On Needing a Why Before We Die

"Before you die, you need a why. Not just about your death, mind you, which is really no big deal since death will happen to everyone, but about your life, which can only happen to you."

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Many of the greatest saints understood that mankind’s death sentence shows us how we ought to live our life.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

What do you say to someone who is about to die? Is there some advice you should pass along, a recommendation, say, on how best to spend his or her last day? And, by the way, that’s everyone, since nobody’s getting out of here alive. What about telling them not to schedule any other appointments that day? Who wants to be distracted at the very moment the Old Guy comes into the room to collect his fee, payment for which will be your very life? I mean, what else have you got to barter with?
And here’s another thing you need to consider, which is even more pressing than the need to clear the calendar for death to snatch you away. And that is to make perfectly sure, before you die, that you have a good reason why. Not just about your death, mind you, which is really no big deal since it will happen to everyone, but your life, which can only happen to you. In a word, you need to know why you’re living it.  

“A man does not die of love or his liver,” Miguel de Unamuno reminds us, “or even of old age; he dies of being a man.” If life is nothing other than a preparation for death, then how you choose to live that life will decisively determine the moment when you take leave of it. 

How often I think of that wonderful passage near the end of Death Comes for the Archbishop, one of the great novels of the last century by Willa Cather. Finding the old archbishop in bed, struck down by a sudden cold, the young priest looking after him tells him not to worry. “After all,” he says, “one does not die of a cold.” Hearing this, the archbishop smiles. “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.” 

We are all hurtling toward death, our brief lives hanging by a thread along the way; which, at any moment, will snap suddenly in two. So, do not become too accustomed to the arrangements on this side of the grave. Which of us knows but that this very day our soul may be required of us.

Live well, then, so that while you may not succeed in cheating death, inasmuch as Old Scratch will sooner or later have us all, at least you’ll not be checking out because you were never really alive in the first place. In other words, do not live like the poor wretches blown about in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; those desiccated souls inhabiting the “Unreal City,” where, “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,” he says, lifting a line out of Dante’s Inferno, “I had not thought death had undone so many.” 

Do not be among the lukewarm, I am saying, on whom the weight of divine judgment remorselessly falls. Those numberless souls who live with neither praise nor blame so that, in the end, having chosen never to choose, they find themselves consigned to the Anteroom of Hell where—oh, most exquisite of ironies!—even the devils disdain their company. Do not, says Dante, quoting Aristotle, “lose the good of the intellect,” which is what finally distinguishes us from the beasts.  

If it be death that awaits us, as Unamuno would say, “let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against our destiny, even though without hope of victory.” Or, to quote Nietzsche, who perhaps put it best of all: “Those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how.” A life without meaning, in other words, shorn of every trace as to why you’ve been allowed to live it in the first place, will never be enough to carry anyone across the threshold of death. And once you do cross that threshold, dragged kicking and screaming from the only world you know, the one to which you continue desperately to cling, you may very well find yourself in Hell. 

“When a man loses everything in life except life,” asks Viktor Frankl, for whom the crucible of a German concentration camp wonderfully clarified the question, “what will enable him to survive?” Only those who had a reason to live in the first place, a meaning on which to depend, were likely to survive, to keep hopelessness at bay.

When death beckons, which is that final cancellation we can no longer put off, there had better be something already in place, a higher vision to draw the soul, an ultimate horizon you aim to reach. Otherwise, what’s the point of having been alive at all? The meaning of life has got to be more than the brute acknowledgment that it ends.

When the Angel of Death comes to fetch you, in other words, it might be best if he didn’t find you merely “planting your cabbages,” which is how Montaigne envisioned his own end. Maybe finding you on your knees with arms outstretched, begging God to bend over your nothingness, would be a more prudent posture to take up, especially when asking God to deliver you from it. Let death find you reciting a line or two from one of the psalms, repeating again and again how, 

In my distress I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice.
The breakers of death surged round about me,
the destroying floods overwhelmed me;
The chords of the nether world enmeshed me,
the snares of death overtook me.
In my distress I called upon the Lord
and cried out to my God;
From his temple he heard my voice,  
and my cry to him reached his ears.

Wasn’t this the posture Christ Himself assumed in His own agony, indeed, the attitude He evinced from all eternity in His relation to the Father? That He should entrust Himself totally to the will of the Father, of the God who speaks His Name, who thereupon sends Him into the world to suffer and die in its stead and on its behalf? To whom does He surrender all that He is and has but to the Father, into whose arms He commends His spirit?  

Let us, especially in these high holy days, go and do likewise.