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A Life Less Painful by Finn Janning My brother died the third of October, 1993. Or maybe he died the day after, on the fourth of October. Does the date really matter? Death is death. It awaits us all. My brother, whose name was Jesper, died at the age of twenty-six, someday in October, somewhere in Denmark. * * * The phone is ringing—three times before my mother picks it up. “NIF chapter house. It’s Conni,” my mother says. “…” “NO, no, it’s not true. It can’t be true,” she says. Intuitively, I know that my brother is dead. My mother doesn’t scream, but her voice is different. Strange. Unfamiliar. It fits an improper situation. Should she sound differently? Could any other words match what she just heard? The sound of her voice scares me. No. The negation hangs silently in the air between us. No. Everything but this “no” falls to the ground. I fall. I can’t remember how; it’s as if the fall is edited away. A part of me remains sitting there on the kitchen floor next to the phone; a part of me becomes a sculptural observer of my own life. Another part of me gets up and moves on. From that moment, I become someone else. * * * Three hours later, I am standing in front of the mortuary at the main hospital in Copenhagen. I sway like a boat where the anchor has not reached anything firm. The waiting room is leaking. Something seeps through from nowhere. Liquid. It picks at and scratches my skin. It feels chilly. Freezing, even. It’s not only entering the room; I feel invaded. I am just a room being moved. I begin to shake. Snap for my breath. There is no other way. I open the door. Automatically, my jaw falls and leaves my mouth open. No longer capable of controlling my muscles, I walk softly, like a ninja. I’m alone with death. It’s not true. It can’t be true. I close my mouth and notice the artificial taste of perfumed flowers. It seems unnatural. Ill-timed. I take in the room, its whiteness that has never known dirt. The clinical cleanness kills all forms of life. Death ends in a dead room. And yet, perhaps as compensation, on the table next to the door is a bouquet of flowers. Besides the flowers is the bed where my brother lies, the only things in this white room flowers and Jesper. I know that he is there. I can sense his presence. Yet, I begin to study the bucket, the apparent contrast between life and death. I postpone my meeting with death for a while, wondering: What do the flowers and my dead brother have in common? The bouquet consists of fresh yellow flowers filled with green leaves. In the center of it is a big heart-shaped leaf. The heart sticks up a little from the yellow and greenish background. The vase is made of steel. I don’t know the name of the flowers; I just look at them and then stare before I notice a greasy fingerprint on the steel surface. Jesper? I repeat the colors of the flowers as a way of getting a foothold. I am standing on a fragile ground of green, yellow, and red. Simple as traffic lights: the green birth that brings hope toward the red death that stops all hope. But what about yellow, this color in between, the pause or waiting, waiting for death, or does yellow not illustrate that being alive is both living and dying in one? A few hours earlier, my mother spoke the definitive words: “Jesper is dead.” Actually, he was already dead when he died in my mother’s and my world; he was dead in our world before we passed on the news to my father and sister. Perhaps green and red are merely illusions, since everything is in a constant state of emerging? I become aware there, standing next to my brother’s corpse, that he died before me knowing it. How long had I lived a lie? Jesper lies on the bed. It’s not death lying there. Death is somewhere else. Life might be absent, but as far as I can see, he could be sleeping. Yet, there are no sounds, no tiny moments. Dead people don’t sleep. They do nothing. Nothing. There are no standards for death; it is placed outside of language. Language arrives with life and leaves when it is all over. I can’t say anything. And yet, this is what I want to do. I want to converse with death because it addressed me. Can I accept it? Match it? Give death its own right to express its nothingness? While I touch his face for the last time, I realize I must live double; everything is up to me now. His death awakens me, not on a higher level of illumination—I’m not sitting under the Bodhi tree—but on a rather quite banal one. I become conscious that I am alive. It’s only me breathing. I am alive. I breathe. I cry. * * * We are twenty or so persons waiting outside the church. Someone is saying, “No parents should have to bury their kids. It’s unnatural. It’s unnatural.” My mother has told the priest that she doesn’t want a long speech. Not that she wishes the ceremony to be over. On the contrary, she just can’t bear listening to anything. It is as if silence brings her closer to the nothingness of death. Closer to Jesper. Entering the church, on this particular day, I notice things that I have neglected during earlier visits to churches. The whole architecture is a violation. At the very end, right underneath the forced embracement of Jesus, is the coffin. It’s covered in flowers and banners that says, “Rest in peace” and “Thanks for everything.” How can a life end in a little box? Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” The mind and our spirit are embodied in the sense that they exist within the body. My body begins to shake. There is no difference between mind and body, even between soul and body. Standing there in the church, I feel like a hunter looking for a prey to whom I can pass on my impotence. I am wounded. Worse: I am bitter and full of helplessness. I am angry and frustrated. “Jesper doesn’t belong here,” I say to my mother. “Shh,” she says. “Is he inside that coffin?” “Yes.” She takes my hand. “… it …” As promised, the priest holds a short ceremony. I can’t hear him. It’s as if my body is without any functional organs. He looks friendly, though. When the words are done with, six robotic men arrive. Without any facial expression, they lift up the coffin and carry Jesper away. Just as they pass the bench where we are sitting, I feel how the pressure from the coffin squeezes us together. We all seem to shake in some spastic movement. “No,” says my mother. I hold her close. I am afraid; her “no” frightens me. This tone. It’s so definitive. My tongue is swollen; I feel like I am suffocating. I swallow a glass of mouth water. “NO. MY SON.” This time, she screams. She reaches over me as if to grab the coffin that is almost at the end of the aisle. Pull him back to life. I can feel her pain. Nothing is private. Is this proof that Ludwig Wittgenstein was right when he said that a private language, only understandable for a single individual, was meaningless? I believe so, although it’s not the same as reducing the world to language. My mother’s scream is grating my heart as if it was a piece of Parmesan cheese. Slices of red cover the floor. Outside the church, I see the faceless men stuff my brother’s coffin inside a waiting car. They close the door. Start the engine. They move, and I fall. My body can’t carry any more. Someone behind me helps me to my feet. Just as the car turns left and leaves with my brother forever, I am about to fall again. Only this time, a strong hand grabs me under my shoulder. I don’t turn around. Don’t want to know who won’t allow me to fall. Why must I not fall? * * * I thought of that question for some years: Why must I not fall? Then I decided it was a philosophical question, nothing to do with gravity or weak muscles. Philosophical wisdom is related to self-knowledge. It is when you lack it that you fall. “Know yourself” is one of Ancient Greek philosophy’s most-known aphorisms. It was carved into the entrance of the Apollo Temple in Delphi. And it was this that Socrates activated when he walked around the square of Athens, turning each one of his listeners toward himself or herself. He taught them to take care of themselves. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Socrates operated not just with one aphorism but two: “Know yourself” and “Take care of yourself.” The better you can take care of yourself, the better you know yourself. And vice versa: the better you know yourself, the better you can take care of yourself. They are intimately connected. Which came first is like answering which came first: The chicken or the egg? Philosophical wisdom doesn’t come from references, but from your own way of living, thinking, and feeling. Philosophy is an open invitation to the ongoing struggle between self-deception and self-insight or knowledge. No one becomes wiser without experiences, that is, without meeting and facing other ideas, thoughts, and conceptions: philosophizing. Socrates, the wisest man in Ancient Greece, had self-insight. He knew what he didn’t yet know. Most of us hardly know what we don’t know. I was not allowed to fall because someone full of good intentions didn’t want me to suffer. That’s an illusion. Life is painful. There is no cavalry coming to save us. We all have to philosophize for ourselves—with a little help from our wise friends. I have come to realize that time doesn’t heal all wounds. Saying so is impotent. But philosophy can make life less painful as you endure taking out the stitches of a wound. |
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