I Shall Die?!

How many times have you shed tears simply because it was an occasion on which sadness was expected?

Are you truly afraid of death, or just rehearsing a response that you were taught to give?

In Tibet, the body of the dead is carried to the mountain’s crown and given to the vultures—a rite without coffin, without lament.

The sky burial fractures the inherited image of how one ought to meet death. Yet the jolt it delivers is itself a mood, born not of death, but of the culture that cradles it.

The Illusion of Mourning

I recall an essay on the Tibetan sky burial. The author argued that the real question is not why they treat death in this way, but whether we have ever truly asked ourselves how we shall die. 

Between these two stances, Kierkegaard, after tracing the knot of self, existence, anxiety, and death, divides our relation to mortality into mood and earnestness. These two responses are intertwined. 

"To think oneself dead is earnestness, to witness the death of another, is a mood(Humbert 45)."

Mood, in Kierkegaard’s sense(1993), is an inauthentic feeling—a defensive, externally orientated, unexamined and unreflected attitude”(Spitzenstätter and Schnell 1219). Born of having internalized society’s view of death, an act of merely witnessing it. He treats mood as our habitual stance toward death—fear, grief, even indifference or avoidance. At its core, it is an evasion: we do not face our own death, but passively inherit the attitudes of others toward it.

Earnestness, by contrast, is an inward awakening. Arises when one confronts one’s own mortality and, in that recognition, seeks the meaning of life, attaining a freedom of the spirit.

The word earnest comes from the Old English eornost, meaning "ardent," "sincere," "grave." It is not mere seriousness, but a way of meeting something, especially life’s most essential questions, such as faith, morality, and death, with authenticity, resolve, and a refusal of frivolity. 

In the context of this essay, it signifies both truthfulness and agency: the moment one realizes I too shall die, and from that realization begins to ask, in all honesty, what it truly means to live.

The Freedom of Dying

In the twentieth century, the advances in public health and medicine, along with rising living standards, have extended human life and shifted our fear of death toward a joy in new life.

Yet the cost was subtle. Today, public sympathy for private death has grown thin. The individual is left to face death and grief in solitude, to part in silence, seldom pausing to grasp what it means for a life to vanish.

In The Hour of Our Death, historian Philippe Ariès traces five historical phases in humanity’s attitude toward death: the medieval tamed death; one’s death; the death of the other; and, in modernity, the forbidden or invisible death (Ariès 5–6).

Sociologist Geoffrey Gorer went so far as to liken private mourning to masturbation—performed in secrecy, and, once made public, veiled with prudery (Gorer). Death became a subject to be swiftly disposed of.

And then, on the high plateau, in the rite of sky burial, the ‘civilized concealments’ we cling to are torn apart, as if by the vultures themselves. Death is no longer a private tragedy; it is returned, bare and unmediated, to the sky and the earth.

For many outsiders who come to witness it, this refusal to adorn death is unbearably direct: the end of life is laid open before us without a veil, and we are unsettled. Yet who is truly doing the avoiding—the sky burial, or ourselves?

For the devout Tibetans, sky burial is not mourning but release. Death is met not with evasion, but with an earnest acceptance of life’s end, and an offering back to nature and all living beings.

Here, death ceases to be merely a scene staged by society—a mood—and becomes an authentic dialogue between the individual and faith—earnestness.

Only when one earnestly faces the fact I shall die can one begin to live, moving forward in the loves and hatreds of the world with peace and with freedom.

Work Cites

(In the order of appearance)

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and trembling/repetition. Vol. 6. Princeton University Press, 2013.

中国社会科学文库-《生命的伦理：克尔凯郭尔宗教生存伦理观研究》本书写作目的与基本结构. www.sklib.cn/booklib/databasedetail?SiteID=122&Type=literature&ID=4752205&fromSubID=.

Humbert, David J. Freedom and Time in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. 1983, McMaster University, thesis, p. 45. McMaster Digital Repository, MacSphere.

Spitzenstätter, Daniel, and Tatjana Schnell. “Effects of Mortality Awareness on Attitudes Toward Dying and Death and Meaning in Life—a Randomized Controlled Trial.” Death Studies, vol. 46, no. 5, Aug. 2020, pp. 1219–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2020.1808737.

Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. 5-6.

Gorer, Geoffrey. Death, Grief, and Mourning. 1965.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Stages on Life’s Way. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1988.

中文版昨天已经先发布了，本来想着是一句中文配一句英文这样一次性发完，但是预览之后感觉读着会有点割裂。其实如果细看这两篇是能感受到我处理句子和结构是有很多区别的，所以两种混着读远没有通篇一种语言读下来地舒服。

（为了最大程度地保留本来就不多的语言张力，先这样试试 :-D

谢谢你的阅读❤️