What we die for
This post started out as a comment a while back in yezida’s journal here. I found the question weighty and wrote some more thoughts down, but never ended up posting it. Now in view of Memorial Day, it seems apropos.
It’s this uncomfortable question of whether a person's death is "in vain" or for a purpose. I find that when I hear people making statements about what someone has "died for," particularly war dead, about 90% of the time statements of that sort boil down to using the person's death to push a political point. Use of the dead in this way is extremely distasteful to me, and I dislike it the same way whether the dead are being used to support claims for and against wars.
I notice that we only talk about people's deaths being "for" something or being "senseless" or "in vain" when they die in certain contexts and are considered preventable. People who died in school shootings or the twin towers or in war have their deaths evaluated for meaning and purpose. We suggest that if certain endeavors succeed then they will not have died "in vain". When people die of AIDS or random urban violence or earthquakes, though all of those kinds of deaths are preventable to some degree, we don't seem to ask what they died for or expect their deaths to have a purpose. When people die in ordinary ways we don’t worry about what they died for.
This business of measuring the value of a person's death by whether it served a purpose causes me queasiness on a deep philosophical level. It feels wrong to me to evaluate death that way. I'm trying to work out why... I guess I feel like in some ways all deaths are senseless, and also all deaths are sacred. Is it more sacred to die of a curable disease, or random street violence, or to be cut down by a war you didn't want? Is it more senseless to die slowly in a hospital ward or to die violently in a war you volunteered for? How do you measure the sanctification of a death? Why do we think we need to measure this?
My grandmother died suddenly of congestive heart failure a couple of years ago. It was, in a way, pretty senseless. She’d had her heart examined recently and been determined to have a strong heart. If we’d expected her to die of something any time soon, it wouldn’t have been that. But nobody seemed concerned about what, if anything, she died for. I guess that means she died for nothing. Which also didn’t seem to pain anybody.
Likewise my uncle. He was cut down in the prime of life, as they say. Forty years old or so, with kids and a life he enjoyed, a partner he loved, dead of AIDS. His partner died soon after, and he wasn’t even forty yet. Everybody said it was tragic. But nobody asked what they died for. AIDS hasn’t been cured yet. Maybe they died in vain. When they find a cure, will we decide that all these vain deaths were purposeful after all, since they contributed to our understanding of the disease?
I suppose though that people would say war deaths are different. Because the death is the result of a campaign that is supposed to accomplish something. And everybody seems to want to take a side, measuring the value of deaths by their view of the noble or corrupt purposes of the war. If you think the war serves some great purpose, then the deaths are honorable sacrifices for a cause. Meaningful deaths. If you think the war is a senseless horror only serving to feed the greed of the military-industrial complex, then the deaths are for nothing, a wretched waste of human life. Meaningless deaths.
I think of the animal world. It is full of creatures dying suddenly before their time, just to feed another life. Which life is the one with value, the one that ends or the one that continues? A deer dies in the cougar’s jaws. Death in vain, because another deer will have to die tomorrow, and the day after, while the hunger of the predators never ends. Or: A deer’s life sacrificed - it will not have died in vain, because in death it gives life continuing to the cougar and its young… How do you measure purpose in death? Death is one of nature’s faces, both senseless and magnificent, numinous and empty.
I guess the problem I have with this is that I feel all this political weighing of deaths fails to respect both death and life as deep mysteries. Death is arbitrary. We never know when it is going to come for us. It occurs without reference to the meaning in a person’s life; and so it’s hard for me to make sense of the attempt to assign meaning to death. It is as meaningful and as meaningless as the tides, the stars. As purposeful, or as empty of purpose, as birth. Our lives are measured out in ways we don’t understand. By some weaving of choice and fate, free will and the will of the Gods, our lives are spun out to a particular length, and then cut. We don’t really know anything about these things: how it is that we have life and how it is that we die, what becomes of the soul; what is the soul… they are mysteries we spend our whole lives contemplating just to begin to comprehend them. Yet we are ready to conclude we know the purpose and meaning of someone’s death, just because it happened in the context of a war?
If birth serves any purpose, it seems like death must also, and it seems clear that if these meanings exist they must be greater than what any person does with their life. We have a place in the ecology of souls that is not established, and cannot be negated, by virtue of our acts in life.
And who measures the sanctification of a death? I guess I feel that people's deaths belong to them as much as their lives do. We wouldn't decide on someone's behalf what the purpose of their life is, so why do we feel it's up to us to decide what purpose, if any, their death has? And likewise part of me feels that if we are going to evaluate someone's death for meaning it should be on their terms. How they would have felt about whether their death had purpose or not. If someone joined the Army in the belief that the sacrifice they might be making would serve a purpose, I find it hard to deny the value they have given to their own death. It seems like a disrespect to their individual humanity. Likewise it's insulting to claim a person died for, and use them to prop up, something that they themselves didn't believe in. I read today that Cindy Sheehan has decided her son Casey “did indeed die for nothing”, apparently because she feels her attempt to end the war has failed. And I wonder what Casey feels, in what place or no-place his soul might be.
I can’t help observing, if anyone is in a position to measure the value of deaths, it is the dead themselves. But few people seem interested in asking them.
It’s this uncomfortable question of whether a person's death is "in vain" or for a purpose. I find that when I hear people making statements about what someone has "died for," particularly war dead, about 90% of the time statements of that sort boil down to using the person's death to push a political point. Use of the dead in this way is extremely distasteful to me, and I dislike it the same way whether the dead are being used to support claims for and against wars.
I notice that we only talk about people's deaths being "for" something or being "senseless" or "in vain" when they die in certain contexts and are considered preventable. People who died in school shootings or the twin towers or in war have their deaths evaluated for meaning and purpose. We suggest that if certain endeavors succeed then they will not have died "in vain". When people die of AIDS or random urban violence or earthquakes, though all of those kinds of deaths are preventable to some degree, we don't seem to ask what they died for or expect their deaths to have a purpose. When people die in ordinary ways we don’t worry about what they died for.
This business of measuring the value of a person's death by whether it served a purpose causes me queasiness on a deep philosophical level. It feels wrong to me to evaluate death that way. I'm trying to work out why... I guess I feel like in some ways all deaths are senseless, and also all deaths are sacred. Is it more sacred to die of a curable disease, or random street violence, or to be cut down by a war you didn't want? Is it more senseless to die slowly in a hospital ward or to die violently in a war you volunteered for? How do you measure the sanctification of a death? Why do we think we need to measure this?
My grandmother died suddenly of congestive heart failure a couple of years ago. It was, in a way, pretty senseless. She’d had her heart examined recently and been determined to have a strong heart. If we’d expected her to die of something any time soon, it wouldn’t have been that. But nobody seemed concerned about what, if anything, she died for. I guess that means she died for nothing. Which also didn’t seem to pain anybody.
Likewise my uncle. He was cut down in the prime of life, as they say. Forty years old or so, with kids and a life he enjoyed, a partner he loved, dead of AIDS. His partner died soon after, and he wasn’t even forty yet. Everybody said it was tragic. But nobody asked what they died for. AIDS hasn’t been cured yet. Maybe they died in vain. When they find a cure, will we decide that all these vain deaths were purposeful after all, since they contributed to our understanding of the disease?
I suppose though that people would say war deaths are different. Because the death is the result of a campaign that is supposed to accomplish something. And everybody seems to want to take a side, measuring the value of deaths by their view of the noble or corrupt purposes of the war. If you think the war serves some great purpose, then the deaths are honorable sacrifices for a cause. Meaningful deaths. If you think the war is a senseless horror only serving to feed the greed of the military-industrial complex, then the deaths are for nothing, a wretched waste of human life. Meaningless deaths.
I think of the animal world. It is full of creatures dying suddenly before their time, just to feed another life. Which life is the one with value, the one that ends or the one that continues? A deer dies in the cougar’s jaws. Death in vain, because another deer will have to die tomorrow, and the day after, while the hunger of the predators never ends. Or: A deer’s life sacrificed - it will not have died in vain, because in death it gives life continuing to the cougar and its young… How do you measure purpose in death? Death is one of nature’s faces, both senseless and magnificent, numinous and empty.
I guess the problem I have with this is that I feel all this political weighing of deaths fails to respect both death and life as deep mysteries. Death is arbitrary. We never know when it is going to come for us. It occurs without reference to the meaning in a person’s life; and so it’s hard for me to make sense of the attempt to assign meaning to death. It is as meaningful and as meaningless as the tides, the stars. As purposeful, or as empty of purpose, as birth. Our lives are measured out in ways we don’t understand. By some weaving of choice and fate, free will and the will of the Gods, our lives are spun out to a particular length, and then cut. We don’t really know anything about these things: how it is that we have life and how it is that we die, what becomes of the soul; what is the soul… they are mysteries we spend our whole lives contemplating just to begin to comprehend them. Yet we are ready to conclude we know the purpose and meaning of someone’s death, just because it happened in the context of a war?
If birth serves any purpose, it seems like death must also, and it seems clear that if these meanings exist they must be greater than what any person does with their life. We have a place in the ecology of souls that is not established, and cannot be negated, by virtue of our acts in life.
And who measures the sanctification of a death? I guess I feel that people's deaths belong to them as much as their lives do. We wouldn't decide on someone's behalf what the purpose of their life is, so why do we feel it's up to us to decide what purpose, if any, their death has? And likewise part of me feels that if we are going to evaluate someone's death for meaning it should be on their terms. How they would have felt about whether their death had purpose or not. If someone joined the Army in the belief that the sacrifice they might be making would serve a purpose, I find it hard to deny the value they have given to their own death. It seems like a disrespect to their individual humanity. Likewise it's insulting to claim a person died for, and use them to prop up, something that they themselves didn't believe in. I read today that Cindy Sheehan has decided her son Casey “did indeed die for nothing”, apparently because she feels her attempt to end the war has failed. And I wonder what Casey feels, in what place or no-place his soul might be.
I can’t help observing, if anyone is in a position to measure the value of deaths, it is the dead themselves. But few people seem interested in asking them.