My Europe: Death and guilt

“In the state of waiting without result, a person can lose hope and confidence, give up temporarily or permanently, come to the tip of his nose with this life,” I read in mid-January in an e-mail. My 82 year old friend, author of this message, is a very dear person to me. I have always experienced Annelina as a loving, wise woman, always ready to help others in need, rebellious in thought and with a lively spirit, adorned with curls, which playfully fall on her face.

After telling in the e-mail that from this small virus with great effect it feels “forced into an” unusual state of rest “with stop-movement”, she writes: “Where there is a beginning, there is an end . (…) Dead ends, one-way streets, endlessly spinning wheels, help a lot to cause that exhaustion, from which you are too tired to accept awake farewell from life, (…) to enjoy the satiety with life, to allow yourself to get tired of it and escape in peace with yourself. ”

What does he mean by that? Bad thoughts suddenly run through my head. How should I react? Looking for her friends, where do you live? Consult a professional assistant? Or should I call him and dare to talk to him? I feel afraid for him, but also for myself. If I reacted “wrongly” to the news, I would probably feel (co) responsible for the death of a person close to me. But on the other hand am I willing to accept the decision, which I fear lies behind the email? A giant responsibility knocks me to the ground.

Meaning and service

As members of the affluent societies of the global West, we have created complex systems that should help us escape this responsibility. Henning Scherf, the former mayor of Bremen, who today is committed to a better confrontation with death, wrote as early as 2016 about the commercialization of the last stage of life as part of a sanitary service sector that is moving death in a taboo area.

He says this is how our hospitals return home, where people die, and the overburdened internal medicine, embedded in an independent market with huge profits, functions as a platform of medical assistance for the sick and dying . Yet this system fulfills a social function: death must be banished and made invisible, we must be freed from guilt and responsibility.

Even more so. Our strategies to escape reality and the rampant sanitary sector seem to me to be paired with the belief that man always dies from something. Death has a reason. And that it could be avoided through proper human action. But does it really make sense to understand death as a cause-and-effect cycle? And is this reason something that can be fought and thus put to death indefinitely?

routines

Annelie’s e-mail reaches me in the Algarve at a time when the number of people tested positive for COVID is increasing. Routine reactions come from Europe, the government in Lisbon tightens restrictive measures.

But even the logic of lockdown entangles us in a complex web of guilt, escapism, and illusory beliefs. This logic is both a promise and a curse. A supposedly comprehensive system of rules promises relief from the burden of responsibility. At the same time it depresses us, that we realize that reality is constantly slipping into the rules. In the constant process of “adaptation” the rules become so complicated that in the end almost no one knows how to act “in order”. Instead of relief comes another burden – frustration from failure.

This is not for nothing. In individualized societies, where self-determination is a high priority, lockdown returns undermine the consensus on which not only these rules are maintained, but also the entire general social and political order. The problematic way of treating death, which is hidden behind it, is not discussed at all.

It is an illusion to believe that individuals and communities have the primary task of protecting others from death. When death is not seen as part of life, but as a human bankruptcy, failure is pre-programmed. We will quickly deplete our resources. We will also awaken hopes that cannot be fulfilled: Each death will raise the question of who it is culprit. As individuals and societies this burden will bring us down to earth. We will become easy prey for those who, like careful shepherds, create the image that they will bring us out of the impasse and free us from fear and despair.

A message to all of us

As banal as it may sound: We possess unlimited resources and we are all mortal. No one is to blame for this! Just as we learn with difficulty that euthanasia has no criminal relevance (that it is not suicide), we must learn to accept that death sometimes comes “as a result of age”, and is even natural. Regardless of what infections we can test in our body with all those independent health care systems.

Stanislaw Strasburger is a writer and cultural manager. His current novel: The Story Trader was published in German in 2018 (in Polish in 2009 and in Arabic in 2014). The author was born in Warsaw and lives between Berlin, Warsaw and various Mediterranean cities. He is also a member of the council of the association “Humanismo solidario”. DW

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