Learning to Die, a Little at a Time

In an early essay, Michel de Montaigne borrowed an idea from Cicero, who had taken it from Plato's portrait of Socrates: that to philosophise is to learn how to die. The young Montaigne took the instruction seriously, perhaps too seriously. He had lost his closest friend and his father within a few years, and he resolved to keep death always in mind, to rehearse it constantly, so that it could never catch him unprepared. It is an admirable programme. It is also, as he later discovered, slightly exhausting.

Then, in his thirties, Montaigne was thrown from his horse and knocked unconscious. As he came round, bleeding and barely able to see, he felt not terror but a strange, drifting softness, as if he were letting himself slide gently away. He described the experience years later in an essay on practice, and it changed him. Death, approached from close up, had seemed less monstrous than the idea of it. Perhaps, he began to suspect, the rehearsal had been the frightening part.

His later writing relaxes considerably. In one of the final essays, he suggests that if we do not know how to die, we need not worry, because nature will teach us fully and adequately when the time comes. The advice sounds almost careless, but it is really a redirection of attention. Montaigne stops rehearsing death and starts attending to living: his meals, his kidney stones, his cat, his friends, the pleasure of a good conversation. Preparing to die, it turns out, looks a lot like paying attention.

What remains

The ancients offered a second consolation that still carries weight. Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, because where death is, we are not, and where we are, death is not. We will never experience being dead. What we fear, then, is a kind of illusion, a future scene in which we imagine ourselves present at our own absence. The argument does not dissolve grief for others, and it was never meant to. But it can loosen the grip of dread about ourselves.

Marguerite Oduya has worked as a palliative-care nurse in Manchester for nearly twenty years, and she is wary of grand philosophies of death. What she sees, she says, is simpler. At the end, people rarely speak about careers or possessions. They speak about particular rooms, particular afternoons and particular people. Those who seem most at peace are not the ones who achieved most, but the ones who have said what they needed to say, often long before they had to.

People rarely talk about their achievements at the end. They talk about who came to the kitchen, and who they wish they had called.

This suggests a gentler way of thinking about legacy. We tend to imagine it as something monumental: a building, a foundation, a name on a plaque. But for most of us, what remains will be smaller and more durable. A way of laughing that a grandchild inherits. A recipe. A habit of asking strangers how they are. Some families keep an old tradition of writing an ethical will, a letter setting out not who gets the furniture, but what the writer hoped their life had meant.

Learning to die, then, may not require constant rehearsal after all. It may simply mean living in a way that leaves little unsaid, repairing what can be repaired, and noticing the ordinary days while they are still ordinary. Montaigne, who began by trying to master death, ended by making friends with his own life. That is the more difficult achievement, and perhaps the only preparation that actually works.