The Myth of Tithonus

Dealing With My Son's Fear of Death

Last night my eight-year-old asked me, with tears in his eyes, if he was going to die. What could I tell him? “Of course you’re going to die!”

This is, thankfully, the one fate no one can escape, regardless of wealth. Death is many things, the great equalizer being one of them. I’ve gone to sleep more than once with a wide smile on my face thinking about how one day, remarkably terrible people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump will all cease to be—and, on top of that, will almost certainly be forgotten far sooner than we might think. My great-grandmother was a household name in 1950s America, but almost no one remembers her now.

AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION

One issue I have with death—the chess-playing skeleton with the scythe, the black cloak, and the hourglass—is the fact that he’s corrupt. He can be bribed, which means that the world’s worst people often use their mountains of stolen wealth to keep him at bay for far longer than they should. Death, instead, consumes the good and the poor—who are usually the same—long before their time. About a hundred thousand people die each day, and most of them never had more than a few pennies to rub between their fingers.

But why was my young son thinking such morbid thoughts? His question was prompted by a number of considerations. One, I think he wanted to stay awake, and saw existential dread as a peculiar means of keeping sleep, the little death, away. Two, he told me he had been thinking about my grandfather, who will be one hundred and two years old in a few months. The guy lives in a Victorian mansion in Upstate New York, he has a crew of nurses caring for him 24/7, and he is remarkably sweet and friendly, though forming new long-term memories seems difficult for him, and he often mixes up people’s identities when he talks with them. You must be wondering about what his secret is for living so long. The answer is simple: he’s rich!

BRIBES FOR DEATH

Earlier that day, I was teaching and studying in social studies class with my two sons. (Yes, we are still doing Paulo Freire commie homeschool because the pandemic (now tripledemic, soon to be octo-demic) is far from over.)

During class—speaking of class—my eight-year-old asked another great question: “What class does your grandfather belong to?”

I told him that when my grandfather was younger, he was a surgeon who owned his medical practice, complete with nurses and secretaries. He directly exploited workers, but also did a great deal of wage labor himself—making him petite bourgeois. At the same time, he had married the daughter of a TV and radio star, and when he retired in the 1980s he invested their extensive savings in the stock market. I’m not sure how rich he is now, but he must be worth many millions of dollars. At this point it’s been decades since he’s done any wage labor, which makes him haute bourgeois. All of his wealth now comes from the Earth and its exploited workers, without which the numbers in his stock market portfolio would be meaningless.

This is how he has managed to bribe death for so long. Other factors may be at play, but this is by far the most important one.

And actually, my grandfather is probably closer to death than any of us—although I could easily die in a car crash today, who knows—but this fact doesn’t seem to bother him. Besides, who can say? Knock on wood, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he stuck around for decades more, and outlived us all. Live too long, as Tithonus teaches us, and you’ll eventually get so old that you turn into a cicada.

ANGKOR AND DANTE

Regardless, everyone must have worried about dying at some point. These existential crises seem to happen when we are alone at bedtime, if we—by some miracle—don’t have much else to worry about. It’s largely a bourgeois concern; workers are usually too busy paying the bills to worry about death—a fearful time when people are no longer able to consume. And yet often enough, the apparent fact that our existence will one day end terrifies all kinds of people, my son included.

Once, when I was randomly in Angkor Wat, I saw a thousand-year-old relief displaying one medieval Cambodian perspective on the afterlife. It depicted hell in stunning detail, featuring sinners getting sawed in half by demons, among other gruesome spectacles. As for heaven, however, the details were lacking. Paradise, for the builders of Angkor Wat—the Jayavarmans and the Suryavarmans and their many workers—seemed to consist of a bunch of plain-looking rooms where you mostly just sat on the floor in the company of beautiful buxom apsaras.

Dante had similar problems. Nobody reads his Purgatorio or Paradiso, though anyone who picks up his Inferno is often surprised to find that—despite the fact that almost nothing written during the Middle Ages makes for fun reading today—it is remarkably entertaining, for hell, as we swiftly learn, is full of Italians.

MORTALITY COPE

In response to my eight-year-old’s tears, my eleven-year-old and I hugged and kissed him and did our best to calm him down. (At the time, my spouse was at work.) I told my younger son—as he cried for his mortality—about Lucretius’s approach to this problem. “You didn’t mind nonexistence before you were born—the billions of years which passed when you were not—so why do you think you’ll mind after you’re dead?”

My boy kept crying.

Next, I tried the dialectical approach. “When you die, you cease to sense anything, you cease to think, and if you can’t think or sense, how can you know that you’re dead?”

The tears continued to flow.

I then adopted a mystical perspective. “Science is all about discovering that the world is a lot weirder than it seems at first glance. We don’t actually know for certain what happens after death. And so who can say? Maybe there is an afterlife!”

I then added that, if this is actually the case, we will probably all end up in hell, since my family is not religious and we in fact generally mock religion whenever the topic is brought up. I was reminded of an American folk tale I’d read about a prank pulled on a guy who fell asleep on top of some hay. A few pranksters found him and decided to set the hay on fire, and when the guy woke up surrounded by smoke and flames, he exclaimed: “Aw, shit! I knew it!”

None of this had the slightest positive effect on my boy. The tears continued to flow.

I then threw in a bit I’ve learned from Thomas Aquinas—about how everything that exists was caused by something else. Nothing stands apart, nothing just is, even though, conversely—from a Buddhist or Taoist perspective—everything just is, and you should chill out and relax or else you’ll turn into an intestinal worm in your next life.

What the Buddha never told you, though, was the secret about intestinal worms: they love being themselves. Every moment of existence for every intestinal worm is joyous. If you could translate their thoughts into English, they would say only this, over and over again: “Haha, fuck yes, this is awesome, woohoo!”

I know this because I myself was an especially poorly behaved intestinal worm in my last life, which is why I was punished by the karma / dharma wheel or whatever and transformed into a human in this life.

HEGEL AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION

But none of that worked, either. So then I hit my son with some Hegel. In this philosopher’s worldview—which is connected to Aquinas—everything is defined by everything else. When you look up a word in a dictionary, how do you define it? With other words. Always. The same goes for every person, animal, physical object, or idea. They are all defined in terms of each other. Existence is a web of connections, and all of them are constantly moving, changing, and contradicting themselves and each other. Or, as Shelley wrote:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever

From creation to decay,

Like the bubbles on a river

Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

According to Hegel—or one reading of Hegel—the universe itself is a creation, which means that it must have had a creator. The universe cannot exist without god, just as god cannot exist without the universe, because each defines the other. The universe, in short, is basically a mirror for god, a way for god to discover himself. The same goes for all of god’s creations, who are each of us on a quest to find that original divine spark within ourselves.

Even squirrels?

Even squirrels.

Of course, the incredibly obvious problem with this approach is—where did god come from? The answer is probably dialectical and contradictory. He/She/They/It always existed, has never come into existence, was created at a specific time and place, and is the creator—all at once—or something. I don’t know. Ever-trustworthy experts tell us that the universe might have sprung from another universe, or a multiverse—it might be a white hole—but that doesn’t actually answer the question. All it does—to borrow an extremely tired metaphor that enrages me whenever I hear it—is kick the can down the road.

Perhaps predictably, Hegel did not calm my son down. By then the poor boy was crying in bed.

ENTER COMMUNISM

At this point I attempted the next logical approach after Hegel: Marx.

“In order to be immortal,” I told my son, “you have to make the biggest positive difference possible. Change the world for the better, help the world’s workers destroy capitalism before it destroys us, and no one will ever forget you. That’s a kind of mortality, isn’t it?”

Along these lines, I sometimes think about how the William Shakespeare we know today is totally different and almost divine in comparison to Shakespeare the man of flesh and blood—not unlike comparing God the Father to the historical Jesus.

But as you might have guessed by now, this approach also did not calm my son down.

FLAWLESS VICTORY

My last method of solving the problem of my son’s existential crisis was this: I gave him a book and told him to distract himself with it. (My kids are currently into Big Nate and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, so it was probably one of those books, I don’t remember.) And as I left his room, I asked him to please chill out so that I didn’t have to come back again.

To my surprise, this approach worked. The crying stopped. My younger son read for a bit, fell asleep, and was back to his ordinary self the next day, which is today, as a matter of fact. Thankfully he hasn’t said a word about death so far, and I’m afraid to bring the subject back up with him, for fear of upsetting him again.