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NOTE 9. A Lesson in Mortality

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CHAPTER IX. A LESSON IN MORTALITY. JANUARY 19, 2005.

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A death in the family is always hard. But three in three weeks is especially difficult

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for children, even though it only involved pets. First, it was the green tree frog discovered

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at the local car repair shop and taken home to be cared for. Sticky lived two months,

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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Modernity still can't seem to come to terms with.

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Death impresses upon us the limits of technology and ideology. It comes in time no matter what

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we do. Prosperity has lengthened lifespans and science and entrepreneurship have made

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available amazing technologies that have forestalled and delayed it. Yet it must come. As Mises

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Mises put it, man lives in the shadow of death.

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Whatever he may achieve in the course of his pilgrimage, he must one day pass away and

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abandon all that he has built.

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Each instant can become his last.

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There is only one thing that is certain about the individual's future, death.

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Modernity has a problem intellectually processing the reality of death because we are so unwilling

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to Defer to the Implacable Constraints Imposed on Us Within the Material World.

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Whole ideologies have been concocted on the supposition that such constraints do not have

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to exist.

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That is the essence of socialism.

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It is the foundation of US imperialism too, with its cocky supposition that there is nothing

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force cannot accomplish, that there are no limits to the uses of power.

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To recognize the inevitability of death means confessing that there are limits to our power

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to manufacture a reality for ourselves. It is akin to admitting that certain fundamental

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facts of the world, like the ubiquity of scarcity, cannot be changed. Instead of attempting to

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change it, we must imagine social systems that come to terms with it. This is the core

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or claim of economic science, and it is also the very reason so many refuse to acknowledge

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its legitimacy or intellectual binding power.

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To discover the fountain of youth is a perpetual obsession, one that finds its fulfillment

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in the vitamin cults that promise immortality.

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We create government programs to pay for people to be kept alive forever on the assumption

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and that death is always and everywhere unwarranted and ought to be stopped.

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There is no such thing as natural death anymore, the very notion strikes us as a cop-out.

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Thus do we insist on knowing the cause of death, as if it only comes about through an

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exogenous intervention like hurricanes, traffic accidents, shootings and bombs.

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But even when a person dies of his own accord, we always want to know so we have something

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to blame.

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Heart failure?

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Well, he or she might have done a bit more exercise.

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Let this be a lesson.

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Cancer?

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It's probably due to smoking or perhaps second-hand smoke.

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Or maybe it was the carcinogens introduced by food manufacturers or factories.

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We don't want to admit that it was just time for a person to die.

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The denial of death's inevitability is especially strange since life itself serves up constant

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reminders of our physical limits.

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Sleep serves as a kind of metaphor for death.

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We can stay awake working and having fun up to 18 hours, even 24 or 36, but eventually

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we must bow to our natures and collapse in sleep.

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We must fall unconscious so that we can be revived to continue on with our life.

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Pills can delay the need for sleep, but cannot obliterate it.

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There are no substitutes for sleep, no food we can eat, no exercise we can undertake,

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no special words we can say.

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We can shake our fist in anger at our body's demand for sleep, but we must still give in.

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Sleep wins out over our individual wills every day of our lives, just as death wins out over

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our will to live forever.

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Our struggle against mortality can take productive forms, of course, as when we seek to leave

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great legacies in the material world.

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Wealth, art, children, literature, charity, change lives.

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We do all this in part because we seek ways to make our brief lives take on meaning beyond

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themselves, to be high-minded means to care not only about our own times, but also about

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those that follow.

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If we cannot live forever, we at least want our impact on this world to live longer than

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nature permits us to live.

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All these impulses appear to be unique to the human person, a reflection of our unique

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rationality, and, for Theus, the presence of a soul. Animals are another matter entirely.

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They avoid death by instinct. Yes, I realize the term explains nothing. But they do not

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seek immortality, or strive to leave legacies, or work to extend the lifespan of their species,

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or otherwise improve the lot of their fellows through innovation.

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They are what we would be if we lacked rationality and souls.

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When a pet dies, all children ask the question, will my pet go to heaven?

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I suppose the answer must be, not in the way we will find heaven.

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And yet, the children want hope that their pet will live again, and that they will see

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see them living again, and because no scripture seems to say that there cannot be, it is

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reasonable to say that animals can live eternally if God so desires it.

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There are many problems with this idea, of course, since orthodoxy says there is no flesh

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in heaven, but if animals have no souls, how, precisely, would they go there?

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In the moments following the death of a pet, such theological ramblings have no place.

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What the moment calls for is closure, to use an overused buzzword.

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And so we gather in silence and dig the hole in the ground, place the corpse in it and

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say some words.

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We gather to bury and pay tribute to Sticky, a tree frog who has been a good friend to

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us all.

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and Unassuming, he lived a good life, stirred our imagination, and delighted us with his antics.

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We will miss you, Sticky. We are grateful for the life you lived.

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If there were ever a tree frog that deserved to enter the gates of heaven, it was surely Sticky.

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Each child takes some dirt on the shovel and tosses it in the grave and it is patted down.

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We stand in silence for a few moments and walk away in the quiet evening.

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A similar scene repeated itself with the tiny chicks.

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We gather to bury these two tiny chicks. Though they were so young and live such short lives,

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we still gave them names. One-minute egg and two-minute egg. We will always remember them.

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Let us remember that we too will die one day, and when considering the whole length of eternity,

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our lives are not much longer than theirs.

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May our souls be as innocent as theirs when we breathe our last breath.

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By this time, the children were rather bored with funeral drama.

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They quickly scampered off to live full lives in the sunshine of day, deciding right then

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to think about death only when they must, but otherwise to live and love every breath,

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and so it should be.