Godfather Death

Decades ago, after I turned forty and one of my sons left home for college, I suddenly felt old and found comfort (or cover at least) in the quip: “Growing old ain’t bad when you consider the alternative.” This assumes growing old to be better than dying, and most people would agree. Otherwise, seniors would be immune to death threats and impossible to hold at gunpoint. 

I remember when I was a teenager, alive in the fresh horror of realizing that personal immortality was no Kalashnikov Truth--not a thing objectively verifiable or universally accepted--that for all I could ever know, death is oblivion. I was flying on my bike down a steep incline one afternoon and suddenly reflected that a blowout and crushed skull might instantly snuff out, not just Billy Green, past and present, but (as far as that Billy was concerned) the earth, sun, moon, and stars—and even the absence of these spheres. Not only light would vanish, but darkness. Not only existence, but nonexisence. Not only life, but death. A beloved cosmos gone as if it had never existed. My growing ego was so bloated with youthful elan that I imagined eternal torment would be better than the utter blinking out of all being. 

Recently, I watched my mother-in-law, bedridden, blind, and worse, devolve into a mumbling near-vegetable whose most articulate wish was to die. A few months ago, she stopped eating—finally defeating her body’s blind urge to pump blood--and her wish came true. Now quite old, I am still curious, libidinous, and active (just mowed the lawn) and still strongly prefer growing older to dying, but I do understand that life is a game of diminishing returns.

This is the message of the myth of Tithonus, a beautiful Trojan youth who catches the eye of Eos, the goddess of the dawn. She loves Tithonus so much that she begs Zeus to give him immortality, and Zeus does. Unfortunately, she forgets to also ask for eternal youth. Tithonus becomes a witless paralytic shut in room where he babbles endlessly and devolves into a cricket chirping for death. “Release me,” he says in Tennyson’s famous poem, “restore me to the ground.” 

Jonathan Swift’s Stuldbruggs, immortals that Gulliver learns about on his travels, share this theme. When a baby in the nation is Luggnagg is born with a red dot over his left eyebrow, this identifies him as an immortal and is occasion for great mourning. Though immortal, the Stuldbruggs devolve into deaf, blind, hairless lumps of stinking flesh legally dead at eighty. The message is that we cannot reasonably wish for immortality except in a changeless world, which clearly is not the world we know and love. Sexuality, the seasons, sunrise, movement itself, all conspire to destroy us. "Time," as Delmore Schwartz wrote, "is the fire in which we burn." 

This brings to mind a fable, freely adapted here from the Brothers Grimm:

A boy fell into a well, but it wasn’t just any well. It was a door to the realm of Death, who loved the child and adopted him as a godson. One day boy discovered a vast cave of flickering candles, some tall, some short, some guttering puddles of wax, and Godfather Death explained that each flame was somebody’s life. When the boy grew up and it was time for him to make his way in the world, Death offered him any gift he asked for. Frightened by the terrible cave of candles, the boy asked never to die.

“I’m sorry,” said Death, “that is the one thing I can’t give you. But I do promise you that, before your time comes, I will warn you three times.”

The years passed. The boy, now a man, was thrown by a horse, and everybody thought he would die, but he knew better. He caught a fever, but he knew he would recover.  Even as his friends died, his hair turned white, his teeth fell out, his skin wrinkled, and he hobbled with a cane, the man knew his time hadn’t come because he’d heard no warnings from his godfather.

Then one winter afternoon, a black coach pulled up in front of his house, and who should be driving it but Godfather Death? “Come on, son,” he said. “It’s time to go."
 "But it can’t be,” said the old man. "You promised to warn me three times."

"Three times?" Death laughed. "Didn't you fall from a horse? Didn't you run a fever? Didn't friends die? Your hair turn white, your teeth fall out, your skin wrinkle, your strength fail? Three times? I've warned you hundreds of times, son." And Death dragged him into the coach.

We can, in fact, multiply Godfather Death’s hundreds of warnings into tens of thousands if we include all mutability. The body on which all physical life depends is subject, like all the material universe, to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and tends toward entropy, toward disorder and ultimate death. For every change that notches positive, toward life and fulfillment, an equal or greater one notches negative. The positive exists only as to complement the negative. Death might just as well have pointed out that his godson saw a flower blooming, saw the moon change, rode a horse, saw frost melt on a field, fell in love, had children and watched them grow, adopted a puppy that became his devoted companion, succeeded in an important project or business, failed in another, became admired or shunned, loved or hated, drank and became intoxicated, grew tired and rested, or merely felt hunger and ate food. All changes are fluctuations in a line graph that must eventually—reliably in less than 120 years—fall below the zero line. Immortality implies absence of change, and absence of change is death itself.

Often the conventional vision of the afterlife ignores this, perhaps assuming a series of divine pulses overcoming entropy and allowing life to swing this way and that forever like pendulums moved by a wound spring or hidden battery. In the vision of Heaven, motion is always positive, fulfilling desire. I’m not sure this would be ultimately pleasant. I once heard a story about a man who wakes up dead where his every wish is fulfilled. This isn’t the old Faustian trope of a few ill-considered wishes that turn out badly. It’s grimmer than that. Here, unlimited wishes are fulfilled in the best possible way and become boring fait accompli so that the protagonist, to keep his buzz, must invent more and more insanely extravagant wishes which become boring in turn until he understands that what had seemed paradise is, in fact, an insidious hell. Here torture isn’t, as Sartre says, “other people.” It is ourselves glutted with satisfied desire.

The path to bliss in life, as in any well-imagined afterlife, may mean curtailing desire, indeed losing all attachment to ego—the hungry self-image that situates itself in plurality and ambition under the sun and moon—and allowing ourselves to be absorbed in unity, whatever we call it. It may involve, not wish-fulfillment, but the renunciation of wishing. Dante, at the end of his climb out of Hell and up the ladder of Heaven, comes upon a luminous rose-like stadium of souls doing nothing but adoring God, after which he is absorbed in a beatific vision and the poem ends abruptly. But eternity at a static stadium event, however well-lit, is not everybody’s idea of a good time. The doctrine of Purgatory makes sense in this way, as a school where we learn not to desire entertainments we’ll lose anyway (or indeed have already lost) and accept pure being outside ourselves—which, being outside, may indeed be synonymous with our ceasing to be. Tithonus despaired because he had lost hope. Only by letting go of hope could he hope to live.