My last post discussed an essay by the philosopher David Rönnegard, who has stage 4 lung cancer. That essay led me to another of his essays, “The Party Without Me,” in which he shared more thoughts on how secularists might cope with death.
Rönnegard begins, “You don’t know me. To most of you, my disappearance will make no difference. That is something we have in common. My disappearance will make no difference to me either: once my consciousness is extinguished I will be as unaware of my existence as you are.”

Rönnegard states that he isn’t looking for sympathy; instead, he is trying to reflect upon how “to find meaning in the face of such adversity.” He reiterates his claim that  “consolation in the face of death is upheld by leaving memories behind through the lives we touch.” And, although he doesn’t fear death, he still doesn’t want to die. Why? As he says, “It’s not that the party is going to end, it’s that we must leave and the party will go on without us.”¹ (Tragically, for billions of people, life isn’t a party.) But surely we don’t wish that everyone else goes with us, “we must leave unaccompanied, and in the process briefly turn the party into a wake … [those] who stay behind are affected more than the departed.”

As for the dying, he quotes Robert Nozick, “How unwilling someone is to die should depend, I think, upon what he has left undone, and also upon his capacity to do things.” Here, Rönnegard reiterates what he stated in his previous essay, that we can find consolation in the footprints left behind. But “Our life party will end in tears if we do not feel it is time to go.”

One of the benefits of being forewarned of your death is “This buys time to put your house in order and say farewell to those you love. We all know that our time is finite, but we tend to live as if it isn’t. As hard as it is to confront, terminal disease allows the afflicted to live life in full realization of its finitude. There is no ‘later’ for which to put off those difficult gestures we otherwise never get around to doing.”

Of course, the world will go on mostly unchanged, except for the few who know us. “But this consolation conceals a paradox. We want those we love to remember us, and if we are really honest, we want them to be saddened by our absence. How can we want to be the cause of sadness for our loved ones?”

Rönnegard resolves this paradox as follows,

We don’t want our loved ones to be unhappy per se. What we want is for the feeling of love to be mutual, and sadness is the unavoidable consequence of missing someone who has touched our lives deeply. One might say that the proof of the loving is in the dying.

Without religious consolation, “we must face our loss head on.” And a consolation for the dying “is that we know that those who stay behind “will through their love grieve and remember us.” Rönnegard concludes,

Nevertheless, the consolation brought by the lives we touch is a double-edged sword. And the other edge is directly related to the fact that we have to leave. The most pertinent example is the children we bring into this world. It can be incredibly consoling to know that ‘a part of us’ lives on – that in a certain sense the world is not entirely without us. But it is also devastating to realize that we will not get to see how the lives we touch unfold. We leave a footprint, but won’t bear witness to the footsteps that follow.

The world without us is only made different by what we leave behind. We are only guests at this party, but should aim to leave it better for us having been there.

I thank Professor Rönnegard for sharing his thoughts. Perhaps the consolation he writes of is the best a secularist can do.

_______________________________________________________

1. The theme of Professor Rönnegard’s essay reminds me of similar sentiments expressed by the philosopher James Rachels. In the final chapter of his book, Problems from Philosophy, when contemplating his impending death, he wrote,
   “After I die, human history will continue, but I won’t get to be part of it. I will see no more movies, read no more books, make no more friends, and take no more trips. If my wife survives me, I will not get to be with her. I will not know my grandchildren’s children. New inventions will appear, and new discoveries will be made about the universe, but I won’t ever know what they are. New music will be composed, but I won’t hear it. Perhaps we will make contact with intelligent beings from other worlds, but I won’t know about it. That is why I don’t want to die, and Epicurus’ argument is beside the point.”

Liked it? Take a second to support Dr John Messerly on Patreon!