On Andrew Sullivan’s blog there’s been a thread on this question. I’ll track back and read it from the beginning, but the question is interesting. In the Death and Immortality course we’ve touched on suicide here and there, mostly when considering whether death is a harm.

Warning! The discussion is on the creepy side. Below is a comment from a reader.

There is good evidence that Toxoplasma gondii — the parasite often found in cat feces that poses a risk to human fetuses — spreads by affecting the behavior of its rodent hosts. Infected rodents show decreased fear-responses to cats, which is thought to increase the likelihood that the cats will then eat the rodents, allowing the protozoa to complete the next phase of their reproductive cycle in a feline host.

Your reader wrote, “Can you image something like that in humans?  Scary.”  There is a growing body of evidence, which is somewhat controversial, that toxoplasmosis may induce behavioral alterations in infected humans as well.

Another epidemic it seems. This time of “genuine” suicides as opposed to “suicide bombers”.

“Young people see this as a way to give meaning to what seem like meaningless lives,” said Sudhir Kakar, a prominent psychoanalyst and novelist who has written extensively about mental health in India. “It is a way to become a hero, to take a stand.”

Suicide is generally considered taboo in Hinduism, the religion of most Indians, because it disrupts the cycle of reincarnation that is central to the soul’s progress, Mr. Kakar said.

But the willingness to die for a cause, as exemplified by Gandhi’s epic fasts during the struggle for independence, is seen as noble and worthy. Ancient warriors in Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India, would commit suicide if their commander was killed, Mr. Kakar said. And the practice of sati, or widow burning, although outlawed, remains a potent symbol of wifely devotion.

In modern, democratic India, however, such drastic measures seem like a bizarre and troubling throwback that has shattered many families.

Archaeologists discover 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife:

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor, the Egyptian antiquities authority said Monday.

A cartoon from The New Yorker. Hilarious as usual.

One of the questions I ask my Intro to Philosophy students is this: If you felt called to do something but knew it would cost you your life, would you not do it and live? Or would you do it and die?

The question is prompted by Socrates and Martin Luther King, Jr. Would you continue on in obedience (they felt) to God or would you hightail it outta there?

In our discussion of Socrates’ position on death it became clear to me that I usually think of death as pertaining to some physical end. Or I should say that the notion of death is conceptualized as something completely physical. There’s the soul, sure. But whatever happens on that side of the equation has nothing to do with death.

Now I’m not so sure. Maybe death or maybe what it means to die is also wrapped up in what it means for us to live.

It was Socrates’ inability or unwillingness to live without being free to think, free to question others and himself that led him to think that kind of unexamined life (Apology 38a) just isn’t worth a hill of beans. It isn’t worth living. Aristotle would agree, I believe, and would go so far as to say that it isn’t even a human life if you’re not thinking and reasoning. This doesn’t mean that thinking here is limited to philosophical thinking, at least on Aristotle’s view. But there seems little doubt that Socrates does mean a deep, reflective activity. A life without examining oneself isn’t much of a life.

Although we briefly discussed the issues of postmortem harm, the really interesting thing was this topsy-turvy feeling I had about what is a “death” and what does it really mean to “live”. Perhaps there still is a connection between how many tubes one wants poking out of one in order to call that situation “a life”. Are you really living anymore under certain medical interventions? Is being on a respirator “living”?

The flip side, though, is coming to a point where none of the physical stuff even comes close to “defining” what death is or what dying is. And that’s the surprising part. Dying, it seems, has everything to do with how one lives. What constitutes death has everything to do with what a person considers  “living”. And if that’s the case, then what we should be “worrying about” is “living” not “dying, death, and immortality”.

When we get to DZ Phillips, I think he’ll have something to say about this and help me out. From what I gather, his view about immortality is intimately connected to the nature of the life the person lived. How we conceive of a person in his “immortal” state is completely connected to the life that person led here in the nittygritty world.

Check out the “rockin’ casket

Before I left home today news of the plane crash was on. The early reports were that it didn’t appear to be a terrorist attack. But since the IRS had an office in the building I know many thought there was a connection.

Very sad. There’s the mental illness part, sure. But after reading his letter, you can sense the seriousness of his views.

My first entry.

We aren’t anywhere close to discussing the topic of grief and loss in the Philosophy of Religion class.

I hate to call it my class! Things have gone so well with Daigan assisting us in our conversations about death and dying. He’s a great facilitator. And it’s more than just Daigan’s experience that is making the class a success: the students are spectacular. It’s so great to have a group (probably close to 50) who are just right there with you. It makes a tremendous difference. Besides my seminars, this has been the most collaborative teaching experience I’ve ever had. Yes, I’m thrilled.

Now back to death! I haven’t experienced a lot of deaths. And I still have to say that I’m grateful for that. That statement alone indicates how uncomfortable I still am with death and dying. But what I do seem to have a lot of experience with is grief.

I suppose the good news is that the people I have loved beyond all measure, e.g., my grandmother, Ga-Ga, and my former teachers such as D.Z. Phillips, have led me to experience tons of grief and a deep feeling of loss.

It’s weird to say “they caused” this. But I’m sure you know what I mean. The absence, the void is still a kind of presence. Perhaps that’s what grief is. I’m reading Simone Weil. I come back to her again and again. This quote is from her Notebooks (Volume 1, pg. 28). It’s available on Google Books here.

To lose somebody: we suffer at the thought that the dead one, the absent one should have become something imaginary, something false.  But the longing we have for him is not imaginary.  We must go down into ourselves, where the desire which is not imaginary resides.  Hunger; we imagine different foods; but the hunger itself is real; we must seize hold of the hunger.

The loss of contact with reality–there lies evil, there lies sorrow. There are certain situations which bring about such a loss: deprivation, suffering. The remedy is to use the loss itself as an intermediary for attaining reality.  The presence of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is very real; it is henceforth his manner of appearing.

This last bit is so true. The absence is real. But that’s just how the ones for whom I grieve appear to me now. What this way of thinking about grief does, at least what my view on it today is, is that it really throws a monkey wrench into wanting to stop the grief or to blot out the feeling of absence. To say, “Oh, I wish Ga-Ga wouldn’t come to mind” or “I wish I’d stop thinking about D.Z. is to cut myself off from being able to experience them again.

I’m not sure if Weil means it like this, but in a way, the appearing is a form of “enjoyment”. I get to remember incidents that bring me joy. It brings the person back to me. That’s cool. But it certainly leaves the odd sense that his death and  his appearing are “all about me”. It’s almost as though a person’s death is something I do.

Whew! That didn’t hurt too much.

I died in a car crash two days ago
Was unrecognizable
When they pulled me from the gears
No one’s fault, no one’s bottle
No one’s teenage pride or throttle
Our innocence is all the worse for fears
The other walked away alive
Arms wrapped now around his wife

My lover sits, the silent eye
In a hurricane of warmth and word
My mother trembles with the sobs
Whose absence seems absurd
My sister shouts to let her see
Through the cloud of crowd surrounding me
My colleagues call for silence in my name

I died in a car crash three months ago
They burned me until I glowed
And crumbled to a fine gray sand
Now I am nothing, everywhere
Several breaths of strangers’ air
And all thoughts ever written in my hand
They plant my tree out in the yard
It grows but takes the winter hard

My lover holds a knife to wrist
Says tomorrow comes, hold on a while
My mother tosses in the sheets
And dreams me holding my own child
My sister plays our homemade tapes
Laughs as tears run down her face
My office door now wears a different name

I died in a car crash four years ago
My tree drinks melted snow
Just eight feet tall a pale and fragile thing
Bee stings beaches bright vacations
Sunburnt high-school graduations
A sparrow healing from a broken wing
This year a glimpse of second chances
Tiny apples on my tree’s branches

My lover hears the open wind
And crawls blinking into the sun
My mother leafs through photographs
And thinks “yes she was a lovely one”
My sister can’t decide her truth
Asks aloud what I might do
In a conference hall my brief efforts engraved

I died in a car crash
A lifetime ago it seems
A decade or two or three
They’ve come out with a new design
Bars and bags front and behind
My fate now an impossibility
Safely packaged hurtling down
The highway hardly make a sound

My lover very much alive
Arms wrapped now around his wife

Lyrics: Passage, Vienna Teng

I’m on Twitter. One person I followed very early was Howard Rheingold. He’s an amazing guy. We had just a short email correspondence when I asked if I could use some of his social media tips for my PHIL 525 a couple of years ago. Well, I had the sense that I was missing a lot of his Tweets. When I went through my Twitter list today, well, one thing led to another and I found Howard again. Not so great news: a cancer diagnosis.

But as the academic gods would have it, he started a blog about his cancer (scroll down to the end of the page to get the very first post of the blog). I haven’t read it in its entirety, but the beginning part tied in perfectly with the theme of this semester’s PHIL 500 class: Dying, Death, and Immortality. Here’s what struck me — it’s at the very top of this page:

And what about living?

Thinking about death led me fairly directly to thinking about living: “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” is always a good question, but it does come up with a certain vivacity in the afterglow of a cancer diagnosis. My immediate and overriding objective in life, of course, is getting well. But what of the big picture? I don’t feel like defining my existence strictly by my particular medical adventures (and thanks to P+T for “adventure, not predicament.”) Although I am committed to full participation in getting well, as long as I have time and strength for other pursuits, I’m going to pursue them. But first, I needed to rethink my life’s course. I had used about half the fifteen minutes I had left until my friend arrived (remember — my thoughts of life and death took place in my hotel room between the moment I read the pathology report in email and the arrival of my friend for what had been planned as a night of cuisine and conversation in Paris.)

As evidence that I’ve been thinking for some time about Kierkegaard’s prescription that “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced,” I doodled the image below at age 17 in 1964, during Professor Deegan’s religion course at Reed. He had Hodgkin’s disease and prohibited smoking in class, which irritated me at the time.

So, please visit his cancer blog as well as his other one. I’ve put off discussing the touchy-feely stuff I’ve been going through since the class started. Seeing his blog has given me a little courage to begin doing so.