Death in a Time of Coronavirus
It’s difficult to believe in death without first-hand experience. The loss of a loved one, or perhaps an illness, brings your own mortality into focus. The inhuman birth and death cycles carry on regardless of your absence. What appears steady, will change. If not now, then later. If not later, than now.
My recent brush with death made me contemplate mortality. In November 2020, I went on a four-day hike in the Pyrenees. Even without Covid-19 restrictions on movement, the off-season mountains would have been devoid of people. With an arctic sleeping bag, thermal wear and waterproofs, I was ready for the elements.
On the third day, a hail storm caught me on top of a bare mountain. Despite waterproofs, I got soaked through and through, and had some difficulty drying out in the evening. Sleeping in sub-zero temperatures and embarking on steep climbs with a heavy bag on my back, I had put my body through significant stress. However, the real danger only became manifest when I returned to Barcelona. That same night I developed insomnia – strange, considering my exhaustion – as my over-active mind throbbed with dizzying thought. Trying to calm myself was like putting my hand into a furious waterfall to stop the flow. There was nothing I could do.
The insomnia was a prelude for worse to come. The following afternoon I developed a high fever, along with all the other nasty symptoms of the dreaded Covid-19. As I already suffer from chronic pleurisy, a lung condition characterised by intermittent bouts of stabbing pains in the chest, I found myself in significant discomfort, especially when the pleurisy returned, as it tends to do, whenever I catch a cold.
I found myself contemplating death. What would happen if I died today? Am I ready? And if not, shouldn’t I be? The initial feeling was resistance. There’s still so much to experience, I’m just not ready. I realised I was always putting off death “until tomorrow”. Death couldn’t happen today. There was still so much to do. Only when I’ve done this, may I die in peace. And there was always another this followed by another today, as if the will to live were a regular Scheherazade, weaving stories in the present without completing them in order to defer consciousness of mortality.
Scheherazade, painted in the 19th century by Sophie Anderson
I decided to write a will, and, at the height of the fever, I found the process oddly soothing. This meagre document was an orderly way to end the chaos of being alive. And surely it hadn’t been a bad life. In my 32 years, I had experienced my fair share of love, friendship, enlightenment, and so many other beautiful things. Anymore, and the debt would be too great. I supplemented mundane instructions with comments for readers, concluding the document (by this stage no longer a will) with a declaration of love for all sentient beings. It was essential, I told myself, to leave this world without a trace of rancour in my heart. Thus I prepared myself.
The fever lasted three long days. In the morning, my temperature would drop. By midday, it was on the rise again. Once beyond the 39 Celsius mark, the delirium would kick in, and sometimes without the consolation of soothing activities such as writing a will. In one moment, I convinced myself that I was being punished for killing a spider. A large, hairy, but probably harmless spider had entered my tent one night, but instead of taking my time to fish it out, I had panicked and crushed it with a shoe. The image of its crumpled figure, its broken legs twitching in the torchlight, filled me overwhelming guilt. This is punishment for that crime, I told myself. The spider is weaving a web of dread around my soul and I will die in horrible pain, just as that poor, defenceless creature died in horrible pain.
I also fantasised that death was a conscious choice. In the mountains, I had to decide between spending four nights comfortably lodged in an abandoned refuge, making day-trips with my daypack, or ploughing on through the mist and rain with my full pack, ascending various peaks, until I came to the next shelter. A dead cow marked the beginning of the latter path; its flesh had melted, leaving its skin, like an oversized jacket, hanging grimly on the skeleton. At 2000 metres altitude, it was too cold for flies. The valley itself, billowing with mist, adorned with golden marsh and rocks and crystal streams, looked enticing. Rust-coloured chamois and striped wild goats would appear suddenly and then as quickly disappear, their eyes bright with animal intelligence. They looked wiser than human eyes.
After a day of deliberation, I decided on the harder path. I’ll cross the valley of death, I told myself, jokingly, unaware that death would reveal itself not in the mountain, but back in the city.
It was raining hard on the morning I left the refuge. In the whiteout, my body cast no shadow and the uniformly grey sky betrayed not the slightest indication of time. With each step up the bare mountainside, the weather got steadily worse, ending with a hail storm. Later, I told myself that death was unavoidable because I had chosen that path.
The Valley of Death, shortly before a hailstorm. Thomas Helm, 2020.
Perhaps the word “burning” captures well the feeling of dying. In its final moments, the body undergoes a terrible upheaval. The cold occurs later: in death but not the dying itself.
An article in Nature magazine suggests a spike in brain activity at the time of dying. In Leonard Cohen’s beautiful narration of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol), the lama tells the dying man: “Listen, do not be afraid, you are dying, the four great elements of the body are collapsing one into the other, it feels as if you’re being crushed by mountains, tossed by waves, scorched and carried off by a strong wind. This is the Bardo of dying. It is important to recognise your own nature”. According to Buddhist tradition, the dying are especially sensitive to sound, and are able to hear voices as they lie dying, even after death itself. It is therefore useful to remind them of how to navigate the afterlife.
On the summit of death, fever reigns,
Hot like forgiveness,
A place no-one belongs
But all must go;
Whoever you have been,
You cup your hands,
And drink the silence in.
After the fever, I felt strangely alive, peacefully detached from previous dramas, anxieties and frustrations. In his elucidation of the famous Lamrim meditation instructions, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso emphasises the benefits of thinking “I may die today”: “The mind that thinks ‘I will not die today’ is deceptive – it leads us in the wrong direction and causes our human life to become empty. On the other hand… the mind that spontaneously thinks each and every day, ‘I may die today’, is the realisation of death. It is this realisation that directly eliminates our laziness of attachment and opens the door to the spiritual path.” So yes, reflecting on your own mortality encourages you to pursue a richer, more fulfilling life.
The name of the terrifying yet strangely benevolent figure Mahakala - a deity common to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism - translates as “beyond time” or “death”. In the Hindu tradition, as expounded by the Shaktisamgama Tantra, Mahakala has four arms, three eyes and the brilliance of “10 million black fires of dissolution”. He dwells in the midst of eight cremation grounds and is adorned with eight skulls, seated on five corpses, holds a trident, a drum, a sword and a scythe in his hands. He is surrounded by loudly shrieking vultures and jackals. Beside him is his consort Kali and they both represent the flow of time. When Mahakala and Kali are together they have the power to dissolve even time and space into themselves and exist as void at the dissolution of the universe. They are also responsible for annihilating great evils and great daemons when other gods fail to do so. Mahakala and Kali are without rules or mercy because Time is not bound by anything and Time does not show mercy.
In Tibetan Buddhism, Mahakala represents the wrathful aspects of an enlightened mind, able to transform negative emotions such as hate or anger into a compassionate force. Although he looks evil, his true purpose is more like that of a guard dog or a guardian angel. His aggression allows him to demolish obstacles that impede the path to enlightenment. His is the transformative power of the presence of death in the world: the horrifying key to a more beautiful door of awakening.
A Tibetan painting of Mahakala, who is often called “The Great Black One” in Tibet.
While Mahakala represents the affirmation of death, world culture is also filled with examples of denial. When his best friend dies, Gilgamesh, the hero of the world’s oldest surviving epic, embarks on a quest for immortality. His journey ultimately fails, forcing this most powerful of kings to bend his knee to death. In Tolstoy’s bleakly comic satire, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a highly regarded official of the Court of Justice contracts a fatal illness, which exposes the vanity of his superficial world and leaves him struggling to find any meaning to his life. There is a famous scene in which his peers discuss whether or not it would be appropriate to play cards after his funeral: a clear but chilling vision of human relations and, specifically, bourgeois society, prefiguring, perhaps, such works as Camus’s L’Etranger, whose distant protagonist fails to feel grief when his mother dies. Although Ilyich struggles with death, there is a sense that death has revealed the horrid “truth” of his “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible” life. A touch of Mahakala, perhaps, of purging the excess in the name of truth?
Major religions often invoke the fear of death to win recruits, promising followers glorious immortality in exchange for obedience. Christians and Muslims stress the horrors of hell for those who fail to worship Jesus or Allah; Buddhists warn of reincarnation in the “lower realms” if one declines the Buddha’s teachings. In Tantric initiation ceremonies for the goddess White Tara, the acolyte typically congratulates the initiates on having attained immortality. Such promises remind me of the ancient Orphic religion, in which explicit instructions for the afterlife were engraved on golden tablets and buried with the dead.
Fourth century BC gold orphic tablet found in funeral urn in Tessaglia, now preserved in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Translation: “I am parched with thirst and I perish. But let me drink from the everflowing spring. On the right is a white cypress. ‘Who are you? From where are you?’ I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven. But my race is heavenly.” (The 'Orphic' Gold Tablets and Greek Religion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p.29). Photo credit: Remi Mathis.
Political ideologies translate the act of dying for a cause into martyrdom: a hangover from the heroic age, when warrior deaths resulted in Valhalla or the Elysium Fields. Horace’s famous ode is a kind of blueprint for the psychology of nationalism: “It is sweet and good to die for your fatherland”, (Odes III.2.13). Wilfred Owen’s embittered response suggests otherwise.
Although the Torah, with its fixation on God’s “special” people, arguably sets the tone for intolerant nationalism, one has to respect Judaism’s reluctance to use death as a tool to bludgeon people into belief. The afterlife in Judaism is famously ambiguous. Virtue should be a good unto itself, without a promise of reward (Aristotle made the same point with his concept of eudaimonia). Jewish coffins are usually quite simple and made entirely of wood to aid decomposition: the polar opposite of the Pharaohs with their garish pyramids and mummies. I find the Jewish approach particularly attractive. When I go, let me disappear as quickly as I can. However wise and beautiful you might have been in life, corpses are always ugly.