Can the Loss of a Loved One Bring Us Closer to Living More Authentically?

Painting by Farah Alkasab

She was lost. I looked for her everywhere, but I could not find her. I felt anxious and waited for her to come home. A week past, so it seemed, but she was still missing. I then found myself walking along a grounded pathway in an unfamiliar park. It was snowing and the wind felt cold against my skin. Suddenly, the memory of what happened to her appeared in front of my eyes and I fell to the ground. I remembered what I already knew; she was not lost, she was dead.

- a dream.

The news of my sister’s sudden death shook my whole being, an earthquake beneath my feet. In the time since I have been trying to fathom her loss and the fact that she is no longer of this world. How does one make sense of the unimaginable, of the absurd? ‘Absurd’ here is fitting: in a world that is supposed to make sense, such a death felt like a proclamation of world-insanity. Shockingly, I was awoken from naivety. Reality was a nightmare, and my dreams were infested with reality: she was not lost; Farah was dead.

In his philosophical essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, written in 1942, Camus (2005) engages with the absurd, being the gap or contradiction between our expectation of a meaningful, ordered world and the meaningless, chaotic one we are actually in. We desire the safety-net of sense and structure, rather than living in full awareness of the world of risk and uncertainty that stares us in the face. For Camus (ibid.) we are only really able to live fully if we embrace the fundamental absurdity of existence.

Whether we run from it or towards it, the absurd is with us constantly, in the way we live our lives and in all the choices we make. The only certainty we face is death. We are destined to die the moment we are born. It might not happen today, but one day: it will. Our challenge is not our death, nor it is the act of dying, but it is rather our acknowledgement of its certainty and the acceptance of what is uncertain; when and how we will die, and the impact our death will have on the world and on the people we leave behind.

Farah’s death was an inescapable event that I nevertheless refused, rejected, turned away from. Yet it is in turning to face it, daring to be with the real, that I have been confronted by my own mortality and the meaning of my own existence. The experience of losing my beloved sister and the absurdity of her death has compelled me to live.

Living Towards Death

Without an acknowledgement of mortality, by forgetting about death, we can easily forget that we are alive, such that we have no understanding of our own existence. Sartre (2008) described death as something that comes from the outside, alien to us, it invades our lives and wipes out our projects. We know that one day we will die, yet the idea of death is horrid, an unfavourable topic to talk about or even think of. Death becomes a denied aspect of our existence, or more accurately, a deferred reality of our being.

This is true, perhaps for the majority, but what makes the minority different? The Greek philosopher Epicurus (1993, p.69) has said, “death is nothing to us”. We are here, then we are not anymore. Epicurus is not denying death, but quite the contrary. He believed that we should not fear death simply because death is nothing, as it is not something we can ever experience. Death is nothing but another leaf amongst all the leaves on a branch that constitute the tree of life; another possibility amongst all the possibilities in what constitutes our lives. Yet unlike all these other possibilities, it is not one that is an actuality for us.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962) argued that it is only when we accept our death as a possibility for us, each as an individual, that we may become our own most authentic beings. By ‘authenticity’ he meant ‘taking ownership’, that through embracing the actuality of our own death we take responsibility for the life we are choosing to live now. How are we to come to a realisation that our death is a possibility we are thrown towards as part of our existence? Must an event first take place, such as a near death experience or perhaps a diagnosis of a terminal illness? Is it possible that the death of a beloved person can bring about an awakening to the importance of one’s own life?

Heidegger (1962) did not believe that the death of others can reveal our potentiality for living authentically. Rather, that although we may grieve the loss of the other, we are unable to have any experience of their death or, more importantly, the loss of existence that has befallen them. The authentic life is about taking hold of one’s own existence for one’s own sake, to realise that I can die - that death is possible for me. Grief, how ever intense, does not reveal this.

Most of the time we are lost in the distractions of the ‘They’, living as one does, going along with things. The ‘They’ (or ‘The One’) is Heidegger’s (1962) term for the way of being that governs what we understand and do in our everyday lives as followers of society and its norms. It has broadly two aspects. Firstly, it enables us to understand the world around us such that we can ‘get around’ and ‘get to grips with’ the world. We can cope in this world because we understand its rules, essentially through learning from others. The other aspect is a way of being we can fall into, whereby having our own life to lead gets covered up in ‘living as they live’, or ‘doing what they do’. The ‘They’ is thus authoritative, demanding and is external to our own selfhood. When identifying with the They in the way of ‘living as they live’, we disown our individuality. How are we to escape from this fallen state, and live our own lives?

Heidegger (ibid.) argued that becoming an authentic individual meant recognising our death as possible-for-oneself. This comes from the ‘call of conscience’, a silent voice that erupts through the noise and chatter of the everyday world and brings us back to ourselves, tearing us away from our everydayness and engagement with the ‘They’. The call of conscience comes from deep within us, causing the familiar to feel perhaps suddenly unfamiliar; we feel that we are not at home in the world anymore. The significance of the everyday world interpreted by the They is broken down, triggering anxiety and feelings of uncanniness.

In particular, if we attend to this silent anxiety in the face of the world, we realise we are guilty; not morally, but guilty of living a life unlived. The call of conscience tells us: you are mortal, you are responsible for your own life - live it! This can be linked to Camus’s notion of the absurdity of life; there is nothing in the world that is essentially ours, or that can ultimately define us. Some might rage at the apparent unfairness of having been thrown into a world in which we are already condemned to die; yet perhaps the problem is in applying notions of fairness and condemnation at all. We simply are in the world in this way, and the real tragedy could well be in rejecting the allegedly unfair life you have because (and perhaps there’s a contradiction here) you are upset that one day it will end. Returning to Heidegger: the revelation is that we are thrown into the world in a manner we did not invite,but must project forward into a future that is our responsibility to make. We can choose to reject this and run away from it if we want, but to live authentically we must take this thrown situation up as our own.

Before we reach our death we are constantly engaged in what is possible. We are, we exist, in relation to the future - always concerned with ‘who we will be’, whether we engage with that consciously or not. Death wipes this out, removing all our possibilities from us. Death then, for Heidegger, is the constant possibility of impossibility. It is part of our existence right now - death is always possible, from the moment we are born.

Recognising the constant possibility of absolute impossibility is an essential component for understanding ourselves. Authentic living towards our own death means taking ownership of life and acknowledging our individual potential for being. In doing so the way of being defined by the ‘They’ is revealed as not one’s own. In this revelation anxiety erupts and throws us out of the everyday world. As destabilising as this might feel, if understood correctly it is a call to ‘wake up’, to recognise we have our own life to live. We can thereby return to the world of others in our own way, to choose a possibility that is distinctive of our individual existence.

In the Event of Traumatic Loss

This is all well and good but the message is clear: engagement with mortality (one’s own constantly impending death) is very much an individual concern. No-one else can die our death for us: it is non-relational. The death of the loved one is, for Heidegger, not a window into our own mortality and therefore not a pathway to personal authenticity. However, what can be more powerful than the death of someone you love? What can be more peculiar than the nothingness that exists after their loss? There they were, until they were not anymore. The emotional trauma that erupts after losing someone dear is life changing. The world suddenly feels brutal and unfair, and we become lost in an unfamiliar situation. We can lose the sense of ourselves, of who we are, and of our understanding of the world. It therefore impels us to question the world, the meaning of their loss and our own existence. What does my life mean, now that the beloved person has gone? How will I live now?

Nothing is absolute anymore. In fact, the revelation comes that nothing ever was. The ground has shifted, the terrain has changed. Perhaps the greater the love for the lost person, the greater the extent that we are thrown out of the world and the more deeply we become aware of its illusion of stability and certainty. Thus traumatising. The loved one’s passing reveals the great contingency that we all share, the knife-edge upon which we rest, and the illusions we construct to hide this reality from ourselves. Thus are we brought closer to acknowledging our own mortality, pushed to face the reality of what our existence truly is: a constant becoming, moving toward non-existence.

Robert Stolorow (2011) has argued that, in trauma, living more authentically towards death is forced upon the traumatised person. In his writings he spoke about his wife, Dede. He described how the emotional trauma of her loss formed his authentic existence towards death. When she died his world became a strange place, the trauma shattering the absoluteness of his life. However, this was of course not merely a sudden upheaval, but a drawn-out unwinding of existence. Trauma brutalises time. Stolorow (2007) wrote about the traumatised state he experienced when he re-lived his wife’s death nearly two years after she died. Whilst at dinner among colleagues and friends, he suddenly felt that he was strange and isolated, not of this world. His everyday professional world fell away into meaninglessness, leaving him cast out, uncanny. This is of course the same way that anxiety brought upon by the call of conscience collapses the everyday significance of The They. Stolorow’s traumatic loss of his wife parallel’s Heidegger’s (1962) representation of anxiety.

When Farah Died

Farah woke up one morning alive, yet by the end of that day she was not anymore. When I heard the news, none of what was said to me made any sense, because the possibility of her death was impossible. In trying to grasp some sort of understanding why she died, I fell into despair and an overwhelming sense of defeat; I could not bring her back. Farah’s death threw a sense of nothingness within me. I failed to feel, but physically I became continuously ill. It was as if my body was embodying death before its death. Was my body in despair? I imagined myself a bubble of air in the ocean; vulnerable and insignificant. Like Stolorow’s( 2011) experience, I too felt small and the world felt immensely large, dark, and lonely. Farah’s death left me feeling devastated, bewildered, and departed. The world fell away, and everydayness never seemed as strange.

Whilst speaking to a friend about the loss of Farah some time after, I accidently said the words “I died” instead of “she died”. I felt desperate to understand the meaning of her death, because when I lost her, a part of me was lost, and when she died, something died within me. The loved other is of me and my worldly possibilities.

Returning to my dream: I felt confused and lost when I did not find her, but I could still sense a slight possibility for her return. But when I felt cold and was in an unfamiliar place, the memory of her death came to me, the possibility for her return ceased, and the earth’s gravity pulled me down to a complete stop; lifeless.

What Followed

After a while, with the world carrying on as it does, the fog began to clear, making space for rage to creep in. I felt angry with Farah for dying, with the world for betraying me, and with God for taking her. My anger acted as a defense against the pain I felt for her loss. The anger was motivation, to re-evaluate the meaning of my whole existence. I imagined myself standing on the outside, looking in, and thought about how I was being in the world. The world is what it is: absurd; and I must resign to it.

In a consideration of faith, choice and absurdity, Kierkegaard (2013) analysed Abraham obeying God’s command to sacrifice his beloved and only son, Isaac. Kierkegaard (ibid.) was astonished with how, following such a traumatic experience, Abraham was simply able to return to how his life was before. This helped him to understand that such an impossible leap is necessary for us to move forward in life. Abraham resigned to his absurd situatedness to then be saved by the strength of the absurd. This is what Camus (2005) realised too; Sisyphus carried on an endless, seemingly pointless task whilst accepting its absurdity.

In the face of the absurd we must decide whether to quit or to carry on; to accept the freedom we are condemned to; to choose how to be in the world. To be authentic, according to Heidegger (1962), we must confront the possibility of our own death, of impossibility, and we do this alone. Yet death is one possibility amongst other possibilities, such as birth, love, and so on, that give meaning to our existence, and like love or birth, it is a social event. Death of course does not affect the survivors in the same way as it does the deceased, but our death has an impact on the loved ones we leave behind as Heidegger (1962) notes. However, he insists that the death of others is not a window to experiencing our own death. As we have established, Stolorow’s (2011) concept of being-towards-loss counters this perspective. When someone we love dies, they are no longer part of our world. We do not just lose them in the present or in the past, but we lose them in the future. The impending possibilities-with-them cease to be and they will be forever missing from our life. Our death is not just the end of possibilities but also the closing down of possibilities with others in the world. Again, the greater the love, the greater awareness of the impossibility that their loss presents us with.

Therefore, our death as the end of our life’s plans should not be referred as solely our own project. Sartre’s (1989) characters in No Exit are concerned with the people that they have left behind; what might they have said about them and what might they have done after they have died. This can be seen as a self-centred way of perceiving death, but it also means that our death is in fact social. Our death influences others, which influences us in how we choose to live our lives in relation to others. Thus, the possibility of our own morality is thought of in the future which extends beyond our death. Death in its nothingness is significant in how we choose to live our lives with the ones we love and will one day depart from.

In the End

Farah died and the world fell away into, what it felt like, nothingness, taking my identity with it. Over time this experience changed. While I was in despair, I felt hopeless and unable to do anything much beyond the basics. Anger, on the other hand, helped me engage with this uncanny, unfamiliar world, and it gave me a chance to dare question my being within the absurd; who was I in a world without Farah? I was able to withdraw, rethink and reformulate my life by re-evaluating how I was being in the immediacy of my presence, and how my being was experienced in the world and in the world with others. In doing so, I was able to conceptualise the meaning behind her death.

Traumatic loss of a loved one, therefore, can in fact help us gain perspective on what really matters, awakening our conscience call. That in itself is proof that our death is not our own but a social occurrence. We hear the call amongst the chaos and become open to the situation we find ourselves in, embarking upon an authentic way of being. If we wanted to exist more authentically, we must have an awareness of what it means to be. If we are capable of not-being, then we are capable of being.

Psychotherapist and Counsellor Thoraya Alkasab

Reference List

Camus, A. (2005). The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. O’Brien, J. London: Penguin.

Kierkegaard, S. (2013). Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Lowrie, W. & Marino, G. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Epicurus (1993). The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments. Trans. O’Connor, E. New York: Prometheus Books.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Trans. Maquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Truama and Human Existence; Autobiogrphical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. London: Routledge. (Psychoanalytic inquiry book series).

Stolorow, R. D. (2011) World, affectivity, trauma: Heidegger and post-cartesian psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. (Psychoanalytic inquiry book series).

Sartre, J. (1989). No exit and three other plays: The flies; Dirty hands; The respectful prostitute. Trans. Abel, L., & Gilbert, S. New York: Vintage International.

Sartre, J. (2008). Being and nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. Abingdon: Routledge.