Ronnie
Bennet at Time Goes By has some interesting posts, and she had one a while back
that was titled, “Being 97”
in which a 97-year-old philosopher looks at his own death in an 18-minute video
created by his grandson. In the video clip he says “So, I just go on existing
until it is time to say goodbye.”
This was a dramatic revision of his thinking
in the 1990s. In his 1996 book about death, Herbert Fingarette argued that
fearing one’s own demise was irrational. When you die, he wrote, “there is
nothing.” Why should we fear the absence of being when we won’t be there ourselves
to suffer it?
Twenty
years later, facing his own mortality, the philosopher realized that he’d been
wrong. Death began to frighten him, and he couldn’t think himself out of it.
Fingarette, who for 40 years taught philosophy at the University of California
at Santa Barbara, had also written extensively on self-deception. Now, at 97,
he wondered whether he’d been deceiving himself about the meaning of life and
death.
“It haunts
me, the idea of dying soon, whether there’s a good reason or not,” he says in his
grandson’s short documentary Being 97. “I walk around often and ask myself,
‘What is the point of it all?’ There must be something I’m missing. I wish I
knew.”
The day
before he died in 2018, Fingarette uttered his final words. After spending many
hours in silence with his eyes closed, His grandson said, his grandfather
suddenly looked up and said, “Well, that’s clear enough!” A few hours later he
said, “Why don’t we see if we can go up and check it out?”
“Of course,
these cryptic messages are up to interpretation,” his grandson said, “but I’d
like to believe that he might have seen at least a glimpse of something beyond
death.”
In the film, Fingarette admits that there “isn’t any good answer” to the “foolish
question” of understanding mortality. “The answer might be … the silent
answer.”
Being 97 is
a moving film that explores the reflection that happens as we age, and the struggle of
accepting the inevitable. His grandson quietly observes the things that have
come to define his grandfather’s existence: the stillness of time, the loss of
ability, and the need to come to terms with asking for help. “It’s very
difficult for people who have not reached a state of old age to understand the
psychology of it, what is going on in a person,” Fingarette says.
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