There Is Nothing in Death to Fear

(Translated from the "Pennsylvania Medical" journal)

"Those whom death has overtaken, and those who came to the very brink of death and then recovered, testify that the last moments of life are free of any history of pain."

One day the decreed term will reach its end, and you will die. If you are like all the rest of us, the likeliest thing is that you fear to die, in the belief that death is hateful. If so, you are mistaken.

For death is not hateful; death takes a man gently, as the drowse of sleep has taken him hundreds of times. It is enough for you to know that death is free of pain. So say the physicians; so say those who have approached the depths of death; so say the departing in the throes of death; and so say those who died and then came back to life (and that has indeed happened).

This is no denial of the pains that precede death. No: the slow rattle that accompanies pneumonia, the choking gasp that comes with drowning, and all the pains that arrive with fatal diseases and mortal wounds — these are part of life, not of death. So long as the body goes on struggling, clinging to life, it may suffer some racking pains. The truth is that the familiar, frightening phrase we have heard for so long — "so-and-so is enduring the agonies of death" — has filled most of our hearts with such terror that we have come to hold a false opinion: that our last days in this world, and our first acquaintance with the next, must needs be hateful and hideous.

Let him hear the testimony of one of the ablest of English physicians, Sir James Goodhart. In his days at one of the great hospitals he made a point of witnessing the last agony of every patient overtaken by the throes of death, and he came to a conclusion whose purport is this: "There is nothing in death to terrify one in whose presence it occurs; the veil dividing this world from the next is no more than a thin cloud through which a man passes almost without feeling it."

Dr. Alfred Worcester, formerly a professor at Harvard University, says: "Death is always easy at the last." Cancer, for instance, is among the most agonizing of diseases in its final days; yet hear what Dr. Hersley, one of the most famous specialists in cancer, says: "Death itself is attended by none of the pain or of the aches that a man feels in any true sense; rather, when we meet it, it is a transition attended by rest and security — an everlasting transition accomplished in the gentlest and most merciful of ways."

Bruce Barton, a famous writer, tells us of one such experience. In a certain hospital there was a cultured man of mature years, racked by pneumonia, over whom death had cast its shadow, until he came to the very brink of death, with some of the nurses and doctors around him holding his hands as though hoping to rescue him from death's slippery slopes; and not one of them could tell whether he was alive or dead. Then the cloud of death lifted, and the man lived.

Some time afterward Bruce Barton said to this man: "The doctors said at the time that you were on the edge of the abyss. How did you feel? And what passed through your heart?" He said: "Nothing at all! I did not care whether I died or lived. All I found was that I was utterly tired, and I kept saying to myself: now I can sleep."

These whom we have mentioned escaped death to tell us what they met — but what did those find who went and did not return? A group of scientists undertook the study of the "last words" uttered by 1,229 persons of distinction. In every 60 words there was one word which could be said to indicate a feeling of fear or of pain; as for the remaining words, 59 in number, they were words of many kinds, ranging by degrees from indifference to ecstasy.

Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke, in his book "Visions," records a curious study of the feelings that visit the hearts of those whose appointed hour has come. In one case he arranged with one of his patients that the patient should report to him what he experienced when the throes of death came over him; they agreed upon a method of finger signals so that he could answer the questions put to him when he could no longer manage speech with his tongue or a nod of his head. When the swoon of death took him, he kept signaling "no" to the question the doctor went on repeating: "Do you feel racking pains?"

Dr. Carrel says: death does not descend all at once, for death is two stages: general death, or the death of the creature; and particular death, or the death of the organs. General death comes with the last beat of the living heart; then the principal functions of the body cease, and the personality of the living being is extinguished; but each one of the organs dies by itself and in its own manner. The brain dies within a few minutes, whereas the kidney may live on after that for an hour or more.

Dr. Carrel calls the first stage

"reversible death," because life can return, or be recovered by swift and effective means, if the principal organs are sound and no disease has ravaged them. The second stage he calls "final death" — that from which there is no return. Here, for example, is a drowned man pulled from the water unconscious; here is a motorist found slumped over the steering wheel with the garage doors shut upon him and the car's engine running. The doctor comes and feels no pulse and can make out no breathing; he sends for a respirator (a breathing apparatus); the minutes speed by — and behold, life has returned to them.

On Dr. Carrel's view, this stricken being had died — died a real death as far as his consciousness and his body as a whole were concerned. And between those who answer the summons of the respirator and live again, and those whose case proves beyond help so that they remain dead, there is a difference: in the first group the principal organs have not yet been destroyed.

And what do those say who have been saved from death by drowning? You will find them always saying that they never suffered any racking distress after the first struggle for rescue; that overwhelming anguish lifts, and after it comes a rest like the doze of a sleeper. One of those who survived after drowning — Grant Allen, the famous English writer — wrote:

"I knew, and it settled in my soul, that I had once experienced death, and this had the greatest effect in making me indifferent to it. Death, like sleep, is free of pain. In death a man finds no pain to oppress the soul; the pain he meets lies in what precedes it — in the struggle and in the sense of its approach — and even this pain is less than what a man feels when a leg of his is broken or a tooth pulled. I felt no creeping of fear within me."

True science explains to us what we meet at the hour of death: the cause of what we experience in it is the effect of the dissolution that creeps through the organs. Each heartbeat is weaker than the one before it in its power to drive the blood through the veins of the body; and as the pressure of the blood steadily fails, a calm and a rest steal over the brain, owing to a gentle numbness whose source is the drying up of the well-spring of the body's vitality. For that mighty wave of human energy has begun to recede, like the ebb tide drawing back into the great sea of universal life, slipping away into depths far from its roaring surge! Then the body of the living relaxes, and receives the most wondrous of life's events with a soul at peace.