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way, such a person has gained all that is required for going along superbly in business and social life, yes, for making a great success out of life. Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying. The despair that not only does not cause any inconvenience in life but makes life convenient and comfortable is, naturally enough, in no way regarded as despair.¹²

But Kierkegaard believes that this “convenient and comfortable” life is itself the greatest form of despair; it is the despair of self-deception, of “not wanting to be oneself, of wanting to be rid of oneself.”¹³ And the myriad ways in which we lie to ourselves about death are all too familiar. We believe in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife. We have children, in the hope of living on in them after we’re gone. We accumulate wealth, publish books, and produce works of art that will leave a lasting mark. We obsess about fitness and diet and cosmetically alter our physical appearance in our efforts to stay young. We treat aging and death as medical problems that can be solved with new treatments and technologies. We believe in our own specialness: death may happen to others, but it can’t possibly happen to me. We even avoid using the word “death” altogether, because of the singular horror it evokes. In his famous story The Death of Ivan Ilych, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy captures this deep-seated avoidance through his titular character, a shallow everyman suddenly stricken with a terminal illness who is in such a state of denial that he can speak of death only from a detached, third-person standpoint, as a nameless “It” that stalks him. As the illness progresses, his futile attempts to depersonalize death become more desperate.

      Ivan Ilych would turn his attention to it and try to drive the thought of it away, but without success. It would come and stand before him and look at him, and he would be horrified, and the light would die out of his eyes, and he would again begin asking himself whether It alone was true … He would go to his study, lie down, and again be alone with It: face to face with It. And nothing could be done with It except to look at it and shudder.¹⁴

Ivan Ilych is like all of us, clinging to familiar cultural norms and symbolic practices that shelter us from the terrifying mutability and impermanence of existence. They serve as character defenses that conceal death by creating the appearance that there is something stable, solid, and secure about our lives. Illness and old age are painful exercises in tearing those defenses down and in giving up on the illusion of control. Older persons are frightening to us precisely because they expose our own vulnerability, and we live in a state of denial by pushing them to the margins of our lives. When we mock older persons, we are drawing a clear distinction between “us” and “them.” In this way, the rampant ageism we experience today can be regarded as a manifestation of our society’s effort to deny and turn away from death. Even media images of so-called “successful aging” are often expressions of this denial, revolving as they do around tropes of autonomy, strength, and mobility. They generally betray the hard realities of growing old, of bodily pain and mental decline, of loss, of being confined to a wheelchair or nursing home. But, more importantly for the existentialist, they point to a deep despair founded on an unwillingness to be honest with ourselves. And Kierkegaard makes it clear that the masquerade is in vain; illness, disability, and death always catch up to us.

      Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived themselves that at last their true nature could not reveal itself.¹⁵

      It is clear that the midnight hour is coming, but here is the trick. For Kierkegaard, we should not recoil from death but earnestly turn toward it, welcome it, and work to integrate it into our lives. Death is our teacher. It is a reminder of our temporal nature, that our time is short, and that our lives cannot be delayed or postponed until tomorrow, next month, or next year. Rilke refers to this attitude as an affirmation of our existence, a state in which we don’t run away from death but befriend it, allowing it to “come very close and snuggle up to [us].”¹⁶

      Believe me that death is a friend, maybe the only one who is never, never deterred by our actions and indecision … and this, you understand, not in the sentimental–romantic sense of a denial of life, of the opposite of life, but our friend especially then when we most passionately, most tremblingly affirm our being-here … Death is the real yes-sayer.”¹⁷

This attitude of affirmation and acceptance is what Kierkegaard means by “earnestness” (alvor). It is to live with a sense of seriousness about death, and it is this seriousness that gives our projects a sense of urgency, meaning, and value that they otherwise wouldn’t have if we continued to drift along in self-deception, thinking that our time was limitless. “Earnestness,” in Kierkegaard’s words, “becomes the living of each day as if it were the last and also the first in a long life, and the choosing of work that does not depend on whether one is granted a lifetime to complete it well or only a brief time to have begun it well.”¹⁸ When our own death is squarely in view, it enriches the fleeting moments of our lives, allowing us to become fully present to their depth and poignancy. This kind of person, for Kierkegaard, is outwardly unremarkable. In Fear and Trembling, he suggests an earnest man could easily be mistaken for a clerk, a shopkeeper, or a postman; there is nothing “aloof or superior” about him. What stands out, however, is that he seems to “take delight in everything he sees.”

      He lives as carefree as a ne’er-do-well, and yet he buys up the acceptable time at the dearest price, for he does not do the least thing except by virtue of the absurd … Finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher.¹⁹

When Kierkegaard, writing for his nominally Lutheran readers in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, says that the earnest person lives “by virtue of the absurd,” he is making it clear that such a person recognizes the fundamental paradox of religious existence, that the divine is not to be found in some otherworldly realm; it is actually bound up in the temporal. It is the finite that has infinite significance. By soberly facing and accepting death, the true Christian experiences the divine in this life, and is able to “live joyfully and happily every instant,” seeing that each moment might be his or her last.²⁰ In this way the person recognizes an appalling truth about God: that “he wants you to die, to die unto the world,” because dying is a kind of freedom; it liberates us from trivial concerns and distractions and enables us to treasure the moments we have now rather than deferring life to some illusory future.²¹ The earnest person knows that we lie to ourselves when we think our happiness is always around the next corner, after the promotion, the wedding, the birth of the child, or the retirement. With death as our most uncertain certainty, all we have is this moment, and the moment is ambiguous; it is not just a cause for anxiety but a cause for joy as well. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger will later develop this idea in Being and Time, by writing: “along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility. In it, existence becomes free from the entertaining ‘distractions’ with which we busy ourselves.”²²

Oncologists and palliative care physicians have long been witnesses to this kind of personal transformation. They have treated terminally ill patients who were initially horrified at their diagnosis but eventually came to view it as liberating. In accepting death, their remaining days often lit up with a sense of urgency and deep meaning; the gravity of their condition pulled them away from frivolous quarrels and ego-driven concerns toward a feeling of gratitude for the short time that was left. Clinical psychologist Mary Pipher describes a conversation in which an oncologist tells one of his patients: “you are about to experience the most affirming era of your lifetime.”²³ Another patient, Kathy, who nearly died of kidney failure, echoes this sentiment, describing her own experience as an existential rebirth.

      The first Kathy died during dialysis. She could not make it long in the face of death. A second Kathy had to be born. This is the Kathy that was born in