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8 The Value of Death Lloyd Steffen Death is a value-laden term. The term reaches our ears shrouded in negativity; and to hear the word ‘death’ uttered can, as W. H. Auden put it, “stop all the clocks.” Death, even the mention of it, can be trusted to arouse feelings of apprehension as we suppress the anxiety that attaches to it and try to avoid thoughts of death, especially as those thoughts turn personal and the death that comes into view is our own. When we do confront death, we often do so with wariness, a sense of unreality and even fear. Death is a mystery to us—despite all we might claim to know about it and despite the certainty we attach to claims about what we believe and profess to know. Religion provides people with practical frameworks (i.e., rituals) and organized belief systems that offer explanations and make sense of death in the context of ultimate realities. Religion helps people to confront the threat of nonexistence and the anxiety of helplessness in the face of our natural movement toward what looks to be, from the point of view of nature, personal extinction. From a moral point of view, religion is one of the cultural assets that makes it possible for people to create meaning and to transform anxiety and fear of death into a powerful life-affirming impulse. When life projects integrate honest confrontation with human mortality, and rely on philosophy and religious thought to do so, the sharp sting of death anxiety can be blunted. Many people experience death through religion, for religion has power to affect a transformation in values and even alter the meaning of death itself. Religious people will often appeal to the values of hope and love, claiming that in those values lies a power even stronger than death. Such a reflection tells us more about the value of religion in relation to death than it does about the value of death itself. So how death comes to have value in human existence seems to be a question worth asking. 315 Keeping in mind that death is an experience for the living, let me suggest just a couple of ways, both positive and negative, that death has value in human life On the negative side, when the constant anxiety over death is realized in an actual human experience of death, the sense of sadness, loss, and grief can, if the death is of a loved one, provoke the most profound and disorienting of human experiences. Testimonials to the shocking and horrible experience of grief are legion, but let me just offer one, a letter Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the day after his son, Waldo, died in January 1842: My boy, my boy is gone. He was taken ill of Scarlatina on Monday evening, and died last night. I can say nothing to you. My darling & the world’s wonderful child, for never in my own or another family have I seen anything comparable, has fled out of my arms like a dream. He adorned the world for me like a morning star, and every particular of my daily life. I slept in his neighborhood & woke to remember him. . . . My angel has vanished. . . . You can never know how much daily & nightly blessedness was lodged in the child. I saw him always & felt him everywhere. On Sunday I carried him to see the new church and organ & on Sunday we shall lay his sweet body in the ground. You will also grieve for him.1 In another letter that same morning, Emerson shared this with Margaret Fuller: “My little boy must die also. All his wonderful beauty could not save him. He gave up his innocent breath last night and my world this morning is poor enough. . . . Shall I ever dare to love anything again?”2 Emerson visited his son’s grave regularly, but it is not is not known if he opened the casket to view his son’s face as he had done in the wake of the death of his first wife—his wife of sixteen months.3 The loss of a loved one occasions sadness and grief; the loss of a friend is a deep sorrow. Death interrupts life with the experience of profound loss, and that death should so deeply affect us allows us to see that death is what helps us become aware of what we most value in life. Without death, we would not know what those most valuable things...

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