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Acceptance of Death

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Carl Sandburg: “I have had a good life of it so I am ready to go with you, Mister Death. I remember when I was a little girl there was a time I was afraid of you and I cried about it. That was because I was a sad little fool and didn’t know then that I would have many good years of life. You stayed away from me many years, Mister Death, and you can now give me your kiss and I will go with you saying thank you Mister Death.”

In the Kaderli letters, the way in which many writers address death is to accept its reality and to offer a solution to the fear of death, as well as a reason to live. As Moss Hart writes: “Death is part of it, but a life fully lived is a rich reward.” Life is something to be experienced, and this experience outweighs the drawbacks of dying, according to Moss Hart and other writers. By experiencing a “fully lived” life, a person can seize the benefits of life such that death is a satisfactory cost. By the end of a “good life”, death is not even a setback; the experiences have been had and life has been lived. Death is merely the period at the end of a story that details all the adventures and moments someone experienced. This perspective on the place of death in the overall trajectory of our lives is similar to what Martha Nussbaum calls “The Banquet Argument” of Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher. In her paper, "Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature," she writes, “…It urges us to realize that life is like a banquet: it has a structure, in time, that reaches a natural and appropriate termination; its value cannot be prolonged far beyond that, without spoiling the value that preceded.” 

A proponent of this perspective that had a considerable impact on Mrs. Kaderli was Carl Sandburg, a famed poet. Expecting an enclosure simply taken from one of his past speeches or books, Mrs. Kaderli was shocked to find a deeply personal letter to her daughter. By the end of reading it, she was openly weeping. Carl Sandburg’s message in his letter reflects a mindset that is seen in many of his poems regarding death. The message is in two parts: a person who lives their life to the fullest and tries to achieve happiness will not fear death, and that death can be easy and kind after a long life lived.

Carl Sandburg writes in his response to Mrs. Kaderli’s daughter concerning her fear of death: “Because you don’t know the chances are you will be alive and having fun next year and the year after that and then maybe fifty years from now, sixty or seventy years from now you can be alive and having fun and work and love and chums and friends and a thousand interesting days and nights when you are thankful to be alive. Of course, death will come to you but not tonight nor tomorrow night nor next week nor next month nor next year and you may go on living fifty, sixty, seventy, even maybe eighty years.” This passage shows a common understanding of mortality; if one lives a life they will not regret, then they can go forward into a peaceful death without fears or worries.

Worth further analyzing from a philosophical viewpoint is the picture of “a good life” that Carl Sandburg describes. His imaginings include “fun and work and love and chums and friends.” This message can be seen in a poem written by Carl Sandburg, titled “Happiness”:

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell

me what is happiness.

And I went to famous executives who boss the work of

thousands of men.

They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though

I was trying to fool with them

And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along

the Desplaines river

And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with

their women and children and a keg of beer and an

accordion.

While the subject matter of this poem is not death, an understanding of the meaning of life is shown, and this meaning of life ties into Carl Sandburg’s interpretation of death. The poem shows happiness as something created organically with family and friends, and as something that is built upon experiences of living. The letter from Carl Sandburg to Mrs. Kaderli follows this same interpretation of life, except taking a view from the end of life. Nussbaum supports Carl Sandburg’s vision of a good life, stating that “The ways of power, reputation, and money are among the most prudentially unsound - in that they base the effort of human striving and imagining on goods that are both external and unstable” (Nussbaum, 1989). By this, she means that true happiness and satisfaction are not to be found in these objects that are devoid of what we truly value, which is love, friendship, artistic creation, and the pursuit of knowledge, among others. Striving for these goods is like trying to fill an empty sieve, and the pursuit of these activities will not grant us closure in death.

Furthermore, implicit in Carl Sandburg’s response is that death is most welcome after a long life lived, not one prematurely cut off by death. He says, “I have had a good life of it so I am ready to go with you, Mister Death. I remember when I was a little girl there was a time I was afraid of you and I cried about it. That was because I was a sad little fool and didn’t know then that I would have many good years of life. You stayed away from me many years, Mister Death, and you can now give me your kiss and I will go with you saying thank you Mister Death.” The rhetoric towards death is strongly one of peace and ease, even generosity on the part of death, using phrases such as the endearing “thank you Mister Death,” and “you can give me your kiss” to signify taking one’s final breath. We can return to the Banquet Argument to see once again why one might have such an attitude only after a long, fulfilling life, for at any point prior, it may feel like death is unjustified in taking one’s life away. For example, at the banquet of life, consider death arriving after only finishing the appetizer. The value of the appetizer is only in its situation prior to the main course, as a preparatory meal. But in death, this main course does not come, rendering the appetizerthe plans, hopes, and desires for a future that will not comeless valuable than it was. We are only ready to go into the arms of death after we have tasted the sweetness and finality of dessert, of a long life filled with love, happiness, and meaning; not before, and not too long after.

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Julian Huxley: “Everybody must be prepared for the fact that death is inevitable, and is the condition of the renewal of life. Your little girl would not be alive if her ancestors had not died.”

If the appeal to satiety in life wasn’t enough to accept a timely death, still other authors appealed to a sense of rationality, natural order, and consideration of fellow human beings. Nussbaum terms this “the Population Argument,” and Julian Huxley, in his letter to Mrs. Kaderli, best encapsulates this perspective. He writes, “everybody must be prepared for the fact that death is inevitable, and is the condition of the renewal of life. Your little girl would not be alive if her ancestors had not died.” In this view, death is simply required in order for life to go on, for others to be born and for younger generations to go on living in a world with enough resources. “Clinging to life” (beyond a reasonable limit) would be selfish for the rest of humanity, and grind nature to a halt (Nussbaum, 1989). This argument is powerful because it does not tell one that their fear of death is invalid, or that death can’t sometimes be untimely or bad, but rather it appeals to a deeper sense of love for humanity and the inner workings of nature as a whole. Nussbaum writes, “It reminds us that this loss is someone else's good, that what you wish most to avoid is necessary and good for unborn others, that nature's structure contains an always tragic tension between the desires of the part and the requirements of the whole” (Nussbaum, 1989).

Putting Sandburg and Huxley in conversation with each other, Sandburg’s popular artistic embrace of the good life and rejection of puritanical deferrals of pleasure is not necessarily at odds with Huxley’s more evolutionary scientific approach. However, a professed eugenicist, Huxley’s preoccupation with population versus resources operates according to a logic of sacrifice that is much closer to the puritanism that Sandburg rejects, and indeed, Huxley’s own eugenicist leanings show that he was all too willing to sacrifice what he saw as lesser humans for the good of those whom he believed were capable of leading lives worth living. This should prompt us to ask, regarding ethical relations towards death, who is deciding what the good life and the good death are, and for whom?