Death and Emotions

Last semester in my Modes of Reasoning class we analyzed the last 405 statements of the inmates on death row executed in Texas (link to the last statements ). We created a numbering system to judge different social emotions like feelings of redemption, professions of innocence, remorse, and love. Then, in my case, we analyzed the results to see if there was a correlation between such emotions and the offender’s age at the time of the crime. Reading through each statement could be very emotional and depressing, but no statement was so eloquently worded as Plato’s comments on his sentencing. From both the death row statements and our readings, it is clear that the prospect of an imminent death leads one to question ideas about both life and afterlife. Like both Will and Logan mentioned in class, I think that in difficult times people tend to turn to a higher being or a more philosophical view of the world in order to better cope with their situation. A few days ago, even, I read an article in which Andrea Thompson asserts that loneliness breeds belief in the supernatural. (For the link to the article click here) Perhaps it is not only the comforting aspects of religion, but also the fact that religion deals with abstract concepts which lead to this turning to God.
((Plato points out that death is natural and universal))
It is not only in times of stress that people think about death, though. We all naturally die just as Plato points out that “had [his persecutors] waited a little while, [their] desire would have been fulfilled in the course of nature” (Plato 55). Philosophy, religion, psychology, history, and writing focus on the fears and ideas surrounding death perhaps because of this mystery coupled with the universality and naturalness of it. Even without physically dying everyone experiences small deaths throughout life. A lost friendship or relationship, a miscommunication, victimization: all are tiny losses or “deaths.” Thus, I think that when we read much of the Roman and Jewish texts dealing with God and also death, we should read them in a more general since.
((Anger, a reaction to loss))
These mini-deaths can make us feel helpless or lost just as “He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers”(Isaiah Chapter 53, 67) in Isaiah. My senior year of high school I took a class on death and dying which focused on issues such as mourning these small deaths and the feeling of helplessness that accompanies them. People feel sorrow but also other emotions like anger. Indeed, I am currently witnessing this anger as my roommate silently and coldly sits across the room from me. She is upset, with reason, that I am rooming with someone else next year. And I notice that when I first told her she got tears in her eyes and seemed sad, but now she clearly is extremely angry with me. Understandably, she thinks I should have told her that I was going to live with someone last semester (although I did not know at the time), and for that reason thinks I have back-stabbed her. Although my entire rooming situation is pretty messy right now, I notice that my roommate drama is like a small death in the sense that we have lost the close relationship (at least temporarily) that we once had. I think the best way to deal with issues such as this is to not shy away from the conflict and also not retaliate even if how one person is acting is unfair just as Isaiah “hid not [his] face from shape and spitting”(Isiah 69). Of course this can be very difficult.
Nevertheless, I think that it is human nature to feel upset over death and to wonder about what happens after physical death. If death is natural then so too are the emotions which flow from it. And according to Jewish writers of Genesis, “God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good” (Genesis A741C) so sorrow and anger cannot be that terrible in the long-run.