Donnie Darko, I don't care about your dog

We die alone. It’s a phrase thrown around by teenage nihilists, armchair philosophers, and anything ever that’s tried to be “edgy” or “dark.”  Variations include “we all die alone,” and “you will die alone.” 

When you really think about it, the deep truth to that statement is more of a “duh.” We as humans exist as individual entities and so when we die, we will be the only one going where we are going, the only one in our dying body and mind. We will be finally separate from everyone and everything we have ever known, as none of it will be relevant in death and nothing can save us from our own mortality. So, we die alone. 

It sounds pretty awful until you start to wonder what exactly separates death from anything else we’ll ever experience. The answer is: absolutely nothing. We not only die alone, but we live alone, we love alone, we think alone, and we are even born alone. Each of us is trapped inside of ourselves, locked away from the deep connection that could be seen as the antidote to loneliness. We are not telepathic, nor are we parts of a collective hive-mind. There is no way to directly hook up one human’s subjectivity to another’s. Thoughts and feelings must be processed into and diluted by language in order to be shared. Every one of us is pasting ourselves into a “translate into:” box in an effort to be known by others, and we all know that when something is translated, parts of it change or are lost. 

We die alone because it is an experience that cannot be shared, just like existing. The powerlessness of others to stop or redirect our deaths is similarly reflected in life. While other humans may contribute to our comfort and bring us joy, they have no real control over our lives. Each of us is an autonomous individual, and while another person can attempt to coerce, guide, or intimidate us, we alone control our choices. No one has any power over our life that they do not have over our death. 

The only reason we react so negatively to the concept of a solo death is the connotations we have attached to both the ideas of death and isolation. We fear separation from other human beings in a real sense, as we are able to connect on certain levels, and the absence of that connection is dangerous, painful and unnerving. We must realize, though, that that connection is also available at the moment of death – we can still love and be loved, we can still converse, we can still coexist. But what we cannot achieve in death, we also cannot achieve in life. If people stopped living in denial of our isolation in life, our isolation in death would cease to matter to us at all.  All we can do is strive in life to come as close as we can to complete togetherness, accept that we cannot truly make it there, and understand that no part of our human existence is more limited or demanding than any other part.