Of Life and Death

—after reading Shen Deyong’s “We Need an Attitude of Living-toward-Death: Reflections on Hospice Care”

Prologue

While sorting old folders I unearthed a sheaf of notes written in my second year at university—ink still wet with eighteen-year-old bewilderment. Dated September 2020, the pages have quietly aged five winters. Some convictions have melted, others calcified, yet the whole seems worth preserving, the way one presses a fallen leaf between pages not to halt decay but to watch its slow, honest change of colour.

Life is Meaningless—so do what you can and what you want

What, then, is the meaning of life? Some will volunteer: to build, to triumph, to leave a luminous scar across the atlas. Yet suppose a person merely breathes for eighty seasons, stirs no rivers, births no miracles—shall we call that existence worthless? Step further: if human life is freighted with purpose, why should the bee’s meaning be pollination, the frog’s pest-control, the dog’s companionship, while the mayfly’s frenzy is dismissed as waste?

Life has no meaning. As Yu Hua writes in the Chinese preface to To Live: “Man lives for the sake of living, not for anything outside of living.” The plum-blossom does not bloom to decorate our verse; it blooms because it must. All so-called “meanings” are after-images projected by the human retina.

Yet we are cursed with thought. A body that secretes mind, a mind that turns back and edits the flesh. Out of this loop leap mathematicians who forget to eat, revolutionaries who kiss the rope, nurses who volunteer for plague wards. If you expect me to exalt them as proof that life is meaningful, I must disappoint you.

Their secret, I think, is chemistry: dopamine, endorphin—molecules doling out morsels of joy. The altruist and the addict chase the same inner sparkle; one takes the scenic route, the other the shortcut. The “noble” are simply those whose private pleasure intersects with public profit. A philanthropist donates and sees smiles—endorphin floods in; society applauds—dopamine follows. A virtuous circle, but a circle nonetheless.

We are born into this loop already soldered. The first lullaby, the alphabet, the flag at school assembly—all gentle firmware updates. By the time we imagine we are choosing a “life mission” the menu has been trimmed to socially digestible options. Even rebellion is prefabricated: the punk record, the purple hair, the Che Guevara poster—all stocked on the same shelf.

Meaning, if it arrives, is less a private revelation than a weather pattern: pressure systems of history, economics, language. The water takes the shape of whatever bottle it is poured into; call the bottle “evaporation” or “thirst-quenching” and you have your meaning.

So I no longer ransack the cosmos for purpose. I inherited a palette of colours, I paint within its borders, and sometimes the picture pleases others—good. The brush is moving; that is enough.

Dying for Dignity—permissible, yet rarely advisable

Thought grants us an exit door: we may refuse the gift. But to die for honour—brandishing death like a diploma—strikes me as vulgar arithmetic: one finite life exchanged for one abstract adjective.

The romantics call it courage; I call it littering. A corpse convinces no one, feeds no child, finishes no theorem. The chorus of eulogies is sung to the living, not the dead; the martyr is deaf to his own applause.

Still, the right must remain. Take Mr Mao Hongtao, former Party secretary of Chengdu University, who stepped into the Yangtze one autumn night. If the torment in his skull outweighed every filament still binding him—children, students, comrades—then the ledger was his to balance. We, the survivors, may mourn the subtraction; we may not audit the equation.

The body is private property; the social roles we inhabit are timeshares. To vacate the property is a solitary choice. To abandon the timeshare without notice is a breach of contract—understandable, punishable only by absence.

Life Should Be Addition, Not Subtraction

Heidegger counsels us to live toward death, to number our remaining mornings so that each burns brighter. I prefer the opposite bookkeeping: treat every dawn as credit, not debit.

Wake, and the ledger grows by one page, one synapse, one freckle of light on the kitchen wall. Die tomorrow and you have still gained today; die at ninety and the surplus is mountainous. The point is not to stretch the timeline but to thicken the pigment.

A day spent finishing a poem that required two yesterday has already doubled your span. A conversation that rewires a friend’s insomnia has added a night to the world. These are the only “supplements” I swallow—tiny, counterfeit eternities minted in passing.

As for euthanasia: when the ledger reverses—when every sunrise delivers only interest on pain, and no hand can be raised to add a single line—then a gentle full stop is mercy. The community will survive the loss; the treasury will even save. But the signature must be slow, inked in triplicate, witnessed by love and error alike, because the door swings only one way.

Envoi

Imagine existence as a board game whose rules were drafted by the long dead. Most of us shuffle our pieces along the printed paths, collecting coloured tokens that crumble if inspected too closely. A few redesign corners of the board—until the next shuffle erases their chalk lines.

I no longer ask the game to mean. I play because the dice are warm in my palm, because your piece intersects mine, because laughter ricochets off cardboard walls. When the final square arrives I will fold the board without protest, curious only whether the box lid closes with a soft wooden click or the hush of velvet.

Perhaps something travels on—an echo, a ripple in dark matter, a saved game file. Perhaps not. Either way, the prudent wager is to finish this round graciously, counters stacked, stories told, so that if the croupier invites us to ante up again we may rise without haste, pockets jingling with the only coins that cannot be confiscated: the ones we slipped, when no one was looking, into one another’s palms.