Sri Ramakrishna Math : The Vedanta Kesari, September 2003

Death is a terrible reality. The fear of death is the root of all fears. Life is being, but death is non-being. No one escapes death's cruel jaws. In the words of Thomas Gray's elegy:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And a ll that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour,
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.¹

Saints and sinners, rich and poor, high and low, old and young, learned and ignorant, righteous and unrighteous, all die. Conquest of death has always been the major preoccupation of the human mind. Science, technology, and medicine are all busy finding ways to make life deathless. Yet death continues to take its toll. In an article in The New York Times (June 29, 1997), the author Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes:

America is often called a 'death-denying' society; each year the United States spends millions on efforts to conquer death, or at least to postpone it. The self-help shelves of bookstores overflow with such pearls as 'Stop Aging Now!' and 'Stay Young the Melatonin Way'.

If Americans don't deny death, they often trivialize it, said Joan Halifax, a Zen Buddhist priest who founded the Project on Being With Dying in Santa Fe, N.M. 'By the time a kid gets into high school, he has seen 20,000 homicides on television,' she said. 'Death as a mystery to be embraced, entered into and respected has been profaned in our culture.'

Courtesy of the assisted-suicide debate, the concept of a good death has now emerged, though many experts reject the phrase as simplistic. Dr. Ira Byock, president of the Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, prefers 'dying well'. Dr. Timothy Keay, an end-of-life care expert at the University of Maryland, says 'the least worst death'.

There is no blueprint, however, for a good death. Death can't be neatly packaged with a red bow. It is messy, irrational, most often filled with sorrow and pain. More than two million Americans die each year; there are as many ways to die as to live. And so unanswerable questions arise: Not only what constitutes a good death and how can it be achieved, but whom, ultimately, it is for--the person dying, or those going on living?

'I'm a little cynical about this whole notion of good death,' said Dr. David Hilfiker, the founder of Joseph's House in Washington, which cares for homeless men dying of AIDS. 'Death is really hard for most people. Why should people who are dying have to have a beautiful death? That's putting the burden on them to have some kind of experience that makes us feel good.'

Indeed, said Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, the author of How We Die, the patient's needs often get lowest priority. 'A good death,' he said, 'is in the eye of the beholder.'

In centuries past, a good death was celebrated in art and literature as ars moriendi, the art of dying. Death marked salvation of the soul, neither an ending nor a beginning but, like birth, part of the cycle of life. 'True philosophers,' Plato wrote, 'are always occupied in the practice of dying.'

Buddhism is filled with stories of Zen masters who wrote poems in the moments before death, embracing it as the only time in life when absolute freedom may be realized. In the Middle Ages, Christian monks greeted one another with the salutation Momento mori, remember that you must die....

Americans have been reticent to talk about death; only recently have doctors and families felt obliged to tell a terminally ill person that he was, in fact, dying. Often the truth simply went unremarked, like an elephant in the dining room.

In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross shattered the silence with On Death and Dying. In it she described the progression of a patient's coping mechanisms in five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

Dr. Byock, the author of Dying Well, offers what he calls the 'developmental model' of dying. When he began caring for the terminally ill 20 years ago, he noticed that when he asked patients how they were feeling, often the reply was something like this: 'Despite it all doctor, I am well.'

This juxtaposition of wellness and dying seemed a paradox, but he has concluded that the two can exist side by side. 'In dying,' he said, 'there are opportunities to grow even through times of severe difficulties, which we would label suffering.'...

Conventional wisdom holds that people die as they have lived; a crotchety old man in life will be a crotchety old man in death. Not so, say experts in end-of-life care; death can be both transforming and liberating.

Dr. Halifax, the Buddhist priest, tells of a woman whose daughter was a hospice nurse. Throughout her life, the mother had adhered to strict codes of politeness and propriety. A few days before her death, she began screaming in rage and pain. As a nurse, her daughter knew that narcotics could subdue her mother's pain. But she chose to do nothing; the screaming, she believed, was her mother's way of finally expressing herself. 'The screaming went on for four days and four nights,' Dr. Halifax said. 'And about an hour before she died, she lit up, and became extremely peaceful, and relaxed completely. And then she died.'

'A good death,' she finally allowed, 'sounds a little polite. It's like death with manners. I don't want to adorn death. Death is death.'²

Responses to the fear of death have been various. The response that is most common is, 'Don't think of death'. In the Mahabharata, King Yudhishthira was asked by a mysterious being, 'What is the greatest wonder in the world?'³ The king replied, 'Every day men see creatures depart to Yama's abode [i.e., they die] and yet those who remain seek to live for ever. This verily is the greatest wonder.'⁴ The second response is, 'Accept the inevitable, because death is the universal destiny and there is nothing we can do about it.' The third response is, 'Enjoy life while you are alive, because this is the only life that we have.' The fourth response comes from the followers of faith. They say, 'Death is the law of earthly life, which is inherently sinful and corrupt. Bear with death as part of purification and education, and hope for eternal life hereafter.' The fifth response is, 'Fight death with material means.' There are many who believe that the developments of science and medicine will one day reverse the process of aging and eventually eradicate death altogether. But, as we develop smart technology and medicine, death also gets smarter and stronger.

However we may want to forget death, death does not forget us. But to accept death as the end of everything makes life meaningless. 'There is, then, nothing to be hoped for, nothing to be expected and nothing to be done save to await our turn to mount the scaffold and bid farewell to the colossal blunder, the much-ado-about-nothing world!'⁵ The notion of enjoying life while ignoring the question of death works well when a person is young, but as he grows older he begins to hear the drumbeats of death getting louder and louder. His optimism turns into pessimism. To enjoy life by being oblivious of the reality of death is infantile and absurd. Our attempt to see only the bright side of life is futile.

Those who accept death as inevitable but still try to get compensation hereafter do not really face the question of death. Everlasting life in terms of time is irrational. That which begins in time will also end in time. Even the longest life will come to an end. The idea of physical immortality is a fanciful dream.

Fear of death, according to Vedanta, is rooted in our mistaken self-identity. Is a human being just a physical entity made of muscles, blood, and bone, or a mental being made of thoughts and memories? Is there anything beyond that? For physical scientists, man is nothing more than a material entity made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, and other elements. Sociologists define man as a member of a family, group, nation, or race. Psychologists defineman in terms of his thoughts and feelings. All such scientific descriptions, however, leave out an essential part of man, namely his soul--the only conscious entity, without which a human body is absolutely valueless.

The body of man is sometimes described as the city of the soul--a city of nine or eleven gates. The nine gates consist of the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth, and the organs of evacuation and generation. Two additional gates are the navel and the aperture at the top of the head. According to the seers of the Vedas, a human being has three bodies, one inside the other. First is the gross physical body. It is material by nature and is produced by a combination of the gross elements. It consists of bone, flesh, blood, and other substances. Depending upon food for its existence, it endures as long as it can assimilate nourishment. Non-existent before birth and after death, it lasts only for a short interval between birth and death. The second body is the mind with its thoughts and memories, and the third body is made of I-consciousness. A human being uses his gross body in the wakeful state, his subtle mental body in the dream state, and his third body in dreamless sleep. The ignorant identify themselves completely with the body. The book-learned consider themselves a combination of the body, the mind, and the self. But the seers realize that the soul, or self, is distinct from the body and mind. This self, which is the focus of the deathless Universal Self, is our true identity.

Death is disintegration of the physical body and is never the end of the story. When the physical body becomes broken due to illness, old age, or accident, the soul, along with the other two bodies, leaves the gross body and looks for another gross body to inhabit. The consciousness of the three bodies is consciousness borrowed from the soul. Deep identification with the body is the cause of the fear of death. The body, being material, is time-bound, and subject to six changes--birth, subsistence, growth, maturity, decline, and death--that are common to all material entities. Being identified with the body, a person follows the destiny of the body. When the body dies he thinks he is dying. But this is not so. The deathless soul only appears to die when the body dies.

The Vedic seers speak of the soul's rebirth. This rebirth is governed by the law of karma that says that our thoughts, actions, and desires determine our destiny. The Bhagavad Gita describes death as one of the series of changes: 'Even as the embodied Self passes, in this body, through the stages of childhood, youth, and old age, so does It pass into another body. Calm souls are not bewildered by this.'⁶ Rebirth gives the soul an opportunity to make things better in the next life. The very fact that life is ever changing indicates that there is some entity within us that is changeless. This changeless entity is our true Self, the constant witness to the changing phenomena of life. There is no escape from the cycles of birth and death until the Self is discovered.

1. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, viii-ix.
2. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "The Good Death: Embracing a Right to Die Well," The New York Times, 29 June 1997, Section 4: The Week in Review, pp. 1, 4.
3. C. Rajagopalachari, trans., The Mahabharata, (Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1990), 142.
4. Ibid., p. 142.
5. W. Macneile Dixon, The Human Situation, (Gifford Lectures 1936-37), as quoted in Man in Search of Immortality, by Swami Nikhilananda, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, 1994, p. 26.
6. Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Bhagavad Gita, 2.13, (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Centre, 1992), 72.