By: Bronnie Ware

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them. 

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five: 

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. 

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard. 

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence. 

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle. 

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result. 

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win. 

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying. 

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships. 

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. 

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again. 

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying. 

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
NY Times Published: January 14, 2013

For much of the year, Bernd Heinrich spends his time at a cabin he built in a remote forest in western Maine. The cabin has no indoor plumbing and no electricity, he says — just a tree growing inside it.

An emeritus biology professor at the University of Vermont, Dr. Heinrich, 72, sees the New England forest as a living laboratory to study nature’s changes. Over the years he has translated his observations into 17 popular books on nature and the animal world, including ones on bumblebees, dung beetles, owls and geese. Also among these works are a memoir and a 2002 book on running, “Why We Run: A Natural History.” (In the 1980s, Dr. Heinrich was a champion marathoner.)

And lately he has been studying how animals die.

Dr. Heinrich’s book “Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death” was published last summer by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

We spoke at the Trailside Nature Museum on the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in northern Westchester County, and later by telephone. A condensed and edited version of the interviews follows.

How did you come to write a book about animal death?

I first started thinking about it when a former student, Bill, wrote saying he was terminally ill and what would I think about his having a “sky burial” on my property in Maine? He wanted to leave his body to the ravens. Bill did not want to be cremated or buried in a sealed box. He wanted to be recycled and have his body provide food for other creatures.

Bill’s letter got me thinking about the different ways animals are recycled in natural ecology and about how scavengers cleanse the world so there’s room for new life.

In many ways, this was a subject I’d been circling for a long time. Over the years, I’d studied ravens and beetles, scavengers who are key actors in natural recycling. I may have felt some affinity for them because we — my parents, my sister and I — had once been scavengers ourselves.

Scavengers?

Yes. At the end of World War II, in Germany, my family escaped the advancing Red Army and lived in the forest. My father was an entomologist, a wasp specialist, and he believed the most awful place to be in a war was a city. We ate by scavenging. We trapped mice. I remember finding a dead boar, and my sister and I ate it.

But to return to Bill: I wondered if his idea was feasible. What if we put him out and no ravens came? I could imagine that even if they did eat him, there might be a human skull lying around and the next thing, the police would be up there. No, this wasn’t practical! I sent Bill a note saying that regrettably I could not help him.

But now I began doing little experiments on my property. I’d been working on a book about beetles and I thought this might make a chapter. So I put out roadkill — mice, raccoon, a shrew — and then watched for who came and how nature’s undertakers — burying beetles, maggots, gorgeous green bottle flies — broke the carcass down.

The entire scene was about transformation. A mouse would die and get eaten and it became beetles. Or its molecules could become part of a hawk or an owl. I looked at a moose and a deer carcass and I was fascinated by how quickly even big things disappeared in nature. So before I knew it, this chapter had grown into a book!

Did you find it difficult to work with roadkill?

Aside from the ick factor, a carcass is a very active scene. It’s not so much about death as life. The carcass provides a huge amount of concentrated food for the animals who are recyclers. So you get competition and all kinds of interesting animal behavior as they try to get access to it. If the food is being defended, that’s interesting. And if all kinds of animals want it, that’s even more interesting.

Some of the recyclers I enjoyed more than others. Ravens are very appealing. I’ve never met a raven I didn’t like. I can’t find maggots appealing, but after a while I did get used to them. Today I can watch maggots and find them quite interesting. Just this summer, I put out a raccoon carcass and it was almost consumed by maggots and there was nothing left, no meat whatsoever, in three days. And then, I saw a whole cohort leave, thousands of them, and they left the raccoon as a group, all in one direction.

What do you think was going on?

I still don’t have all the answers. I can give you some hypothesis. They were heading for the sun, moving towards light. They had to leave the carcass because they’d finished it off and there wasn’t any food left. Most creatures, if they don’t have food, they move on. Why shouldn’t a maggot? The question still is why did they all go at once? This was in the summer and if you move in a group, you reduce the surface area and lose less water. I’ll be doing more research on this next summer.

Many scavenger species have a bad reputation. In some cultures, there’s a hatred for vultures and ravens. Do you understand it?

It’s because of their association with death — they are blamed for it. Ravens get blamed a lot for killing a lot of things when, in fact, they mostly eat the dead and the nearly dead. It’s an illogical association that comes from a lack of understanding of what these animals do. Consider what would happen in the ocean if nothing ate the dead fish. Eventually, the ocean would be up to the top with dead fish. If there were no recyclers, nature would stop.

Many of the scavenger species are now endangered. What is happening to them?

With some of the larger scavengers — the condors and the vultures — we’ve hunted out their food base. There’s nothing left for them to eat. Also, we are using poisons to kill competitors for our own food sources — rats and mice. Then owls and hawks eat these poisoned rodents and die.

With some of the vultures, there have been population crashes because some of the medication fed to livestock is toxic to them. They eat dead cattle, traditional food, and then they die.

I was just reading about how the Parsis of India have sky burials as part of their religion. Lately, they’ve begun breeding vultures for their ceremoniesbecause there aren’t enough wild ones left. It’s tragic. The ecosystem is very complex and we can’t know what will happen if these animals disappear.

Are humans and their remains part of that complex ecosystem?

I think so. But human death is becoming more and more divorced from nature. We pump our dead with polluting chemicals like formaldehyde, put them into airtight boxes and then plant them in precious real estate that could be used for agriculture. We think we’re denying death that way. The appealing thing about Bill’s idea was that he wouldn’t be consuming resources in death — his body would give back to natural world.

What ever became of Bill?

He’s still alive. Happily that sky burial hasn’t been required.

By: Woody Allen
NY Times, January 12, 2013

WHEN The New York Times called, inquiring if I might pen a few words “from the horse’s mouth” about hypochondria, I confess I was taken aback. What light could I possibly shed on this type of crackpot behavior since, contrary to popular belief, I am not a hypochondriac but a totally different genus of crackpot?

What I am is an alarmist, which is in the same ballpark as the hypochondriac or, should I say, the same emergency room. Still there is a fundamental difference. I don’t experience imaginary maladies — my maladies are real.

What distinguishes my hysteria is that at the appearance of the mildest symptom, let’s say chapped lips, I instantly leap to the conclusion that the chapped lips indicate a brain tumor. Or maybe lung cancer. In one instance I thought it was Mad Cow.

The point is, I am always certain I’ve come down with something life threatening. It matters little that few people are ever found dead of chapped lips. Every minor ache or pain sends me to a doctor’s office in need of reassurance that my latest allergy will not require a heart transplant, or that I have misdiagnosed my hives and it’s not possible for a human being to contract elm blight.

Unfortunately, my wife bears the brunt of these pathological dramas. Like the time I awoke at 3 a.m. with a spot on my neck that to me clearly had the earmarks of a melanoma. That it turned out to be a hickey was confirmed only later at the hospital after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sitting at an ungodly hour in the emergency room where my wife tried to talk me down, I was making my way through the five stages of grief and was up to either “denial” or “bargaining” when a young resident fixed me with a rather supercilious eye and said sarcastically, “Your hickey is benign.”

But why should I live in such constant terror? I take great care of myself. I have a personal trainer who has me up to 50 push-ups a month, and combined with my knee bends and situps, I can now press the 100-pound barbell over my head with only minimal tearing of my stomach wall. I never smoke and I watch what I eat, carefully avoiding any foods that give pleasure. (Basically, I adhere to the Mediterranean diet of olive oil, nuts, figs and goat cheese, and except for the occasional impulse to become a rug salesman, it works.) In addition to yearly physicals I get all available vaccines and inoculations, making me immune to everything from Whipple’s disease to the Andromeda strain.

As far as vitamins go, if I take a few with each meal, over time I can usually get in quite a lot before the latest study confirms they’re worthless. Regarding medications, I’m flexible but prudent because while it’s true antibiotics kill bad bacteria, I’m always afraid they’ll kill my good bacteria, not to mention my pheromones, and then I won’t give off any sexual vibes in a crowded elevator.

It’s also true that when I leave the house to go for a stroll in Central Park or to Starbucks for a latte I might just pick up a quick cardiogram or CT scan prophylactically. My wife calls this nonsense and says that in the end it’s all genetic. My parents both lived to ripe old ages but absolutely refused to pass their genes to me as they believed an inheritance often spoils the child.

Even when the results of my yearly checkup show perfect health, how can I relax knowing that the minute I leave the doctor’s office something may start growing in me and, by the time a full year rolls around, my chest X-ray will look like a Jackson Pollock? Incidentally, this relentless preoccupation with health has made me quite the amateur medical expert. Not that I don’t make an occasional mistake — but what doctor doesn’t? For example, I once convinced a woman who experienced a mild ringing in her ears that she had the flesh-eating bacteria, and another time I pronounced a man dead who had simply dozed off in a chair.

But what’s this obsession with personal vulnerability? When I panic over symptoms that require no more than an aspirin or a little calamine lotion, what is it I’m really frightened of? My best guess is dying. I have always had an animal fear of death, a fate I rank second only to having to sit through a rock concert. My wife tries to be consoling about mortality and assures me that death is a natural part of life, and that we all die sooner or later. Oddly this news, whispered into my ear at 3 a.m., causes me to leap screaming from the bed, snap on every light in the house and play my recording of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” at top volume till the sun comes up.

I sometimes imagine that death might be more tolerable if I passed away in my sleep, although the reality is, no form of dying is acceptable to me with the possible exception of being kicked to death by a pair of scantily clad cocktail waitresses.

Perhaps if I were a religious person, which I am not, although I sometimes do have the intimation that we all may be part of something larger — like a Ponzi scheme. A great Spanish philosopher wrote that all humans long for “the eternal persistence of consciousness.” Not an easy state to maintain, especially when you’re dining with people who keep talking about their children.

And yet, there are worse things than death. Many of them playing at a theater near you. For instance, I would not like to survive a stroke and for the rest of my life talk out of the side of my mouth like a racetrack tout. I would also not like to go into a coma, to lie in a hospital bed where I’m not dead but can’t even blink my eyes and signal the nurse to switch the channel from Fox News. And incidentally, who’s to say the nurse isn’t one of those angel of death crazies who hates to see people suffer and fills my intravenous glucose bag with Exxon regular.

Worse than death, too, is to be on life support listening to my loved ones in a heated debate over whether to terminate me and hear my wife say, “I think we can pull the plug, it’s been 15 minutes and we’ll be late for our dinner reservation.”

What worries me most is winding up a vegetable — any vegetable, and that includes corn, which under happier circumstances I rather like. And yet is it really so great to live forever? Sometimes in the news I see features about certain tall people who reside in snow-capped regions where a whole village population lives to 140 or so. Of course all they ever eat is yogurt, and when they finally do die they are not embalmed but pasteurized. And don’t forget these healthy people walk everyplace because try getting a cab in the Himalayas. I mean do I really want to pass my days in some remote place where the main entertainment is seeing which guy in town can lift the ox highest with his bare hands?

Summing up, there are two distinct groups, hypochondriacs and alarmists. Both suffer in their own ways, and traits of one group may overlap the other, but whether you’re a hypochondriac or an alarmist, at this point in time, either is probably better than being a Republican. 

By: Amanda Katz, NPR June 21, 2012

What happens to our books when we die? Many books disappear before we do, of course; they fall apart, or we put them out on the stoop for scavengers. A book like this one, however — a text that is still read and reprinted, that has played a notable role in the 20th-century imagination, and then a copy of the text that played an especially interesting role — is likely to be passed down carefully as long as we can preserve and recognize it. Like the Bibles some families use to record their histories, it traces a chain of readers through time.

The Harvard English professor Leah Price, in her recent book How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, mentions that often the very condition of a book changing hands is death: “One measure of the value that readers attach to books (as opposed to, say, newspapers) is that they enter circulation only against the owners’ will.” This is particularly true of “association copies,” the collector’s term for books signed by the author to a significant person, or books owned and perhaps annotated by someone of note, which can become a kind of talisman: “Borrowing the logic of the saint’s relic, association copies invest the object with value borrowed from the identities of its human users. And like the saint, the previous owner must be dead.”

Whenever serious readers die, their heirs face the task of dispersing their books. But few of us like to think about what will happen to our own libraries. Will our children value our books (and will they have shelf space for them)? Will they be bought by a serious research library, or draw bids at Christie’s? Not unless we are famous, or they are first editions. Perhaps they will re-enter circulation at a used bookstore, sold for pennies and resold for a few dollars: it’s pleasant to imagine them released back into the sea of books, to be caught afresh by a new reader. Of course, this may be something of a fantasy; even New York’s Strand, with its “18 miles of books,” turns down many offerings these days. (They did accept the huge annotated collection of novelist David Markson after his death in 2010, however, and the treasure hunt for his books sparked a fascinating discussion among his fans.)

As Price’s book suggests, the question of what to do with books that outlive their owners has only been a common problem since the mid-19th century, when the steam-powered press and the advent of cheap paper caused a vast expansion of the book market. Before that, few families would have had the problem of a surfeit of books. Now, though, we may be reaching the end of the 150-year-old print boom, and with it a transformation in the way we have shared books, reader after reader and life after life.

In the age of the e-book, the paper book faces two possible and antithetical fates. It may become something to be discarded, as with the books that libraries scan and cannibalize. (In the introduction to another book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, Price mentions the severed book spines that hang on the wall at Google, “like taxidermists’ trophies.”) Alternatively, it may become a special object to be preserved and traded. My grandfather’s copy of War of the Worlds obviously falls into the second category — but very few of the millions of books published since the mid-19th century are ones you’d want to own. If Amazon has a “long tail” of obscure but occasionally purchased titles, the tail that goes back 150 years is near endless and thin as thread.

Meanwhile, the kind of “serial” book sharing (as Price describes it) that occurs over time is giving way to simultaneous, “synchronous” sharing. With the Kindle, you can see what thousands of other Kindle readers are highlighting in the book you’re reading — a fairly astonishing innovation. But the passage of books from hand to hand, gathering inscriptions along the way, is not part of the e-book economy. Will your grandchild inherit your Kindle books? No one knows, but given password protection and the speed at which data becomes obsolete, that seems highly unlikely.

Still, as far as posterity goes, the e-book system has some genuine superiorities over the old economy. Annotations exist in the cloud, so if your house burns down they are preserved. Your marginalia is accessible to more than just someone who holds the volume itself — biographers of the future will surely appreciate not having to count on a generous widow bequeathing them their subject’s reading copy. With e-books, there’s no need to fight over a single physical library copy; no trees need be cut down; unsold books need not be pulped; you don’t need to lug books from apartment to apartment; pages will never be dotted with mildew.

But what do we lose as we bid farewell to what may turn out to have been a brief period in which common people owned physical books? I think of my own already excessive book collection, with its books that I have loved and worked on (as an editor and translator) and received as presents. Though I hope someone in the generation after mine will love living with them too, it doesn’t really matter to me: I won’t be there to see it.

But when I think of sorting through the boxes of my grandmother’s books — even the ones we couldn’t keep, or didn’t want — and what we found there, I am grateful not to have been handed her Amazon password instead. Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone.

The new book Immortality warns against the quest for eternal life

Ronald Bailey | Reason.com, May 29, 2012

Imagine you are offered a trustworthy opportunity for immortality in which your mind (perhaps also your body) will persist eternally. Let’s further stipulate that the offer includes perpetual youthful health and the ability to upgrade to any cognitive and physical technologies that become available in the future. There is one more stipulation: You could never decide later to die. Would you take it? Metaphysician and former British diplomat Stephen Cave thinks accepting such an offer would be a bad idea. 

Cave’s fascinating new book, Immortality, posits that civilization is a major side effect of humanity’s attempts to live forever. He argues that our sophisticated minds inexorably recognize that, like all other living things, we will one day die. Simultaneously, Cave asserts, “The one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This is what I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization.” 

Cave identifies four immortality narratives that drive civilizations over time which he calls; (1) Staying Alive, (2) Resurrection, (3) Soul, and (4) Legacy. Cave gracefully marches through his four immortality narratives citing examples from history, psychology, and religion up to the modern day. “At its core, a civilization is a collection of life extension technologies: agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing to stave off cold, architecture to provide shelter and safety, better weapons for hunting and defense, and medicine to combat injury and disease,” he writes.

In the Staying Alive narrative Cave opens with the quest of the First Emperor of China to find the elixir of life but lands us soon the 21st century where transhumanists aim to use modern science to finally achieve the goal of perpetual youthful life. He notes that in the last century, humans have in fact doubled average human life expectancy.

Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating physical death? This is the goal of transhumanists like theoretical biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey who has devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) program. SENS technologies would include genetic interventions to rejuvenate cells, stem cell transplants to replace aged organs and tissues, and nano-machines to patrol our bodies to prevent infections and kill nascent cancers. Ultimately, Cave cannot argue that these life-extension technologies will not work for individuals but suggests that they would produce problems like overpopulation and environmental collapse that would eventually subvert them. He also cites calculations done by a demographer that assuming aging and disease is defeated by biomedical technology accidents would still do in would-be immortals. The average life expectancy of medical immortals would be 5,775 years. Frankly, I will be happy to take that.

Resurrection is his next immortality narrative. Of course, the most prevalent resurrection story is that of Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago. The New Testament explicitly states that one day every individual will once again live in his or her real but improved physical bodies. Physical resurrection is also the orthodox belief of the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam. Thus, Cave notes, half of the world’s population officially believes in the future resurrection of their physical bodies. He adds, however, that many Christians, Jews, and Muslims actually subscribe to another immortality narrative, Soul.

Cave identifies three major problems with the Resurrection Narrative: the Cannibal problem, the Transformation problem, and the Duplication problem. Briefly, if resurrection is to mean anything, it must mean that a specific individual is brought back to life. The question is what happens when atoms have been shared by more than one person: Who gets to use the specific nitrogen and carbon atoms when everyone is brought back to life? I don’t think that that is much of problem since atoms are interchangeable and presumably God could simply put any random carbon and nitrogen atoms back in the same places they were in your physical body. They needn’t be the exact same atoms that you had when you died.

The Transformation problem is harder. Many believers would have died old, decrepit, and demented. That’s not how they believe they will be resurrected; they expect to get better, incorruptible bodies. By being thus transformed would the resurrected believer really be the same person who had died or a different person? And then there is the problem of duplication. God could not just reassemble a believer as she was when she died, he could also reassemble her as a 5-year-old girl. Cave argues that these three problems calls into question the notion that it would truly be a specific individual believer rising from the grave.

Besides these ancient resurrection dogmas, modern technophilic thinkers have devised a couple more: cryonics and mind uploading. Cryonicists aim to avoid the three ancient resurrection problems by having their bodies frozen at minus 276 degrees Fahrenheit in liquid nitrogen with idea that future technologies will be able to revive them. Cryonicists believe that reviving individual brains with their unique patterns and history would be the way to guarantee that specific individuals are actually brought back to life. 

Cave notes that this focus on preserving a person’s mind leads other modern would-be computational resurrectionists to argue for uploading minds (information encoded in an individual’s brain) onto another piece of hardware, an electronic avatar, a robot, or another brain which would be psychologically identical to the original mind. Cave argues that computational resurrection does not actually achieve immortality for a specific individual, but merely makes an exact psychological copy of him. There is the additional problem that if minds can be digitized they can be duplicated many times. If this occurs who then is the original resurrectee? “When you closed your eyes on your deathbed, you could not expect to open them again in silicon form,” he explains. The result of mind uploading “would all just be high-tech ways of producing a counterfeit you.”

Counterfeit? Counterfeit means to make a copy with the intention to deceive or defraud. I doubt that people who decide to take advantage of mind uploading would be defrauded or deceived. Even if digital duplicates were made of the same individual’s mind, I suspect that they would have no problem with that—the more versions of their specific memories, desires, and psychology the merrier. 

Cave does not address one other popular version of how computational immortality might occur. As the 21st century advances our bodies and minds will be increasingly integrated with digital appliances of various sorts, e.g., more and more of our memories and reasoning abilities could be located on silicon (or whatever quantum computations devices come later) and accessed via radio. Eventually more and more of the information that makes up an individual’s mind will have migrated into these digital devices. When the biological portion of an individual’s techno-complex eventually dies it may be regretted but the event will not significantly disrupt the continuity of the individual’s self-consciousness.

The most popular immortality narrative is Soul. Most Christians now believe that their souls, which persist after death, will be reunited with their resurrected bodies. Souls thus solve a lot of the identity problems associated with the earlier Resurrection narrative. Cave argues that Soul narrative resolves the Mortality Paradox by denying “that the failing body is the true self, identifying the person instead with exactly that mental life that seems so inextinguishable.” In Christianity all souls are equal before God, so if the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of the universe is interested in your life then who are your politicians to ignore your desires?

What about the afterlife? Cave cites American evangelist James L. Garlow who says that in Heaven “your every desire is satisfied more abundantly than you’ve ever dreamed.” But what if your desire is to be reunited with your wife who instead desires to spend her eternity with her childhood sweetheart? A more sophisticated theocentric view of the soul’s afterlife is that Heaven is the eternal exaltation of God. But what can this mean? Cave points out that an afterlife without time is not really a life at all. “Everything that makes up a human life—experience, learning, growth, communication, even singing hosannas—requires the passage of time. Without time, nothing can happen; it is a state of stasis, a cessation of thought and action,” he argues. “The attraction of the soul view was the unique aura it gave to every individual life, but its logical conclusion is an eternity of nothing, with life negated altogether.”

The major Eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, also subscribe to versions of the Soul narrative involving cycles of reincarnation. Cave points out though that both religions’ accounts of souls are pared down to being some kind of vague continuum of awareness. After death your individual experiences, memories, hopes, desires are all forgotten as your soul moves from one body to the next. Cave is correct when he asserts, “If you have a soul, yet it does not take your mind, personality, or consciousness with it, then its survival after the death of your body should be of as much interest to you as the survival of your toenails.”

Cave tries to imagine the sorts of scientific experiments that might show that people do have nonmaterial souls. For example, he asks if souls are maintainers of awareness why is it that when our bodies are knocked unconscious or anaesthetized that our nonmaterial souls apparently lose consciousness too? If your soul is the essential you it must harbor your emotions, memories, ability to speak, and moral norms. However, neuroscience shows that damage to specific areas of your brain can eliminate all of these qualities that make up you as an individual. “Those who believe that the soul could preserve these abilities after the total destruction of the brain in death must explain why the soul cannot preserve these abilities when only a small part of the brain is destroyed,” challenges Cave. 

The final immortality narrative is Legacy. It comes in two varieties: fame and progeny. Achieving fame and glory in the here-and-now have some obvious benefits, e.g., increased status, more money, more power, and more opportunities to mate. In addition, fame means that you will be remembered by later generations. Cave considers the bundle theory of the self in which bits and pieces of your memories, personality, and images continue to exist in the cultural realm after your death. But you are still dead—your consciousness and personality is not dispersed into books, movies, or the minds of fans. And research shows that it takes only 70 years after our deaths before most of us are forgotten. Can you name all of your great-grandparents?

People also want to live on through their children. Your genes live on through your children, but genes are simply machines for making proteins in response to environmental cues. You are merely the disposable container that genes use to make more copies of themselves. Reproduction, as satisfying as most people find it, is no way to preserve one’s individual consciousness.

Cave concludes, “All four fundamental immortality narratives are illusions. None of them will enable us to live forever.” But even if one of the immortality narratives were true or possible, Cave argues that on the one hand, boredom and apathy would eventually set in after one has done and seen everything, and other the hand, the prospect of an infinite future means that there is no urgency to do or see anything resulting in paralysis. Meaningful lives require a time limit, he argues.

Since the immortality narratives fail, we are still left with our fear of death and non-existence. To overcome our fears and to escape the clutches of the Mortality Paradox Cave advocates turning to what he calls the Wisdom narrative. He thinks that he has made the case that a genuinely unending life would most likely be terrible. However, he acknowledges that this realization is unlikely to convince people that it’s great to be dead. So the next step toward wisdom is to accept the notion that the “fear of being actually dead is nonsensical.” And the final step is to cultivate virtues that undermine our will to live forever and thus reduce our existential angst.

The model for realizing that the fear of death is nonsensical is the Greek philosopher Epicurus who wrote, “While we are, death is not; when death is come, we are not.” Cave interprets Epicurus as chiefly arguing that we should not fear the state of being dead. Being dead is nothing, so why fear nothing? Cave asserts that wisdom comes when we realize “that we can never be dead, that fearing being dead is therefore a nonsense.” Oddly, I don’t think that I (and many others) suffer from Cave’s Mortality Paradox—I can imagine non-existence. Consequently, with regard to death there is nothing to fear but nothing itself.

In order to further undermine our fear of death Cave counsels that we adopt the three virtues of empathy, mindfulness, and gratitude. Empathy reduces our fear of the death by shifting the focus from ourselves; mindfulness encourages us to enjoy the present moment; and gratitude makes us conscious of what an incredible stroke of luck it is to be alive in the first place. It seems to me that the cultivation of these virtues is valuable in its own right, and if such cultivation happens to reduce one’s fear of death then that’s a nice bonus.

As comforting as they have been and as much as they have inspired people to build civilizations, Cave is right that the Resurrection, Soul, and Legacy narratives are illusions. So too is the modern version of the Staying Alive narrative if it is interpreted such that it results in infinite life rather than radically increased life expectancies. However, toward the end, Cave grants the transhumanists who are pursuing medical immortality would not suffer from the problem of eternal boredom since they would eventually die of accidents in any case. And of course, if the radically long-lived did get bored they could simply stop whatever treatments they are using to maintain their lives.

Finally, back to the question of whether you would accept an offer of true immortality—your consciousness (and perhaps your body) persisting eternally. Cave clearly believes that it would be a bad idea. He cites many legendary examples in which mortals are granted immortality who come later to regret it. Mostly because they become very bored. And yet, as far as I know, no one seriously claims that God suffers from ennui. 

Nevertheless, before I read Cave’s book, I would have answered absolutely I would accept such an offer. Now, I am thinking about it a bit more. Since I need more time to contemplate the upsides and the downsides of eternal life, I will happily accept any legitimate offer for a dramatically extended and healthy lifespan.