Denying Death (Non-Fiction): Gerald Frape (VTAC 44050789 G)
Woody Allen once joked that he wasn’t afraid of death – he just didn’t want to be there when it happened. Preempting Woody by 2300 years, Greek philosopher Epicurus assured us that where death is, we’re not.
The thought of dying terrifies most people. Sigmund Freud – who persuaded his own doctor to assist in his death with a massive dose of morphine – called the fear of death thanatophobia (from the Greek figure of death, Thanatos). Freud believed that in the unconscious each of us was convinced of our immortality.
Later, Ernst Becker, in his book Denial of Death, argued that much of people’s daily behaviour was aimed at staving off death anxiety. Craving escape from this existential dread we invent varieties of afterlives.
Religion bypasses death anxiety, promising eternal life in glittering heavens or porno hells.
Heaven is perfect one day; perfect the next. Eat all the chocolate you like sans pimples and never run into your ex at the supermarket. Downstairs, infidels and heathens are cast into everlasting fires of skin-stripping damnation and tasteless gothic art direction.
Even non-believers aren’t immune.
Although we intuitively know we’re going to die, we still grasp at the eternalism offered by modern materialism’s cryogenic credit card. Advertising commodifies society’s denial of death, imagining us as Peter Pans and Tinkerbelles skating on the thin ice of counterfeit immortality.
Then, when it comes, we’re worried about the ‘quality’ of death. Will it be ‘a good death’?
But good is not good enough. We demand the perfect death, the perfect marriage and the perfect break-up.
The perfect death is wish fulfillment. Death has a will of its own. It waltzes in, with or without reason, arriving too soon, or too late, stealing your loved one away when – after sitting up all night – you leave the room for a pee.
In the existential share house, birth rents the curtain into the blinding light. Death draws the blind, coming and going as it pleases.