We sometimes imagine our lives as though we are conductors of a locomotive, traveling through the countryside of our life as the crossties pass uniformly below. At intervals, we may flip the switch at a crossroads, moving ourselves onto new tracks headed towards a different point on the horizon. In this dream-world of our life and our living, the train only travels in one direction: forward. Behind us, all we leave is mist.

This way of conceiving of our life is quintessentially modern. It rests on the idea of time as a series of self-sufficient, self-standing events that always lead toward progress. We could say that this way of thinking about time itself has indeed enabled many kinds of progress: the coordination of vast kinds of labor and industry, scientific discoveries of many kinds, new ways of being human.

Death, perhaps especially sudden death — whether from the impingement of nature or the malice of man-made violence (war, say) — is not just an explosion on the tracks that leaves us holding fragments of wood and iron. It shatters this dream-world, revealing it’s partiality, the ways in which it is always illusory: an illusion driven by our compulsion for control, for order, for meaning; an illusion that forces us to disavow the immense, the chaotic, the untidy. 

Philosophers, or at least the philosophers who’ve always interested me, think a lot about death. Perhaps it is because death itself stands in defiance of the very idea of modernity. It says to us that man is nothing in the face of the vastness of the universe, in the face of God or Nothingness or whatever we might imagine lies beyond. Before that, whatever we call it, all our accomplishments are but Towers of Babel that can be torn down at any time as though we are nothing, that we ourselves could be scattered, our languages made into mere gibberish.

Many of these modern philosophers have focused in particular on our own deaths. For we stand in an odd relationship to our own death, in comparison to other events that belong to ourselves and to our lives. “Death is not an event of life,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously observed. “Death is not lived through.” That is to say, death is not not an event, not something that we can live through because at the moment that it happens, at the moment our own train stops, resting on that final crosstie, leaving only mist and an empty vessel, we are no longer there to experience it, to live through it as we have lived through every other event in our lives. 

But I want to say, too, though that Jules’ death cannot be for me just another event in my life. It is not just another crosstie, another crossroads, another countryside that I must pass through. I want to say odd and perplexing things to you, like: When Jules died, the man you once knew died with him. Before you stands a new being, born from weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

There are many reasons that I want to tell you this. 

One is: Jules’ death was not just the death of a human being who was in the process of being born. It was the death of a whole world, Jules’ world, a world in which I would be his father and Willa would be his mother. A world in which someone would be his closest friend, and his first love, perhaps even one day his own child. (The world of each of those people has changed now, too, though they will never know it.) 

Each of us has such a world, our world, that we share with others. And so when our loved ones die, the world we share with them also dies, in some sense. We die, in some sense. 

Maybe this is why, even though I want to be called a father, it is also deeply painful for me. I am a father of a child who died in childbirth and so my fatherhood in some sense also died in father-birth. If you are a father, you and I can reminisce about what it’s like to expect a baby or support our partners during labor, but there the similarities end. I cannot share with you about changing Jules’ diapers or having him crawl into our bed in the morning as a toddler to nestle under our hot breath. Instead, I must find other fathers who died in father-birth, who know what it might mean to inhabit this strange and terrible world where we are trying to father a dead child. 

Another reason is: Jules died before he could live, before he had language to make sense of his world, before he could fully inhabit this absurd, miraculous gift that is being human, and before he could understand this absurd, tragic theft that is the death of the young. So now I have to hold his dying for him and the living that was stolen from him; for he is not here to do it. I am trying, such as it were, to build a new world for Jules and me, now that he has died. It is, of course, no substitute in any real sense. But this, too, is why I must make these writings: to give Jules life for me, for you, for us. To make his world, our world, real. To make his death, our death, real too. 

If I did not tell you these things, and you are lucky in this life, you may never know how they feel, and the death of a child might remain inconceivable to you. But many of us suffer not just our own death, but the death of our loved ones, even the tragic death of loved ones lost before their time. In this age of crisis, death looms at every point on the horizon — though hope does too, since being alive always already entails hope. Nonetheless, I am sending you a report of the tracks that may lie ahead. And if death has already come to you, if you have lost your love, then I am trying to stand with you in the way I know how, as we grasp at the mist we have been left holding.

The truth, of course, is that I have not died, but I am forced to live without Jules. Or rather: I am forced to live with Jules-who-has-died rather than Jules-who-lives. I am learning what that might mean, and who I have now become, and it is not easy.

One thing I do know is that Jules’ death does not conform to the dream-world of self-standing, self-sufficient events that we often inhabit. Jules’ death sends shockwaves backward and forward that change the meaning of things that have come before and will change the shape of what’s ahead.

For instance, before Jules was born, we did not know his sex. Before, the meaning of this was: won’t it be a fun surprise to learn our baby’s sex when they are born. Now, the meaning of this is: if only we had known that Jules was Jules during the time that he was growing into a human being inside Willa’s belly, we might have known him just a little better while he was alive. I suppose this is what people mean when they speak of regrets upon a person’s death, and it is something we have, even though Jules had so little of what we usually think of as life.

So, too, the meaning of birthdays has changed. Before, the meaning of this was: The day I came into being, as if somehow I materialized spontaneously as I emerged from the womb. Now the meaning of this is: The day when I could have died, but didn’t.

We celebrate the miracle of birth, but generally hide and ignore that it is a fearful thing, too, a thing fraught with danger. As a good friend pointed out to me recently, a friend who knows of suffering and tragic loss, that is why parents look at Willa and I with a special kind of horror and compassion. We represent the irrepressible actualization of their worst fear, a fear they do not want to contemplate: the death of their own children.

My birthday this year was a time of anger and anguish, as many of you foresaw even before I did. The question that pressed upon my mind was: Why should I have survived? Why should I be gifted with 38 years of life, while my son Jules could not be gifted with a single day, a single hour? On Christmas, Willa was angry with Mary and baby Jesus that they survived. On my birthday, I felt angry at myself that I survived, while Jules did not. Why can’t I trade my years for even just a few days with Jules?

These why-questions have a kind of meaning, but just as much they are ways of saying: no! They are the millions of different ways of objecting to this state of affairs, this explosion on the tracks, the collapse of the dream-world in which we ordinarily live. Why, why, why — this is the sound of my forehead hitting again and again against the veil that separates me from Jules.

In these ways and more, Jules’ death both is and is not an event. Jules died on December 17, 2021. But his death also stands outside my life, outside of time, reshaping the meaning of events that have come before and the events that are to come. It reshapes who I am and how I understand myself. This is precisely why so many philosophers are interested in the question of death. Yet it is also perhaps a result of the intensified individualism of modernity and Cartesianism and capitalism that they confine their investigation of this phenomenon so narrowly to the self.

The death of those we love puts us face-to-face with the sharp edge between Being and Non-Being. In the terms of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (who was also a Nazi — the world is complex and filled with contradictions), I can say that Jules’ death reveals again to me the care structure of the world. The fact that the events and objects and people of this world are disclosed to us, that we come to grasp their very being as beings through our care for them. And it reveals, too, the utter groundlessness in which that caring takes place. That at any moment, each of us and those we love could cease to exist. So that in order to live authentically human lives, we cannot content ourselves to always only watch the countryside pass by with a sense of detachment, while avoiding contemplation of the danger on the tracks and the horizon in the distance. We must instead let our awareness of care and contingency ripple across all of our being, shaping every moment of the way we live. We must let our lives and our deaths, and the lives and deaths of those we love, call us forth into the being and loving and the suffering that is ours in this world, until we, too, find our end.

Photo: The High Bridge on the Great Georgetown Loop in Colorado, Universal View Company, 1906, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.