing so won’t alter the loss, but it will provide a different structure to my daily life so that I perhaps won’t feel it as acutely. My mom, though, will have a harder time, since caring for him was her norm throughout their 60+ years of marriage; adjusting to not caring for him will require a huge shift in her life. She will both miss him, and she will need to find ways to restructure her daily life without the alternatives I have. It’s hard, and it’s weird, to have to redefine your life and yourself in the face of loss. I remain convinced that such work can be done, and in a way that honors the loss. This work is best done, I think, not be turning to ourselves as the foundation of our life and away from the pain of loss, as Heidegger might suggest, but by turning toward others, not to repair the web of relationships but perhaps to expand it, allowing us to restructure our lives and redefine ourselves even in the midst of loss.