The Willingness to Die:
FEIFEL, HERMAN
The Willingness to Die My Brother Death. By Cyrus Sulzberger. Harper. 225 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Herman Feifel Clinical psychologist; editor, "The Meaning of Death" One of man's most...
...We treat death, in fact, as an obscenity...
...In a certain sense, the willingness to die appears as a necessary condition of life...
...The frenetic accent on, and continual search for, the fountain of youth in many segments of our society reflects our anxieties about death...
...Clinical observation also indicates that, for many persons, perception of death from a temporal distance and from close-up may be two different matters...
...Even before its actual arrival, death is an absent presence...
...Yet, by and large, in the presence of death Western culture has tended to run and seek refuge in euphemistic language, in the development of an industry which has as a major interest the creation of greater "life-like'1 qualities in the dead, and in actuarial statistics...
...From Saint John Nepomucen, spitted and broiled by Wenceslaus the Slothful, and Saint Agatha, rolled naked over live coals mixed with potsherds, through Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake, and Ziska, the dying general of the Bohemian Hussites, ordering his officers to make a drum of his skin so that its thundering roll would scatter the enemies of his Protestant God, to the wicker basket on the desk of Ante Pavelic, dictator of the Fascist Republic of Croatia during World War II, seemingly filled with mussels, but actually containing 40 pounds of human eyes, Sulzberger compellingly makes his major point: "For the manner of death is often more surprising than death itself, and more important...
...Current psychological research reinforces the idea that death can mean different things to different people...
...One of the reasons we tend to reject the aged is because they remind us of death...
...The existentialist movement, for example, has been particularly conspicuous in rediscovering death as a philosophical theme in the 20th century...
...In so doing, he has succeeded in making death less of a stranger to us, albeit not quite a brother...
...Directly confronting the existential fact of death seems to cast a blight on ego functioning...
...editor, "The Meaning of Death" One of man's most distinguishing characteristics is his capacity to grasp the concept of a future and inexorable death...
...Death, Sulzberger believes, is a multi-faceted symbol—terrible to Cicero, desirable to Cato and indifferent to Socrates...
...And it is in this same encounter with death that each of us discovers his hunger for immortality...
...We have been compelled, in unhealthymeasure, to internalize our thoughts and feelings, fears and even hopes concerning death...
...Indeed, our modern way of dying in the big hospital almost obscures death's reality, making it a public event, something which befalls everyone, yet no one in particular...
...and an admirable soaring quality to his prose...
...Yet, we are aware that human maturity brings along with it a recognition of limitation...
...One of life's few lessons ought to be fine dying...
...It has accented death as a constitutive part rather than the mere end of life...
...Herein lies the promise of enhanced understanding of the individual's behavior and broadened therapeutic horizons...
...and one of the serious mistakes we commit in treating seriously ill and terminally ill patients is the erection of a psychological barrier between the living and dying...
...The notion of the uniqueness and individuality of each one of us gains full meaning only in realizing that we must die...
...For Sulzberger, the manner of man's confrontation of death appears more important than the event itself...
...Take heart," he tells us, "from these splendid men and women, our colleagues and companions, who knew how to make the journey...
...To a degree we can control the style of our own dying even if we cannot influence death itself...
...To die is the human condition...
...as well as the diverse ways in which death comes to us: war, plague, famine, murder, one's own hand, capital punishment and persecution...
...The assaults of two world wars together with the heritage of a potential nuclear holocaust have tended, in recent years, to push life's temporality more into the foreground...
...Reading this review about death is one thing...
...Existentialists insist that to completely understand himself, man must confront death, become aware of personal death...
...How easy is death for those who know how to meet it, striding across its silent iciness with pure, clean courage...
...It is to the author's credit that he has brushed aside the curtains of silence and overcome embarrassment at looking at the individual face of death...
...It is to this cognition concerning life that Cyrus Sulzberger addresses himself in this book...
...to live decently and to die well is man's privilege...
...There is an amazing range to Sulzberger's pursuit of making death more of an "intimate acquaintance...
...With emotional insight and poetic sensitivity, he indicates to us that facing death is the beginning of mastery over life's terrors...
...Although man cannot control death, he can face it proudly and with courage...
...Is it not a fraud perpetrated on ourselves to neglect one of the essential realities of life...
...Certainly here is a challenge to the nascent systematic concern of psychology and the behavioral sciences regarding attitudes toward death—to relate the specific import of death to the nature and fortunes of the individual's development and cultural context...
...Life is not genuinely our own until we can renounce it...
...learning next week that you have a metastasizing cancer may be quite another...
...In spell-binding panoramic fashion Sulzberger offers us the words and actions of philosophers and sages, kings and warriors, saints and martyrs, as they come to grips with death...
...We are not altogether free in any deed as long as we are commanded by an inescapable will to live...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 13
