The first poem I ever learned by heart was Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.”

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

The poem is, I think, powerful and beautiful. Nevertheless, I am unable to muster the prerequisite attitude that would allow for me to “step through the door full of curiosity…” for I have been unable to shake the belief that bodily death means the end of my conscious existence.

I believe that personal identity is what we might call “diffuse.” What or who I am does not end or begin with my body. Who I am is interlaced through many “people.” But I don’t think there’s a soul or anything else that would carry on my conscious existence after bodily death. This has long troubled me. I enjoy existence and don’t like the idea of missing out on things. I know full well that if I cease to exist I won’t be around to bitch about it. But that is of little consolation.

My second year of grad school at the University of Iowa I became a TA, leading discussion sections every Friday for a Philosophy and Human Nature class. One thing we read early on was Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses what happens after bodily death, among other things. While I had often thought about and worried about death before, this sent me into the deepest depression I’d ever experienced. For the first time in my life I experienced a lack of meaning in daily existence. That lack is an odd thing because when it isn’t there, it’s not as though life feels positively imbued with meaning—the meaning only became obvious in its absence. It was as if things had lost all their color, but still more. It was disturbingly palpable.

The depression didn’t last too long, maybe a month or two. But one valuable thing came out of it. In the midst of loss of meaning, I realized one thing couldn’t be sucked dry of significance, namely, the love I had for my family and friends.

After reflecting on the thoughts that disturbed me the most, I came to another realization: there are two general ways you can view your life, from above or from within. From above, you view things as a kind of time line, one that is easy to survey very quickly and which has, all importantly, a time before and after your life. From within, there is no before or after and things don’t pass so quickly. The view from above is much like a movie montage of someone’s life or the quick facts, for example, of when Einstein was born, where he went to school, when he published his greatest discoveries, where he was when he was older and when he died: it has the appearance of moving so quickly. The view from within is from your own eyes, ears, etc. You might fast forward and skip around through memories, but it doesn’t lend itself so well to the shortening of the montage. The point is this: if you constantly look at your life from above, and if you have an issue with death, you will most likely make yourself miserable. Trying to keep the view from within can help mitigate the troubling aspects of death. It’s no cure-all, but I’ve found it to make a big difference.

Another thing I have found helpful is Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The last time I came back from Germany was in 2002. I was already afraid of flying (really crashing and dying) and 9/11 didn’t help. So I arranged to come back on a freighter. It would take two weeks, but I would have a spacious two-room cabin and lots of time to revise my MA thesis, read, etc. Before I left Bielefeld I bought the Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass. I tend to speak too quickly and occasionally stutter. One of the things I have done over the years to try to work on this is to read literature out loud, slowly. So I read “Song of Myself” out loud in my cabin. As I later recorded in my journal:

In reading, “Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month,…” I thought quickly of my birthday and about celebrating my life and then it occurred to me that I should just be happy with the time I have been allotted on the earth. There was a time before and will be a time after but I should not regret either. If only I could maintain this attitude!

“Attitude” isn’t really the right word, for what I felt was an intense sensation of peace throughout my being at the idea of my death. It was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience. For the first time ever I was completely fine with my future death. The feeling faded fairly quickly, though the general attitude did last for a few weeks.

I couldn’t say exactly what it was in “Song of Myself” that did it. I believe if I tried to make it concrete it would falsify it. I can say that it was the result of a slow build up that came from reading the poem out loud. The slow build was the slow shifting of perspective. And that, it seems to me, is all we can do in the face of death, unless we embrace the idea of continued existence.