Society

Reckoning with a collective near-death experience

What if I succumb to the virus and the year 2020 marks the end? What if this is it?

May 09, 2020
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We are all going to die. Not today, of course, with any luck, or even in the coming days. But one day. It’s the only thing we know for sure about our lives. They are finite. It will end.

We know this. And yet, somehow, we don’t—or at least we carry on as if we don’t. It’s understandable. If you really lived each day as though it were your last you’d probably run up a scary credit card bill and regularly wake up with an appalling hangover: like death, but warmed up. Instead we plough on, knowing at the back of our minds what lies in store, yet hoping that this moment might be put off indefinitely.

The cognitive dissonance starts very young. “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?” muses Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. “There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on for ever. It must have been shattering—stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality.”

There’s no need to intuit mortality at the moment. It is all around us in dreadful numbers. Lockdown imposes, in the worst cases, a kind of living death for some—isolated, shut in, with few attractive options available.

Most of the time we try not to think about death—our own or anybody else’s. Why would you? There are nicer things to think about. “Death, like the sun, cannot be stared at,” as La Rochefoucauld said. But this current pause in our lives, this enforced hiatus, makes us consider the end. What if we succumbed to the virus and the year 2020 marked the closing of the brackets opened up by our date of birth? What if this is it?

In his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey urged us to (habit number two) “begin with the end in mind,” in other words to adopt a purposeful approach to life. He uses a startling device to encourage us to do so. Imagine you are attending a funeral, he says. You get to the church, admire the flower arrangements, approach the open coffin, look in… and see your own dead body lying there.

At the service four eulogies will be spoken, one by a member of your family, one by a friend, another by a work colleague, and lastly one by a member of the community where you live. What do you want them to say, Covey asks. And what sort of life will you lead from now on to try and ensure that those words will be spoken when you do finally die?

I wonder if the unease, confusion and anxiety felt by some in these days of lockdown might have something to do with this sort of challenge—the sense that we should be ready to account for our lives, what we have done, what we still have to do. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” says Richard II in his captivity. Are some of us feeling a similar (if less kingly) sense of despair?

I asked Gianpiero Petriglieri, professor at the Insead business school in France (but also a former psychiatrist and psychotherapist) whether he felt people are currently having a near-death experience.

“We are all near death, besieged by deaths of all sorts, and with nowhere to run,” he told me. “Even if you have not lost a loved one, you have not been ill or lost your job, you have lost the life you knew, who knows for how long. That kind of loss can provoke as much disorientation, anger, and despair as grieving does.

“It affects us physically and psychologically in the same way, making us exhausted and numb—or hyperactive and numb—and unsure where to turn to for help. But near-death experiences can also, in time and with some help, make us feel more resolute, more compassionate, more alive,” he added.

Sally Maitlis, a professor in organisational behaviour at Saïd Business School, Oxford, also finds grounds for optimism instead of despair in the current lockdown. “I see it more as a disruption or interruption of our manic and often mindless ways of living and working,” she says. “For many of us, the pandemic has jammed the brakes on just about everything. So suddenly we can look up and see how we have been living and feel what it’s like to stop. And lots of people don’t want to go back to how it was before. In this sense I think we have the chance to make a change, if we dare—perhaps the kind of chance Covey tries to give us by writing the eulogy before we die? But I don’t think it comes from feeling we have wasted our lives or not achieved what matters; it seems more that we are questioning the way we’ve been living than regretting what we’ve done.”

Perhaps it is the nagging questions that tire us out, rather than simple anxiety or despair. And maybe the hard work our subconsciouses are doing explains the rash of deep and weird dreams that some report having, or the waves of nostalgia washing over others. Maybe it would be better to try and look on the bright side of life, and death.

Before he is killed, Richard II seems almost to renounce his former majesty and grandeur:

“For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends…”

When all this is over it will be time to sit down with our friends again, break bread, drink, and be “more resolute, more compassionate, more alive.”