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“Remember that you have only one soul; that you have only one death to die; that you have only one life. . . . If you do this, there will be many things about which you care nothing.”—St. Teresa of Avila
“I am not afraid of dying. I just do not want to be there when it happens.”—Woody Allen
Death is a necessary condition for our transcendence and the inevitable price we pay for our individuality. With conscious evolution comes the awareness that “I will die"; aging is therefore counterpoised against the certainty of our death. Most people require decades of maturation to outgrow the conviction that they are immune from death. First, you consider yourself too young for it. Then the fear of death awakens and the instinct for self-preservation kicks in.
Sometimes this is replaced in later life by an acceptance of the inevitable. At the prospect of imminent death, the child may be overwhelmed but courageous. The young person loathes death but may give her life freely for some higher ideal. The adult often does not think of death because he is "too busy," but also avoids risks and begins to pay more attention to his health. For old people death is not an abstract fate; it is an event near at hand.
In truth, death does not draw closer with age; it is always inescapably near because there is no set moment for it to strike. The word "soon" remains as vague at 80 as at 70. Sometimes death arrives unexpectedly. Orson Welles reportedly remarked, "It is like the child being sent to bed after being given some wonderful toys.”
The fear of death is common, but it is not the reverse of a love of life. There are fates worse than death such as extreme physical suffering or isolation. Death sometimes seems preferable when life has only suffering to offer. But even in a comfortable, joyful life, the fear of death is unnecessary. The Roman philosopher Cicero posited that there is no reason to fear death because both the young and the old die but the old have had the joy of living: Ah, but it is just there that he is in a better position than a young man, since what the latter only hopes he has obtained. The one wishes to live long; the other has lived long.
Death in Nature
We can die in youth; old age is not a necessary end to human life. The real question is not why we age, but why we live as long as we do. Many creatures die shortly after reproduction. Death emerged long before man when cells started to specialize and organisms became complex. Cells needed to age and die to make way for other cells. For one-celled organisms, cell division isn't really death. In some worms, death does not occur in all cells simultaneously but comes as a progression from highly metabolic areas to slowly metabolizing areas. It is like a creeping epidemic from cell to cell. Cellular immortality in higher creatures is not good for the organism. In modern terms, we call immortal cells malignant because cancer cells have escaped the genetic controls of normal cellular aging.
Almost certainly there are death genes. Many cells contain enzymes that cause cells to digest and die at a genetically determined site. This is normal for many organisms as occurs in the loss of the pollywog’s tail. During the course of our lives, our bodies are gradually sculpted as we shed millions of unneeded parts. For example, we shed our baby teeth to make room for permanent teeth; we deliberately kill off excess white blood cells after an infection has been successfully overcome.
As living things evolved some members of species were ill-equipped for living on Earth. Species that kept poorly adapted members were weakened and death became a tool of change and progress in evolution. Multi-celled creatures that neglected to adapt became extinct. Some species have advanced through the partial death of themselves.
For example, the sap tubes that run up and down within the trunk of a tree die and henceforth serve as life-sustaining water channels for the rest of the tree. There is the demise of the caterpillar after it spins a cocoon and fades away into a soupy disorganized mass, dead for all intents and purposes. Then the mass reorganizes into a totally different organism, a butterfly. Another example is the serpent repeatedly renewing itself by shedding its skin.
Similarly, early myths and rites dramatize passage from one stage of life to another. In Greek mythology, the nymph Psyche was immortalized by Zeus as a personification of the soul and took the form of a butterfly. Everything that dies seems to be in trade for something that comes to life.
