LIFE is too short. Perhaps no single force has worked so powerfully on man as his knowledge that he must surely die. Whole civilizations have been built in death's dominion: the Egyptians turned their land into a vast necropolis, and the Aztecs conquered Mexico not for booty but for human sacrifices to blunt the lethal appetites of their man-eating gods. Trying to cope with the dreadful and perplexing fact of death, man has erected great intellectual edifices; philosophers as far apart as Socrates and (2,300 years after him) Karl Jaspers have held that the essence of philosophy is preparation for death. Others have sought to exorcise death with magic. Or with reason. "When I am, death is not," said Epicurus. "When death is, I am not. Therefore we can never have anything to do with death." The vanquishing of death was Christianity's great enterprise. "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" cried the apostle Paul.
But Atropos with her shears, Time with his scythe, the Pale Horse and Rider of the Apocalypse, the grinning skeleton at the revels of Everyman—and the God of Judgment—have maintained their power on earth, to frighten man and elate him, to drive him to noble works and to dreadful deeds.
Today, throughout the Western world and especially in America, man's attitude toward the mystery of death is making a break with human tradition. Medically, death seems to be constantly receding, and some scientists think seriously about an almost indefinite life span for man (the late Norbert Wiener, for one, was horrified at the prospect of the overcrowded world this might bring about). Socially, the rites of death and mourning, except at those rare times when whole nations hear the muffled drums for a Churchill or a Kennedy, are growing more impersonal and grudging. Religiously, the promise of immortality has become dim and uncertain. Much of the fear and mystery that once attended death has been dispelled—but so has much of the meaning.
The "Management" of Dying
Instead of incorporating his mortality into his total view of what he is and how he should live, instead of confronting his finitude with all the resources of myth and hope and wonderment that are his heritage, modern man seems to be doing his best to dismiss death as an unfortunate incident. Carl Jung warned against abandoning the traditional view of death "as the fulfillment of life's meaning and its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation." Psychologist Rollo May feels that the repression of death "is what makes modern life banal, empty and vapid. We run away from death by making a cult of automatic progress, or by making it impersonal. Many people think they are facing death when they are really sidestepping it with the old eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-you-die—middle-aged men and women who want to love everybody, go every place, do everything and hear everything before the end comes. It's like the advertising slogan, 'If I've only one life ... let me live it as a blonde.' "