From time immemorial death has been a unique subject for philosophical meditation. The beginnings of philosophy itself are said to be a sense of wonder, but the claim has always been shared by reflection on death.

This, for example, is how Epictetus, the ancient philosopher, saw it: “Let others study cases at law, let others practice recitations and syllogisms. You learn how to die.”

Implied here is an “unlearned” way of approaching death, as opposed to a way of reflective awareness. Death is clearly too important for Epictetus, to be consigned to being just a physiological process that brings an end to life.

Reflection about death, however, is always something situated. The context influences the views and the going assumptions about the reality. Looking at some broad periods of history, we see, for instance, that just prior to the beginning of the Christian era, when ancient culture seemed worn out, the general context was one of uncertainty.

With their inheritance in decay, individuals were thrown back in isolation on themselves. Before death, they turned to mystery cults (secret rites promising rebirth), stoicism (for the strength to endure), and epicureanism (refuge in modest pleasures and tranquillity).

The Middle Ages, on the other hand, generated the danse macabre, an allegory combining two motifs, the universality of death and a last fling at merriment. The common depiction of the allegory was a personified death leading a dancing line of skeletons – typically an emperor or king, a pope, a young man, and a beautiful girl - to the grave.

It was a reminder to all of the fragility of life and the vanity of all earthly status. It also reflected the preoccupation with death in the wake of the Black Death, a plague that decimated between one and two thirds of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century.

Because death was so omnipresent and arbitrary, and survival so uncertain, there arose a hysterical desire for amusement, while there was time, and the comforts of a last dance.

We too have our own context and assumptions. The old materialism formulated long ago by Lucretius is still quite alive: Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not; and where death is, we no longer are. Therefore it is nothing to the living or the dead. There are also new euphemisms in addition to those once noted by Jessica Mitford in The American Way of Dying.
Mitford wrote her great book more than forty years ago.

She was one of the first to explore changes in the lexicon of death. Undertakers had begun to call themselves funeral directors or morticians, coffins had become caskets; flowers were floral tributes and corpses were loved ones.  More recently, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross speaks of the phoney city practices of silk pillows and comfortable shoes.

The German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar distinguishes three broad periods in reflection about death, a mythic-magical period, a theoretical period, and an existential period. The first refers to cultures where death involves a journey to an abode or an underworld without clear definition. The journey’s end, across a river of oblivion, is a place of shadows.

The second period refers to stricter conceptual thinking, more abstract reflection on what it means to say that we die.

We are now, according to von Balthasar in the third period, and cannot return to the first two. We may take Augustine’s experience of death in his Confessions as emblematic of this period. In Chapter Four of the Confessions, Augustine speaks with surprise of the internal upheaval he felt in reaction to the death of a friend.

“I became,” he wrote, in the famous words, “a great question to myself.” Death, in other words, forced his gaze inwards, to a state of puzzled introspection about his own identity. 

Existentialists of the 19th and 20th centuries raise other questions and make other observations about death, but they all maintain Augustine’s focus on the “I,” the concrete self affected by death.

What happens when someone dies? I ask the question in a preliminary step. We will return to it in greater detail in due course. What does direct experience reveal? In what sense can death be a matter of direct experience? Doctors are said to be privy to what happens in a way that people ordinarily aren’t.

They witness death routinely, but what they have is a professional, scientific knowledge of the physiological process. When we ask about death, however, not as scientists, but as human beings, physiology is not what interests us.

We want a knowledge which is humanly accessible, but no one has that, except the dying person, and from the nature of the case, the knowledge is incommunicable.

As modern existentialists say, “death is not an event”; “by its very essence, death is in every case mine (alone)”; “the dying of others is not something we experience in a genuine sense”; at most we are simply “there alongside.”

One could ask another question of direct experience. Would we imagine, for instance, that we would die, if we did not see death all around us? Would death be something directly intuited? Max Scheler very forcefully thought so. “A man (sic) would know in some way that death will overtake him even if he were the sole living being on earth.”

Augustine regarded this existential certainty as one of the key aspects of death: incerta omnia, sola mors certa/all things are uncertain; only death is certain:
Everything else about us, good as well as evil, is uncertain…
When the child is conceived, perhaps it will be born, perhaps there will be a miscarriage…Perhaps the child will grow up, perhaps not; perhaps it will grow old, perhaps not; perhaps it will be rich, perhaps poor; perhaps honoured, perhaps humiliated; perhaps it will have sons, perhaps not…
And the same for whatever other good things you may name. Consider all evils there may be; for all, everywhere, it is true that perhaps they may be, perhaps not. But can you also say of someone: Perhaps he will die, perhaps not?
As soon as a man is born, it must at once and necessarily be said: He cannot escape death.

In all philosophising about death this association of certainty and uncertainty has been regarded as one of the most important motifs. But this is not all that can be said on the basis of experience.

We know not only that death awaits everyone with certainty at an absolutely uncertain moment, but that in dying something uniquely ultimate takes place, a definite departure from this life, an irrevocable occurrence in the most absolute sense.  Life, of course, contains other moments of ultimacy – there are decisions and acts that once taken or done, cannot be undone.

But nothing is as ultimate as death. When someone dies, he/she crosses a frontier that henceforth remains unalterably behind him/her, and there’s no returning. The familiar distinction between “here” and “beyond” or “here” and “hereafter” refers explicitly to death and to it alone.
               
This language is also found among pre-Christian writers like Plato, i.e. it is not of Christian origin. “Over there” in Plato refers to the place of the dead. No more specific definition is required.           

What direct experience reveals – what we can summarize so far – are thus the features of inevitability, uncertainty, and finality. In the final analysis, however, the initial question is still unanswered, namely, what happens when a person dies?

Are these features all that we glean from direct experience?  Do we prevent ourselves from learning more by keeping death at some distance from ourselves?

We do, according to the reflective tradition. In Tolstoy’s great short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, for instance, the mortally ill man suddenly sees the implication of this distancing via the logic of the syllogism, Caius is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal

“The example had seemed to him correct only in relation to Caius. Caius is in fact mortal; and it is all very well for him to die; but for me…the matter is entirely different.” Death, in other words, tends to be a reality in the third person – it’s he, she, or it, that dies, not I.

Distance disappears in one special instance, and the premise for that occurrence is love.
In one of his essays, Gabriel Marcel affirms that “to love someone is to say, ‘thou, thou shalt not die!’”

The lover faced with the death of the beloved who “must not” die experiences death not as something happening simply to another, not from the outside, but deeply as something from within.

He or she is accorded an experience that comes as close as is humanly possible to the dying person’s own death. Ubi amor, ibi oculus, i.e. it is love that makes perception possible.

What the one who loves experiences is some sense of the real nature of death, a new, more comprehensible knowledge of the reality itself from the inside. At the same time, death loses none of its dreadfulness. There is, in fact, no one who feels its dreadfulness more deeply and thoroughly than the one who loves.

This knowledge is perhaps not best understood as a flash of understanding. Certainly in the moment of death, one immediately grasps the reality of finality; even so the knowledge takes time to be incorporated into one’s life. From this point of view, Roberta Temes’ behavioural schema provides a close mirror of people’s experience.

In her book, Living With An Empty Chair - a guide through grief, Dr Temes describes three types of behaviour exhibited by survivors coming to terms with grief: Numbness (mechanical functioning and social insulation); Disorganisation (intensely painful feelings of loss); and Reorganisation (re-entry into a more 'normal' social life.)

These stages need not be sequential, equal in duration, or clean cut, but together they describe fairly accurately how we deal with actual knowledge of death, as this comes home to us in the death of someone dearly loved.