Jonathan Iwry | Beyond a hereafter

The Faithless Quaker | We mustn’t let hope of life after death distract us from the life we already have.

By Jonathan Iwry 11/02/14 10:39pm

T he c ollection of moments and experiences that was my great uncle came to an end this week.

After the service, my parents and I stepped away to visit my grandparents’ tombstone. My father reiterated what he had said in his eulogy moments earlier and what he had told me after my grandfather’s passing years before — that they would want us not to grieve their deaths, but to celebrate their lives.

It would take time for me to absorb the meaning of what he said. It was right around the time of my grandmother’s passing that I first read Voltaire’s magnum opus, in which an innocent and naive young man named Candide is cast from his uncle’s castle into a world of senseless misery. The story concludes with the suggestion that mortal suffering is beyond explanation, and Candide and his entourage content themselves by acquiring a garden and living simple, happy lives of hard work free of metaphysical speculation.

My grandmother also owned a garden. It was there, while picking figs from their trees and admiring the birds that swept in regularly for water, that she would urge me to live a life surrounded by beautiful things — not only aesthetically, but things that make being alive worthwhile.

Looking back, I see a bit of Candide in my younger self. The death of my grandfather robbed me of my naive  complacence about mortality, and I was forced for the first time to confront the fact that both my life and the lives of those I love will eventually end. The next 10 years were spent in search of answers.

As I treaded through the texts of my Jewish upbringing, I couldn’t help but think of Candide’s tutor, Pangloss, who tries to justify the horrors of life with abstruse theological arguments. Most of the religious wisdom I encountered held fast to the idea of a “world to come,” making groundless claims and fumbling to justify them on metaphysical (or just plain physical) grounds. These failed attempts didn’t seem far off from Pangloss’  empty reassurances that all suffering happens in accordance with a grand plan, and I came to suspect that the idea of the hereafter, like Pangloss’s name, might be “all tongue.”

Virtually every known culture offers commentary on what happens when we abandon our physical forms. And many people, in anticipation of an afterlife, fail to make the most of their time on Earth. The suggestion that death is not the end provides comfort and security, but it prevents us from seriously dealing with our mortal anxieties by pretending that they are unfounded.

I don’t believe in taking this life for granted. Obsessing over what happens after death is often a disguise for obsessing over death itself, and fearing the inevitable casts a bitter and unnecessary shadow over the time we still have. Others might feel that their time on earth is spoiled by its lack of permanence; I think that makes it all the more precious.

My great uncle understood better than most the miracle of simply being alive. Having survived the horrors of Auschwitz, his simple life in Baltimore was really an act of triumph, and he died, as his wife put it, “like a human being.” Countless others from his generation did not. His natural death at 95 is not a tragedy, but a final stroke of victory — the triumphant conclusion of a life lived in defiance of wickedness.

In keeping with my father’s and grandparents’ reverence for life (a different sort of optimism than that of Pangloss), his service featured little talk of the afterlife — of what would happen to him now that he had ceased to be. Rather than cloud our memory of him with fear or speculation, we commemorated the life he had led and the impression that he had left on the living.

There is too little time to be wasted worrying about the end or to delude ourselves into assuming that another life awaits us. As far as the evidence is concerned, this life is all we have. Rather than worry, we must direct our effo rts to better our time on earth and that of others — to live boldly and find beautiful things along the way. We must keep tending to our garden.

Jonathan Iwry is a 2014 College graduate from Bethesda, Md. His email address is jon.iwry@gmail.com. “The Faithless Quaker” appears every Monday.

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