1 Death-Man

      To see yourself is to die, to die to all illusions.

      Søren Kierkegaard

      In his classic analysis of the concept of death in children, existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom describes how youngsters protect themselves by anthropomorphizing death, treating it as if it were something separate from them and giving it a skeletal and ghostly human form. In a conversation with a therapist, Bobby, a four-year-old, says:

      [B.] Death does wrong.

      [T.] How does it do wrong?

      [B.] Stabs you to death with a knife.

      [T.] What is death?

      [B.] A man.

      [T.] What sort of man?

      [B.] Death-man.

      [T.] How do you know?

      [B.] I saw him.¹

For the existentialist, our childhood fears of “death-man” persist deep into adulthood. Death-man is deteriorating; he is disabled, thin, and frail; he has translucent skin, yellowed and missing teeth, and a stale smell. We don’t want to be near death-man because he reminds us of where we are heading. When I was in cardiac rehab I saw many incarnations of death-man, and they terrified me. It was inconceivable that I was like them. But, back on campus a few weeks later, I realized that I was death-man. Although the external defibrillator I was wearing after my heart attack to protect me from cardiac arrest was largely concealed under my shirt, it was attached to a camera-sized box at my hip, with a black cord running up my side. It was unmistakably a medical device, and I felt the stigma. I was branded. When colleagues approached me, they would glance uneasily at the device and look at me with concern. What was especially disturbing is that some whom I considered close friends avoided me altogether or would simply smile and scurry away, uncomfortable with what I represented: shattered health, vulnerability, a reminder of death. These jarring experiences forced me to reflect on my obsession with youth, beauty, and strength and my negative views of old age and consider the fact that the pervasiveness of ageism in our culture may manifest itself unconsciously, as a way for us to protect ourselves from the awareness of our own mortality.

The ways in which we belittle and debase the elderly in contemporary society are shocking, especially considering that, at least in the United States, the fastest growing age group is made up of eighty-five- to ninety-four-year-olds.² The toxicity of ageism has become acutely visible during the coronavirus pandemic. We have witnessed a remarkably callous attitude toward older persons, as if their lives no longer had any productive value. The United Kingdom’s former political strategist Dominic Cummings remarked that the primary goal of the country’s response to the pandemic was to achieve “herd immunity, [to] protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”³ And Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, came under fire for claiming on a nightly news broadcast that, because older persons are no longer contributing members of society, they should be willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of reopening the economy.⁴ These views reflect an attitude that conveys the impression that older persons are neither admired nor respected; they are expendable. And this attitude has become so normalized that it is rarely called into question. Our negative stance toward the elderly appears on the surface not as a subjective expression of bigotry or as a contingent historical quirk so much as an objective fact about the human condition. This is strange because, unlike other “isms” such as sexism or racism, ageism isn’t directed at an amorphous “other” with a different gender or skin tone, but at our own future self. Understood this way, ageism looks like a kind of self-hatred of who we will one day become, and this means that older persons today probably participated in the same negative stereotyping that they are now being subjected to. As Beauvoir puts it, “[w]e carry this ostracism so far that we even reach the point of turning it against ourselves: for in the old person that we must become, we refuse to recognize ourselves.”⁵ This, she says, is “astonishing, since every single member of the community must know that his future is in question.”⁶

But in previous eras older persons were not dismissed as incarnations of suffering, illness, and death. Indeed, growing old was viewed as a sign of grace, and mortality was more commonly associated with youth, with dying in childbirth, with injuries from battle, with executions, or with various vocational hazards. The old were regarded as fonts of vitality and wisdom. Their voices mattered because they embodied a deep understanding of the customs, myths, and rituals that held their communities together.⁷ This sense of respect and veneration helps us understand the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC–AD 65) in their proper cultural context: “Let us cherish and love old age, for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it … if God is pleased to add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts.”⁸ Contrast Seneca’s reflections with the dehumanizing views we have today, when older adults are scorned and functionally removed from productive society, given over to the paternalizing control of medical experts, and warehoused in nursing homes and retirement communities. Beauvoir refers to this phenomenon as nothing less than a “failure of our entire civilization,”⁹ but the failure is not merely the byproduct of the unique sociohistorical forces of modern capitalism. The existentialist understands that the segregation of the elderly and the structural discriminations of ageism emerge out of something more insidious and primal: out of our collective fear of death.

Of all the existentialists, none was more haunted by death than Kierkegaard, whose name is homonymous with kirkegård, the Danish word for “graveyard.” In his brief life of forty-two years, he witnessed the deaths of his parents and of five of his seven siblings; and he had the prophetic belief that he, too, was fated to die at a young age.¹⁰ Kierkegaard was intimately familiar with the abyss that yawns and swirls beneath our lives and recognized this abyss as the wellspring of all our neuroses. He saw death as the ultimate concern, the fundamental given of our existence, and reminded his readers that, although death was certain, the time of death was uncertain; it could come for any of us at any moment. From the standpoint of this “uncertain certainty,” he introduced a pioneering distinction between “fear” (frygt) and “anxiety” (angst) that would later become axiomatic in the development of existential psychotherapy. He argued that fear always has an object; it is always of something, and these thing-like fears can be managed and controlled to some extent if we make efforts to avoid them. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a fear of nothing; it is fear of the annihilating chasm at the heart of the human condition. Anxiety reveals that there is nothing solid or stable that secures my existence, that I am lost, and that there is no underlying reason for me to be. And I cannot point to what it is that I am anxious about because I myself am the source of anxiety. Kierkegaard went on to show that most of our everyday fears manifest themselves as displaced anxiety, whereby the inchoate fear of my own nothingness is transferred onto a more manageable fear of something. My fear of divorce, of losing my job, or of my upcoming colonoscopy displaces and covers over what it is that I’m really afraid of. Kierkegaard believed that, when anxiety is displaced in this way, “the nothing which is the object of anxiety becomes as it were more and more a something.”¹¹

He goes on to argue that our cultural institutions and social practices are built in large part to repress this anxiety and to keep death hidden from us. Losing ourselves in these practices creates the illusion of well-being, that we are living a good life, that we are not lost, not in despair. In The Sickness unto Death,