Picking Flowers and the Denial of Death

Written by Sophie Marx

If we stopped denying the inevitability of our own death, would we allow ourselves to live a life we truly desire?

A few years ago, I ordered a book that had innocently caught my attention on Pinterest: Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. To say that it has shaped my life in ways I never fathomed would be a gross understatement. Gradually, Becker’s words took hold of me, invading my mind from within. Never before had I felt such relief amid misery—gaining the ability to fit mismatched puzzle pieces of my surroundings with my life. I felt seen by this man whom I would never know. I cried, miserably curling up during long nights on my couch, unable to put the book down, craving someone to talk to about the insights I was gaining. I felt numb, as if my inner self had died. Turning the last page brought together all the feelings that had passed through me while reading the book, forming a sense of attainment.

As the book promises, it starts with death: one that is unforeseen, as it is the death of the author himself. Shortly after submitting the manuscript, his theory was, whether by chance or a higher power, to be tested on himself.

Upon hearing the news of the author’s beforestanding passing, the publisher hurried to his bedside for their first conversation. The question not only he was asking himself, but most likely everyone who hoped to find a pinch of salvation in the book, was whether Becker felt prepared to die. Would he have regrets? Would he be calm? More specifically, did his way of thinking not only enable him to live an authentic life but also take away his fear of impending death? And would his book grant the same grace to us?

One of Becker’s key arguments is the role religion plays in our relationship to death, with its promise of the afterlife. Many world religions view our time on earth as God’s punishment, reducing it to our banishment from paradise. Only if we adhere closely to the religion’s rules will we be rewarded with access to the afterlife.

In the 19th century, during a time of heightened dichotomy between traditional religious views and modern scientific perspectives, Karl Marx remarked that “criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”

Becker deduced a similar ideology from his sociological observations. As people slowly started questioning religious teachings, the science-rooted phenomenon opened people’s eyes to the mythical aspects of religion. These imaginary flowers, which had once beautified many harmful teachings, no longer disguised the reality of human suffering through religion. Like Marx, Becker believed in freeing oneself from limiting beliefs and immersing oneself in life—to pluck the living flowers.

If we spend our lives seeking our purpose in death or are too afraid of dying that it renders us numb and makes us submit our free will to pre-existing societal and religious norms of who we should be and what we should do, then all we will have achieved by the end of our time is wasting our precious life.

The Denial of Death was published in 1973, a time when the church’s influence was no longer omnipresent, yet its teachings had ingrained itself into the collective subconscious and has become a natural part of our morals, norms, and culture even today.

While religion can provide us with hope and comfort—the knowledge of not being alone—it has simultaneously caused people to confine their minds in fear, leading them to live lives mirroring ideals from religious writings that have been internalised in societal expectations of leading a life of pre-determined purpose.

The way religion and the obligation to fulfill ones position in society can cause the mind to spiral and reduce life to something that without religious reprise is impossible to endure is a main theme in Simone de Beauvoirs “The Inseperables”. 

Based on herself (in the book names Sylvie) and childhood love and best friend Zaza (in the book named Andrée) we witness Sylvie struggling with losing her religion and the repercussions this has on other people’s perception on her while Andrée is unable to deviate from the family imposed societal expectations that determine her life. Unable to reconcile her spirit with her religion, her family’s expectations and her position in society, she submits to what religious teachings voiced through her family demand of her and as a result suffers from unhappiness, showing tendencies of self-harm and suicidal ideations. 

As teenagers Andrée asks Sylvie; “Sylvie, if you do’t believe in God, how can you bear to be alive?”

“But I love being alive,” I said.

“So do I but that’s just it; if I thought that the people I loved would die and that would be the end of them, I would kill myself immediately.”

“I don’t want to kill myself,” I said. After that conversation, before which Andrée struggled with practicing her faith she took Communion again that Sunday.

Years later as University students, the pressures her family and status in life demanded of her, Andrée dropped an axe on her foot to temporarily get out of her family commitments that rule over her life. 

“I will never understand how you had the courage to do that.”

“You would have, if you’d felt trapped like I did.” She touched her temple. “I was having the most terrible headaches.”

“You don’t have them anymore?”

“Much less frequently. Since I wasn’t sleeping at night, I was taking maxiton and kola“ (An Amphetamine and a source of caffeine)

“You’re not going to start that again?”

“No. When we get back, it will be painful for a couple of weeks, until Malou’s wedding; but now I feel more up to it.”

Andrée’s life was pre-determined by her family’s religious believes and throughout the book it is undeniable that it was trying to align who she is and what she wants out of life with the reality that she was not in control over her own life that cost her her mental wellbeing. It wasn’t just her faith that drove her to being unwell, but the way it was used by her family and society – a tool to control her. 

Since we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a higher power, in order to live a fulfilled life of our own desire, I, like Sylvie or Ernest Becker, prefer to live under the assumption of there not being an afterlife. For the simple reason that while heaven or reincarnation cannot be proven, we do have our life on earth, and we should not waste this gift. Fearing and, consequently, denying death might be one of the main reasons people do not dare to make choices for themselves. Operating under the judgmental eyes of society, it appears easier to conform and choose a widely accepted path than to dare to be true to oneself and risk being perceived as a societal outcast.

But if we look inward and ask ourselves how we would want to live the one life we have been granted for certain, what would we actually want to do with it? Would our priorities change? Would our dreams? Perhaps we would no longer see the point in pleasing others or in slaving away in a nine-to-five job in a profession we never felt passionate about in the first place. Would accepting our mortality elevate us to the point of no longer wanting to fit in and instead allow us to live happily in unconventionality? I believe so.

One writer who explored this theory in his novel “A happy death” was the Algerian born writer Albert Camus whose existentialist hypothesis inadvertently fit in with Becker’s concept in the Denial of Death. Following the philosophical revelations of the wealthy Zagreus, the book’s main character Patrice Mersault takes fate into his own hands and kills Zagreus for his money in order to test the dead man’s hypothesis that financial independence is the key to freedom and consequently, the key to happiness. 

After trevaling extensiely to find happiness Mersault is plagued by an emptiness within himself from living a life that is not authentic to himself. Upon returning to Algiers living a more simple life close to nature and in solitude he at last feels more contempt in his life. The true test to whether Zagreus hypothesis did in fact result in a happiness is posed when Mersault can feel death slowly consuming him. 

Initially struggling with the realisation that his life was soon coming to a end in sickness, his philosophy regained control; “before losing consciousness he had time to see the night turn pale behind the curtains and to hear, with the dawn and the world’s awakening, a kind of tremulous chord of tenderness and hope which doubtless dissolved his fear of death, though at the same time it assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been his whole reason for living.”

“He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence – they were afraid of death because of the sanctions it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.”

Whether we look for insights in literature or in our own lives, we have to remind ourselves that fictional characters too are a reflection of reality and their struggles and our own often stem from similar causes. Therefore, as we look into the lives of Sylvie, Andrée, Patrice Mersault and Ernest Becker through different paths they concern themselves with unifying a fulfilled existence with the inevitability of death, looking beyond religious explanations to soothe our soul for the risk that living someone else’s truth would stop us from truly living at all. If we deny ourselves the kaleidoscopic whole of our identity, we will not allow ourselves to be the person we truly want to be. This, at least, was the mindset Becker imparted on his deathbed, a veil of calmness originating in his heart and draping over the room for his publisher to feel.