Abstract
And next year’s words await another voice.
For me, it felt in my life like the break of day. I was in my late twenties, married and with two young children, at long last moving out from life fully bound by outer structures: college, medical school, internship, residency, and the then required two years’ uniformed service time. Eager to take full ownership of life, I was shocked when the doctor at my service discharge physical announced I should not resign from the service. “Why?” I demanded. Her words still echo: “Because your wife will need widow’s benefits.”
That was one of three times doctors in different circumstances told me I likely had a fatal disease. Each of those times had a happy outcome, yet I know a time will come with a different ending. The ease with which now I reflect on transience is far from the cold terror that attends the imminent presence of death.
Death is a fact; its subjective impact varies with distance. I move a touch closer, from times that worked out well to one that did not. Standing at the bedside of a hospitalized friend on a day we both knew would be one of his last, I mentioned Prospero’s line, “Every third thought will be my grave.” My friend fell momentarily silent, then smiled and said, “I like that—every third thought, not every second.”
Death’s proximity concentrates one’s mind. Desire to distance attention to the imminence of my own demise is apparent in the path I followed essaying this concept. Customarily, when writing, I start with a disorganized draft of rambling thoughts, modify them repeatedly, and finish with a polished statement very different from its uncertain start.
This time was different. Instead of tacking, repeatedly altering course, while sailing continuously forward, this time I started, stopped, started anew and differently, doing so repeatedly and creating a series of distinctly different statements. Only retrospectively did I recognize how hesitantly I had ventured, working my way cautiously as I approached the subject. My first accounts were objective, academic. Only with struggling could I work my way to the subjective, the more personal.
Now I retrace that journey with three dissimilar short statements: the first, on time and the evolutionary uniqueness of our species; the second, on the place of impermanence in an individual’s developmental line; and, finally, on confronting the awareness of one’s own passing out of time, passing from life. First, the species; next, the individual; and last, one’s self.
Change is the quality that defines time. Regardless of scale, the nature of time is progressive alteration, existence always carrying a before, during, and after movement.
Whether other animals, other species, have awareness of personal death is something we cannot directly know. We do, nonetheless, have reason to recognize that impermanence is an essential organizing principle that defines our species. A biological verity lies behind Kafka’s famous statement that the meaning of life is that it ends.
The evolutionary advance that marks us a species apart, homo sapiens, lies in our minds, precisely in our capacity to form symbols. Less imprisoned by rigid instincts than our evolutionary predecessors, we have power to break the link between stimulus and response—or at least to interrupt it. As a result, we can delay reflexive reactions, create meanings, play with possibilities, and choose our reactions.
Not so bound by rigid reflexes, we capture perceptions and take them into our minds as mental representations. Capturing perceptions and experiences in symbols and words, we make meanings, meanings that then define us. A person is a meaning making mammal. This is the quality that, I believe, led general semanticists accurately to define our species as “time binding.”
We recognize time and its passage. We have memories; we reflect on events; we discuss them; we pass what we have learned on to others. The human is a time binding animal.
The evolutionary miracle of symbolically internalized time binding, like all evolutionary advances, carries its own intrinsic flaw. The essence of time is that it passes. If all were static, there would be no time. Time passes, and therein lies the ironic flaw of our species.
Even as we lay down memories, reflect on events, and pass what we have learned on to others, time passes. Time’s being out of joint is built into the human condition. The moment we register an experience in mind or form a word, that representation or word is in some part wrong. The word fixes something as stable in our minds while the world continues to change.
That pace of change can be so slow that often we need not notice the slippage between our representational world and the universe of outer reality. Still, slippage is always there, ever present and normal, not a disconnection existing solely in the neurotic distortions of “then” and “now” on which we focus our clinical attention.
When psychoanalysts speak of character, they refer to the relative permanence of a person’s psychic structure over time—a seeming permanence that in fact is relative. It is easy to forget that psychic structure means no more than a relatively stable set of functions.
The inexorable permanence of impermanence is built into the nature of our species, into everything we think. We are time binding, with the result that our mental representations, our symbols and words, are always temporally a bit askew. Life implies movement. Transience is in the very structure of our minds.
Let us move from the species to the individual and the life pattern of any individual. From the day of birth through the ever changing years of growth and into what we favor by calling the prime of life, even before time starts clearly to advance too rapidly to ignore, there are early hints of the ultimate chill that awaits the end of day. Mostly, painful awareness of our impermanence lies outside our notice when we are young.
“Mostly” is not “always.” When fears of disappearance intrude severely, we think of mental disorders. We adopt a detached clinical stance and speak of childhood phobias, or we parse the provenance of depression. We do so validly, but also at times a bit defensively. We are too quick to pathologize. Just as beginning always implies ending, so living implies dying. Implications of ending are intrinsic to normal life, affecting us whether or not they impinge on consciousness.
Although Eros prevails as life begins, fears inevitably accompany growth. Whatever the security, still loss intrudes—loss of the breast, loss of body parts, loss of the other, losses of every variety, even loss of one’s very self.
Fears of disappearing appear in child’s play, from an infant’s peek-a-boo, to early childhood’s hide-and-seek, later to the older child’s game of musical chairs. Reality requires a maturing child to master an ever mounting awareness that not only do things change but that at times they disappear and do not always reappear. From the start Eros must battle Thanatos, its endless rival.
Without surveying the threat of loss of self across a lifetime, I call attention to that particular developmental phase when awareness of personal transience loudly commands attention. Unlike earlier stages, this period has not been studied closely enough to have its own recognized name. “Midlife crisis” is not what I have in mind, although that crisis of recognizing mortality often serves as the opening into this phase. For shorthand and without any chronological precision I will simply call it “the sixties.”
Repeated observations reveal that for many the sixtieth is the most frightening birthday of their lives. I have seen it in friends, colleagues, patients, and myself. Turning sixty heralds one’s being old in a way never before accepted. Mortality is insistently proclaimed; it commands notice. Death seems to hover in the air. The experience may not be linked directly to the birthday, but somewhere around this period a person’s awareness of vulnerability of being comes more to the fore. Appreciation of the fleeting nature of one’s own life then tenaciously colors one’s being. One’s sense of self changes.
Some fracture in the face of this new challenge, shriveling with meanness or anger, becoming bitter with jealousy of the young. Others find new energy and blossom, starting new ventures as if life now offers possibilities never before dared. Those who achieve acceptance rather than mere resignation find the fear of death start to fade.
For these people, their sixties are like a second adolescence, an unexpected opportunity to loosen and reshape earlier character styles, an occasion opening innovative possibilities in life. Unlike “second childhood,” a phrase often used disparagingly to deny one’s own vulnerabilities by mocking the loss of powers in others, “second adolescence” connotes no demeaning repudiation, as it names a developmental possibility for a late-life fresh growth spurt, even a new capacity to transcend the character constrictions of one’s earlier life.
Having moved from the time patients told me I was “too young to understand” to that of being thought “too old to understand,” I am now often consulted by many in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties—successful people who are keenly introspective as they confront aging, each alert to the evanescence of life. One, a therapist in his mid-sixties, when asked why he was consulting me at that particular moment, offered an answer both simple and profound: “Because now I’m old enough.”
The threat of ending can spark new beginnings. Recognizing transience can open the risk-taking needed for new creativity. In addition to several friends who published their first novels after turning sixty, I think of many others who found their own singular fresh outlets for imaginative originality.
Respecting the fact of death as a fact of life can dissolve fears and inhibitions. Just as the burst of pubertal sexuality opens an adolescence of new possibilities for one’s childhood way of being, so can the sixties burst of awareness of the ephemeral nature of life open fresh possibilities and even courage for new adult freedoms.
Mastering the realization of mortality is not easy. Taming personal narcissism is difficult work. Nonetheless, aging does not dictate inevitable depression. Loss, yes; grief, yes; mourning, yes; but depression, no.
Thanatos can add wisdom as well as fear. In Freud’s words, “Transience value is scarcity value in time” (1916, p. 305). New appreciation of poignancy can also add subtle richness to aesthetic sensibility. Perhaps even more valuably, one’s basic acknowledgment of the otherness of others can enlarge into more fully cherishing the very distinctiveness of those others from oneself.
Facing Thanatos stirs the defiant vitality of Eros. Whatever physical limitations age brings, there also can be a bold resurgence of vitality, a resilience, an emotionally mature vigor that is put into the service both of one’s self and, significantly, of loved ones who will live on beyond one.
I do not want to distort or obscure the agonies of what can be the wreckage of old age by painting it in the pastels of youth. On the other hand, it would be equally wrong to fall into the common fallacy of pathologizing all of life. Despair is not the preordained outcome of recognizing the ephemerality of life. Not only does the heart have its reasons; it also has its creative strengths. Acceptance opens doors that are closed by resignation. Indeed, with acceptance of the evanescence of life, the question of whether there is life after death comes to matter less than does determination for life before death. Awareness of mortality can rouse one’s active claim on the life one has.
At last, perhaps inevitably left until last, attention to the evolution of our species and consideration of an individual’s developmental lines must yield. What is personal and immediate will not disappear, despite our avoidance. Reality is what will not go away. We return to the actuality of death, death for me and death for you. Each of us will die, each and all, a fact unforgettable even if at times unrememberable.
We whistle past the graveyard, making light of death—as in a friend’s comment that the average age in his condominium is deceased. Death’s appearance in humor is more often implicit than explicit, as in that jest. Nonetheless, whatever its form, humor deriding death acknowledges death’s very undeniability. There is no pardon from “time’s thievish progress to eternity” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 77, line 8).
Death will not be deterred. Our own narcissism has us try to forget that it is Death who states, “Et in Arcadia ego sum.” One’s own death is not a reality easily absorbed; narcissism can tolerate only so much. Nonetheless, there is no exception to the rule of Thanatos: I die; you die; he, she, it dies.
Words commonly offered to soften the sad sense of approaching loss are the poet’s “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (Shelley 1819). That hopeful encouragement, however, lends itself to contrary meanings.
Whose spring arrives after winter’s passing? If it is implied that we ourselves enjoy returning spring, we then deny personal death even as we pretend otherwise.
Yet the saying that values springtimes still unborn holds true if comfort comes from knowledge of the continued lives of others we love, if we are led not simply to deny our personal passing but to recognize the satisfaction that comes with our passing on the baton of continuing life.
From the growing number of patients who die while I still live, I mention just one, one who carried into action in our encounter this caring forward for the next generation.
D. and I were both young when first we worked together analytically almost a quarter-century ago. At that time he stayed engaged for only about three years before deciding to interrupt his analysis, to go off, in Goldsmith’s felicitous phrase, “in search of superfluity.”
D. found success in that search, great financial success as well as success in establishing a new family, a new wife and son and daughter, all before returning in his mid-forties to resume his unfinished analytic introspection.
The death of his father while D. was quite young, indeed his deeming himself to have grown up as if never having had a father, contributed to his intense concern for how he would father his own children. He was particularly anxious over his determination to be for his son the good father he himself had never known.
Our analytic work together proceeded well until at forty-nine D. developed a fatal illness. He worked assiduously to protect his children as the effects of his disease and repeated hospitalizations washed over the family for the three years until his death.
Some months before he died, D. asked me for a promise, one that was deeply important to him. He asked that after he died, at whatever time his son chose, whether sooner or later, I would meet once with him to talk about D., about D. as a man, about D. as a father, about D.’s profound regard for his son. It was as if I were to give a testimony of authenticity to his love for the son. Indeed, more than that, in contrast to the unresolved resentment he felt for what he had taken to be his own father’s disinterest manifest in abandoning him by dying, D. wanted his son to know the genuineness of his respect for the lad, for the son as a separate person with great value of his own.
The death of my patient and my mourning for him came, and time went on. Many months later I was called by D.’s fifteen-year-old son. I spent a single two-and-a-half-hour session with him in which we discussed his grief and his ambivalence, his guilt and his imaginings about his father. I think I was of help to him, but I am certain that for me those were among the most emotional hours I have experienced in more than fifty years of practice. I was the stand-in carrying the message of caring respect from a dead father to his adolescent son.
What had this meant to D., my patient? One element of our shared enactment, his and mine, had to have been his fantasied power to act after death, a derivative of early omnipotence. Much more important, I believe, was the greater ease to face death that he found in this token satisfaction of his wish to reinforce his son’s flourishing after he was gone.
Generosity of spirit, creative generativity, is the way Eros defies Thanatos, the way one generation can deeply regret its own death yet be comforted by the continuation of loved others. This is no mere trick, no disguised belief that we ourselves will see through their eyes, nor is it the foolish false fantasy of continuing as if we ourselves are still actually alive through the memory of others.
Rather, it is what genuine love of the other brings, the knowledge that while we will be no more, we can find contentment, even pleasure, in the joys yet to come to our children and grandchildren, professional as well as personal, and beyond them to those yet to come newly into life who follow us.
“Every third thought will be my grave.” Then, every second. Who knows for any of us how many final thoughts will be the grave, how many final thoughts will be of our caring for an other, that love of others in whose continuation we take joy even as we ourselves disappear?
What I have in mind and intend is descriptive, not at all inspirational. I report observations that appear to be consistent: Not only does generosity of spirit bring its own great richness to life, but also, beyond the soothing fantasy of being remembered by others, generous genuine love of those others in their own right offers the chief ease in death.
Life is a flow of generations. As our parents’ generation died, leaving the world to us, so will we pass on, leaving the world to those who follow. What is a generation but a community of contemporaries? And what is the essence of that word “generation” but a group defined by engendering those who follow? A generation engenders. It generates.
Eros is the god of life; Thanatos, the god of death—the two endlessly engaged in the passage of time. For us, it is generosity of spirit for those yet to come that allows Eros to allay the agony of Thanatos.
Footnotes
Former editor, JAPA Review of Books.