Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T08:12:14.451Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

My Own Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Deal on, Deal on, my merry men all

Deal on your cakes and your wine;

For whatever is dealt at her funeral today

Shall be dealt tomorrow at mine.

(Verse at an Irish Wake in 1810)

One day I shall be dead.

The thought came upon me suddenly, about half-way through a seemingly endless discussion of high medical politics. My mind wandered. This speculative essay is an attempt to make some general sense out of my personal relatively free association, with its clash of clever talk and chaotic emotion.

At first, the sentence ‘One day I shall be dead’ provided a subject for an entertaining philosophical word-game. I reflected upon the peculiar logic of the sentence—about how there could be any sense in which an experiencing T is in a state of being dead. I recalled the annoyingly opaque remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases. Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived through.’

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

Celoria, F. Burials and Archaeology. A Survey of Attitudes to Research’, Folkore, 77, 1966, pp. 161183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freud, S. Totem and Vienna, Tabu, Heller, Hugo 1913 English edition, Totem and Taboo trans. Straachey, J., London , Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950.Google Scholar
Freud, S. Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, pp. 337–258. London , Hogart, 1958.Google Scholar
Gorer, G. Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain, London , Cresset, 1965.Google Scholar
Hobson, A. Personal communication 1970, to a appear in Full circle. A study of Morals in Shakespeare. Awaiting publication London Chatto and Windus.Google Scholar
Kreeger, I. S. Personal communication, 1970.Google Scholar
Lifton, R. J. Psychological Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima’, Daedalus 92, 1963, pp. 462497.Google Scholar
Reprinted in Death and Identity, ed. Fulton, R., London , Sydney . Wiley, 1965.Google Scholar
Mccabe, H. Law, Love and Language. London and Sydney , Sheed and Ward, 1968.Google Scholar
Mcnulty, B. The Needs of the Dying. London , Guild of Pastoral Psycholgoy Pamphlet, No. 149, Jan. 1969.Google Scholar
Maslow, A. H. Cogniton of Being in the Peak Experiences’, Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1959, pp. 4366.10.1080/00221325.1959.10532434CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagy, M. H. The Cild's View of Death’ in The Meaning of Death, es. Feifel, H., New York , Mc Graw‐hill, 1965.Google Scholar
Natterson, J. M. and Knudson, A. G. JR. Observations Concerning Fear of Death in Fatally III Chidren and their Mother's’, Psychosomatic Medicine 22, 1960, pp. 456463.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ogden, C.K. and Richards, I. A. The Meaning of Meaning. London , Kegann Paul, Trench, Trubner , New York , Harcourt Brace, 1944.Google Scholar
O'suilleabhain, S. Irish Wake Amusements. Cork , Mercier Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Smart, N. Philosophers and Religious Truth London , S.C.M., 1969.Google Scholar
Van Gennep, A. The Rites de Passage, 1908. English Edition The Rites kof Passage, trans. Vizedom, M. B. and Vizedom, G. L. Caffe , London , Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logicao‐Philosphicus. German‐English, trans. Ogden, C. K. and Ogden, F. P. Ramsey , London , Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. Philosphische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., Oxford Blackwell; New York , Macmillan, 1953.Google Scholar