Death, Mortality And Stories
How Stories Helped Me Make Peace With Mortality
Trigger warning: Mention of attempted suicide
Hello!!!
This is Joyie and welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet where I talk all things books!
I've been reading Anna Karenina this week, I'm at chapter fifty five and so far I'm really loving it. Have you been reading anything this week?
Yesterday on Substack, I read a post about Leo Tolstoy's Death Of Ivan Ilyich which I really loved. Because it talks about a topic which is very close to my heart– mortality. Today's letter is inspired from that post.
A few months back, I watched a clip of J.R.R. Tolkien at an interview. I'd quote one of his lines from there.
Stories – frankly, human stories are always about one thing – death. The inevitability of death.
Since watching that interview, I can't help noting that it's absolutely right. All the stories that left an impression on me, have in one way or another been about death.
When I was twenty two, one night my sister and I were talking about death. And she said, I wonder when we're older and most of our life is behind us, how we'd feel about death. That was the first time in my life that I took the time to actually stop and think about my impending death, the inevitability of it and the fact that every living moment, since I was born, one step at a time, I'm marching towards that end.
Of course even before that I'd known I'd die someday, I had even tried to kill myself before that, so it wasn't like it was news to me that people die.
But that realisation that it was going to happen to me one day, with or without my consent, that I didn't even get to have a consent in that matter, that I should just accept it, it shook me.
I spent the next few days, in a state of almost madness, to me the whole world and my whole life seemed pointless. I tried talking to others, but no-one seemed to get what I was going through. The response I got was, yes, we're going to die one day, we know that.
And to me that didn't make any sense. Because then, how could they keep living their life like nothing was wrong? I was terrified, and helpless and desperate and worst of all— isolated.
I learnt to live with that ultimately, everyone does. I learnt to live according to the fact that life was limited, and objectively pointless. Then in 2022, I read The Stranger by Albert Camus. There, when Meursault desperately searches for a way to escape his death sentence and eventually understands that it's impossible– reading that part, I felt understood for the first time. And in a way, it finally set me free.
I'm twenty nine now, and I still live what I call a very death-conscious life. It's not as bad as it was in my early twenties. But every decision I make in life, I make in light of the fact that I'm going to die someday. It gives me a strange sense of clarity.
I tried living ignoring death, it didn't work for me, so I've had to learn to embrace it. And nothing has helped me with that more than stories have.
Have you ever struggled with thoughts of mortality?
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That’s it for today, I'll be back in your inbox next week.
Until then,
Joyie 🌻
I just finished AK last week. so good! Speaking of mortality there’s a quote a like from Richard Dawkins about mortality that I want to share:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"
(Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow)
The Stranger is one of my favourite novels. Camus in general, doesn’t seem to miss for me. I also enjoy trying to keep a “memento mori” mentality because it keeps me more engaged with what I’m after in life; we don’t have forever, & staying present makes everything seem so much more satisfying & keeps gratitude at the forefront.