Ron’s Blog

Oz strives for authentic being toward death

The other day Oz (a couple weeks shy of his 8th birthday) had his first real existential crisis. Earlier in the weekend, on Saturday morning, one of our elderly and ailing neighbors died. Oz knew this — he saw the aid car come, and a day later, he was with his mom as she talked to the sister of the man who died. Oz had talked about it a little during the day — e.g., telling the “sad news” to his grandma and the like, but mostly seemed to be responding to it as a kind of curiosity. That evening, I was giving him a haircut, and he had his head hanging down for a minute or two to accommodate the hair cutting; but when his head came up, he was crying. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, through tears, “I don’t want to die!”

I asked him why he was worried about that, and for a minute or two he was pretty inconsolable; and although it was clearly spurred by our neighbor’s death, it was now all about his own future death. And so I said the good philosopher-humanist-parent things — that he didn’t need to worry, that the life ahead of him was a zillion times longer than he can imagine before his time comes; that it’s the nature of all living things like us — cats, trees, flowers, etc. — to have a life with a beginning and an end; that we do all eventually die, but after a long a full life, we can meet the end of life as the natural coming of our time to make room for new life; and that the limited nature of our lives is a reminder to us to make sure we make the most of it, enjoy it, and appreciate the love, joy, and other goodness we find in it.

At this point, he’s still quite concerned, but starting to turn from crying to talking. Being a family where nobody believes in any kind of afterlife, we’ve never suggested that there’s any such thing, but rather have always talked with him openly about death in ways that presume its finality. We’ve also taken hundreds of walks in various local cemeteries, and have taken those occasions to normalize death as well. So death and its finality is far from being an alien concept to Oz.

The conversation then segues into talking about the idea of whether the Earth will someday die, and about how in billions of years the sun will burn out, and about how maybe by that time, if there were still people, maybe we could have spaceships, and go to other planets with suns that were still hot, and how it would be fun to be a scientist working on how to make spaceships like that.

But a few minutes later, he returned to the issue of personal death, and tries to solve it. So, he says, maybe we could just, after death, go into another woman’s belly and be born again, and it could be you again — basically inventing the idea of reincarnation on the spot (something that we’ve never talked about). So I said that was a really interesting idea, and that there are many people in the world who believe that, including Hindus and some Buddhists — but that we didn’t think that it was true. I pointed out that when you’re born, and when you’re little, you don’t actually remember anything from any previous life. He thought about that a little, and then said that it wouldn’t really be you then (apparently he holds a Lockean memory theory of personal identity), and I agreed that this was one of the reasons that the view didn’t really make sense in the end. He agreed, then went on to say that maybe we could just live for ever and ever — but that then that just took us back to where we started, which was that he just really didn’t want to die.

It was such a completely heartfelt encounter with the idea of death and the finitude of life, that utterly central aspect of the human condition. And as we discuss it, I’m torn: On the one hand, I feel for his anguish and fear — he was crying some of the time, and was clearly quite caught up with this concern. And on the other hand, I’m feeling like the high-school health teacher whose daughter just had her first period — this is existential, philosophical questioning and angst at its most primal, and it’s in some sense the subject matter that I’ve spent my whole adult life studying and teaching. I’m feeling pretty well-prepared, but I’m also feeling incredibly proud of him as I watch him struggle with these most basic of philosophical worries about his own existence, just like a full-fledged human being. I’m pretty much bursting at the seams with some combination of parental pride and teacher-like satisfaction. As a philosopher and as a parent, this is pretty much the shit I live for; and I’m pretty thrilled to be there sharing it with him, even though it’s clearly got some of the real pain of confronting your own death and finitude.

So that’s the story of Oz’s first existential crisis. For my part, I did my best, and I think it worked out all right.  As with other subtle and complicated issues, simplifying and boiling them down for your child does force you to go to the heart of the matter — as when I explained to him that we were Democrats because we believed in sharing with the less fortunate, and letting everybody participate.  With death, I tried to encourage in him the idea that the finitude of life was part of what encouraged us to appreciate and value it; the sense that life’s road was longer than he could imagine at this point; and that it was part of becoming a full person to confront and examine these issues and to find our path through them.