The Fantasy of the Good Death

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION

Floating around Christian bioethics conversations is a trope that operates like an urban legend, bemoaning the fact that somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to die well. Folks in the past, so it goes, wanted slow deaths so that they could get their spiritual affairs in order, namely, by resolving sin against God and others. Conversely, the claims continue that we moderns care little for dying well and pine for quick and painless deaths—that is, if we cannot figure out a way to avoid death altogether. Of course, we would rather not die, but if it really cannot be helped, we prefer not to know death is coming. Descriptions of this kind have as their larger target secular culture, compromised churches, professional medicine, American consumerism, or other familiar bugaboos. In valorizing good and bad deaths, purveyors of this rhetorical move tellingly pass over important details and rest their claims on shaky, reductive accounts of contemporary and historical communities.

Even if one were to take seriously the implied claims about contemporary American Christianity animating this description—namely, that traditions linking sin and death no longer hold sway, that people today do not want to “die well,” largely because they do not want to die at all, and that sin is largely beside the point if death is viewed as the worst thing that can happen to you—the question remains, “What does one do with all this?” One might take the trope’s route of cultural grievance, complaining that vicious people die viciously, and so on. In this essay, we suggest another route. Instead of complaining about modern attitudes about sin and death, we examine the trope and ask what it presumes about persons. While we take time to assess whether the formulation of bygone good death holds up under historical scrutiny, our larger goal is to ask why the idea of good deaths proves so enticing and whether or not what we call “the fantasy of the good death” is itself another form of the evasion of the complexities of death this rhetorical flourish, at its best, tries to register.

One of the things that is interesting about a person’s attitude toward death, especially her own, is that it demonstrates just how complex human beings are. A person can have in place the perfect death plan—sins accounted for, relationships reconciled, priests and loved ones assembled, tranquil background music, etc.—and yet, when death actually comes knocking, everything goes out the window. In fact, good people often die badly, and, sometimes, bad people die well. Both are true for complex reasons. We worry that the tropic formulation trades on a simplistic anthropology that belies the complexities of how persons operate in the world. In this essay, we are interested in these complexities and a better theological acknowledgement of them, not least because the fantasy of the good death ill prepares one for real death. We argue that valorizing pious religious death and profane ugly death loses sight of these complexities, which we think should comprise any account Christians give about what persons are and are in their dying—an account that often goes by the name “theological anthropology.” It is the simplistic theological anthropology more than the tropic formulation—the anthropology the trope smuggles in—that concerns us. Our argument proceeds by first examining the fantasy of the good death, measuring it against a historical record with an examination of the Ars Moriendi tradition, and then thinking more broadly about what motivates it. Along the way, we consider a recent film, The Farewell, where good-death fantasies comically run up against death’s reality and where goodness, truth, and beauty show up anyhow.

II. ENTERTAINING FANTASIES

In challenging what we are calling the fantasy of the good death, we are not denying that some deaths are better than others or that Christians have interests in dying well. Death plays a significant part in the story Christians tell. Death’s sting and the lengths people go to avoid it are taken as paradigm examples of sin’s destructiveness. Inversely, Christ’s resurrection and the church’s baptism into Christ’s death are lifted up as points where sin’s destructiveness is not only turned but overcome. Living as Christians entails living into Christ’s resurrection—what Philippians 3 describes as fellowship with Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection—which definitionally entails death. Much of Christian faith comes then to this question of one’s attitude toward death and whether one’s posture is appropriately inclined to resurrection as death’s overcoming. Part of the formula’s goal in extolling good deaths is to get Christians to remember that dying well is as much a part of their stories as living well, indeed that attitudes toward life and death render one another intelligible. Purveyors of the trope are all too aware that Christians are prone to forgetting their baptism at precisely those moments when they most need to remember. They worry about the well-lived life being thrown off by the threat of death, whether a grim medical diagnosis or some sudden tragedy, and about the role modern medicine plays in these upheavals. Christian commitments seem to give way at those moments, raising questions about whether they were all for show. The big idea here is that dying badly makes no sense in a well-lived life, that such stories become hard to follow. We are interested in examining this preoccupation for narrative coherence, the notion that a life should be straightforwardly coherent from birth to death. We wonder whether the notion ends up betraying the very thing it sets out to honor. Again, none of this is to deny that good deaths matter for Christians, but insofar as that is true, it behooves us to interrogate good-death fantasies and what motivates them. We suspect these fantasies follow overly tidy construals of what counts for narrative coherence and thus fail to reflect properly the complexities of human life, especially at its end.

Stanley Hauerwas has famously floated a version of the good-death fantasy. It comes in a passing comment he sometimes makes for rhetorical effect. In the essay “Sinsick,” for instance, the formula arrives in the context of critiquing what the essay takes to be modern society’s attitudes toward sin, sickness, and death. The essay makes its case by first setting up a suggestive relationship on which it later hangs its critique, where the force of the latter is drawn from the suggestiveness of the former. Hauerwas writes, “Sin, like sickness, seems more like something that happens to us than what we do. Yet as Christians, we believe that we are rightly held accountable for our sins” (2000, 8). Invoking accountability as he does is instructive of how Hauerwas simplifies things in order to make his point. After all, when it comes to sin or sickness, accountability—that which Christians are “rightly” held to—is hardly a straightforward matter. How, for instance, does one think about accountability regarding Christian participation in structural evils, not of one’s individual making? One might ask, “What does accountability mean in a context where sin has become unavoidable?” The question underscores the reality that it is appropriately difficult to track the many threads of agency and action running through everyday notions of “accountability.” Hauerwas’s formulation passes too quickly over these difficulties.¹ The ambiguities surrounding accountability for sin are not only analogous to ambiguities surrounding accountability for sickness, but more importantly, they together call attention to genuine difficulties regarding responsibility within worlds, not of one’s making.

Hauerwas takes advantage of this ambiguity in a way that lends force to the strong distinction he next draws between past and current attitudes toward death. The suggestive but undefined relationship between action and accountability on the one hand, and sin and sickness on the other, allows him to make it seem like modern attitudes toward death—or anything else for that matter—are the sole possessions of those who hold them, in turn allowing him to nostalgically valorize the vicious present and the virtuous past. Harping on the practical atheism he sees running through much of contemporary Christianity, Hauerwas pushes the trope that Christians once feared death only insofar as they feared sin. Christians no longer care about sin and so are left with death as an evil in itself. He writes,

Even if we say we believe in God, most of our lives are constituted by practices that assume that God does not exist. The most effective means I have discovered to illustrate this is to ask people how they want to die. We all want to die quickly, painlessly, in our sleep, and without being a burden…It is quite interesting to contrast this with the past, when the death Christians feared was a sudden death….[for] they might die unreconciled with their neighbors, their church, and, of course, God. (Hauerwas, 2000, 8)

It is a remarkable set of claims with undeniable rhetorical power. In order to get to our larger point about the complexity of persons and how those complexities inform attitudes toward death, we raise two questions about Hauerwas’s formulation: first, what picture of persons does it get away with, and second, what are the broad historical strokes that comprise that picture? We think a closer examination of the history Hauerwas invokes greatly complicates the picture he paints. Attention to those attitudes toward death and sin shows that things are less straightforward than Hauerwas lets on, and we think, again, instructively so since we are talking about human attitudes toward death, where all the complications populating selfhood come into focus or fail to. In the same way that Hauerwas’s ready picture of happy death obfuscates a more serious moral psychology, we present actual death in order to lay its complexity bare.

III. ARS MORIENDI

It is hard to know exactly what Hauerwas has in mind in his article “Sinsick” when he references “the past, when the death Christians feared was a sudden death.” There are certain moments in Western history that resemble Hauerwas’s description, the closest example being attitudes toward death in the late medieval period, particularly evident in the development and popular reception of the Ars Moriendi literature. In fact, in various lectures and public discourses where Hauerwas makes this same rhetorical appeal to the “past,” he explicitly references medieval Christian’s desire to die well, even alluding to the Ars Moriendi tradition in particular.² Given this connection, it is fitting to compare the historical record with Hauerwas’ description.

These Ars Moriendi manuals for dying—written with the express purpose of training readers for good deaths—have all the markings of those good-death tropes. They presume that dying well is a process that plays out in extended closing moments, thus demanding time. They take these singular moments as both opportunity and temptation, with paths to reconciliation or damnation close at hand. One can repent of outstanding sins with the promise of blessedness. Death then becomes the capstone of a life that now finds its fullest realization. These manuals lay out steps for what we have thus far called (following what are popularly called “birth plans” for expectant parents) “death plans” and their idealized hopes for how things might go—sins accounted for, relationships reconciled, priests and loved ones assembled, tranquil background music, etc. Yet, on closer examination, one finds that Ars Moriendi issue as specific responses to complex circumstances determined by specific cases. They work less like prearranged death plans and more like exercises in practical reasoning. Attention to the historical context and rhetorical content of the Ars Moriendi, to which we now turn, will prove, relative to Hauerwas’s formulation, somewhat disappointing.

Coming in the shadow of the Black Death and coupled with regular wars and bouts of famine, the 15th century, according to historian John Huizenga, sits apart from the rest of Western history: “No other age has so forcefully and continuously impressed the idea of death on the whole population” (1996, 156). The period’s unusual relation to death is not simply a function of lots and lots of people dying but also indicative of how all that dying forced certain representations of death. During this period, attitudes toward death morph into entirely “self-preoccupied” obsessions, most evident in the danse macabre, which presented death “only as misfortune and terror” (170-71). One finds emerging from the Black Death a peculiar fascination with the self, which Huizenga attributes to the convergence of death’s practical demands and the shifting theological perspectives attempting to meet those demands.³ During the 14th century, Philippe Ariès argues, a general doctrinal emphasis on the Last Judgment was replaced by a new focus on the last event of one’s own life. Attention turned to the individual soul just as the broader cosmic drama receded from popular imagination (Ariès, 1981, 107).

Casualties from the Black Death (bubonic plague) varied greatly, but numbers were consistently high and devastating. The disease, known for manifesting large swellings (buboes) on the body and black discoloration of the skin, killed nearly half of those who contracted the disease. After onset, the symptomatic rarely lived longer than three to five days (Platt, 1996). In England, for example, many regions lost half of their inhabitants, with some small villages nearly disappearing altogether (Platt, 1996). Moreover, and important for our purposes, it was often the clergy who suffered the largest casualties. For example, in the outbreak of 1348–9, Platt (1996) estimates that 60% of parish priests perished. It is little wonder that an increased religious fascination with death coincided with the bubonic plague as the heavy toll on clergy shifted responsibility for the soul from communities to individuals.

Before the Black Death came along, parish priests cared for the dying by administering confession and Eucharist (viaticum) and bestowing Extreme Unction (the anointing of the sick). The extreme privacy of these moments turned outwards as funeral processions moved from the home through the community to the sanctuary, pronouncing the person’s final identity with the church (Herlihy, 1997, 60–61). The plague resulted in “a failure to perform the accustomed rites” (Herlihy, 1997, 61). The combination of the plague’s widespread devastation and the threat posed to communities shut everyone behind closed doors, turning everything private. Consider the following account from 1348: “[Sick] relatives were cared for not otherwise than dogs. They threw them their food and drink by the bed, and then they fled the household…No priest came to hear the confession of the dying, or to administer the sacraments to them. People cared only for their own health…” (quoted in Herlihy, 1997, 62).⁴ By the 15th century, it was common in Europe for Boards of Health to require not only separation from but quarantine of the sick (Herlihy, 1997, 60-62). Isolation became central, community the exception.⁵

It was within these extenuating circumstances that Ars Moriendi manuals offered guidance. These late medieval texts (both written and illustrated) were intentionally simple instructions suited for audiences under stressed conditions. They served both dying laity and those attending them. There was the longer Latin text, dating to the first quarter of the 15th century presented under the title Tractarus artis bene morendi, and a shorter version generally associated with the iconic graphic woodcut prints. Extant copies of the Tractarus in English date from the middle of the 15th century (see Atkinson, 1992, xi). As a specific example, consider Crafte and Knowledge For to Dye Well (c. 1490), an anonymously translated text of the Tractarus (Atkinson, 1992, xi). Crafte begins with the acknowledgment that death is indeed terrifying, but reassures that for “euery good perfyte Chysten man, and also euery other man, though he be imperfyte and late conuerted from synne, so he be verily contryte…shul not be sory, ne troubled…” (Atkinson, 1992, 2). It envisions the deathbed as an elaborate scene where Christian faith plays out. The repentant comes to accept death as she passes trials now set before her. Carved block prints illustrate instructional deathbed scenes where Moriens, the dying one, lies in repose surrounded by heavenly and demonic hosts (see fig. 1). Family, friends, physicians, and priests gather in attendance. Temptations coming in the face of death are listed and recounted (temptations to faithlessness, despair, impatience, pride, and avarice) along with instructions for overcoming. A short catechism for Moriens and instructions for how attendees might pray for him testify to the thrust of the text: gaining victory and beatitude for the dying.⁶

Fig. 1.

c. 1470.

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As death and isolation loomed large, Ars Moriendi offered a highly contextualized procedure centered on individual sin and reconciliation. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries exerted extraordinary stress, necessitating makeshift theologies and practices of death. In the face of extenuating circumstances, the individual—aided by a hastily assembled community if circumstances permitted—became responsible for her death in a way particular to that historical context. Ars Moriendi tries to transform a moment of terror in an age of threatened isolation into an occasion for something better, serving a very narrow range of human experiences. Yet, it is hardly the universal mold for future attitudes and practices. If anything, Ars Moriendi marks a tragically limited moment in the history of the ecclesial community’s response to death. Instead of a universal exemplar, the Ars Moriendi tradition is one valuable resource in the church’s historical response to numerous plagues. When facing new threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic, learning from robust accounts of past responses to crisis, including attending to the limits of these accounts, may generate new ways of moving forward in the face of death.⁷ Nevertheless, why would one want to make a general rule of Ars Moriendi when doing so belies its historical context—the conditions under which Ars Moriendi proved useful—and makes a virtue out of plague-driven isolation?

Tropes like Hauerwas’, as should be evident by now, trade on mythical readings of the past hastily applied to the present. The problem arises when the rhetorical flourish is confused for something more; perhaps some will not guess that Hauerwas speaks in hyperbole. Worst still, if one looks to take advantage of the confusion, manipulating the fact that most will not be able to identify historical shifts or particular contexts. In these circumstances, Hauerwas’ deployment of the trope achieves the desired effect of licensing superficial critiques of modern culture. It will do so because invoking “the past” makes it seem like real Christians always have and always should fear sin more than death and have viewed a prolonged death as the ideal proving ground for their faith. Moderns, in turn, are shamed for failing to live up to those standards.

IV. THE DIVIDED SELF

We have thus far articulated what we think the fantasy of the good death is after and have tried to show how its formula assumes support that the historical record cannot offer. However, our concern here is not historical accuracy but rather fidelity to humanness and the way the trope—i.e., folks in the past knew how to die well, but we modern Christians lost our way—betrays an insufficiently theological anthropology. One way of getting at that is to turn to a debate in moral philosophy. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams argues that Aristotelianism is the strongest available account of ethics, and yet still proves wanting. Williams’s constructive goal is to move beyond moral philosophy’s limits toward modes of self-actualization that apply the best of ethical theory while eschewing all the hang-ups. For our purposes, what matters is that the very thing Williams finds deficient in Aristotle’s ethics ends up looking suspiciously like that on which Hauerwas’s tropic formulation depends.

We said earlier that formulations like Hauerwas’ are especially concerned with the narrative coherence of Christian lives and, hence, the worry that dying poorly can throw off otherwise coherent stories.⁸ Hauerwas thinks that dying well substantiates one’s life, where well-lived lives can be put to apologetical use—in dying well, Christians witness the truthfulness of Christ’s resurrection.⁹ Williams believes that that kind of formulation presumes way too much. He doubts that human lives are unified enough to tell stories that can bear the rhetorical force someone like Hauerwas wants. Now, Williams, unlike Hauerwas, does not need them to; he only needs the self-actualizing individual to identify for herself what she most desires, regardless of whether those desires coordinate with all else that she might want or need. Hauerwas’s formulation of the Christian witness needs more than this, and therefore much is given to depend on precisely the narrative coherence offered by the faithful Christian life, which, ipso facto, must end well. For Williams, these kinds of formulations mirror mistakes made by Aristotle, whom he describes accordingly, “Aristotle himself held a very strong theory of general teleology: each kind of thing had an ideal form of functioning, which fitted together with that of other things. He believed that all the excellences of character had to fit together into a harmonious self” (Williams, 2006, 43). Williams sees Aristotle as intent on forcing on human experience a unity that is simply not there. He writes,

Aristotle saw a certain kind of ethical, cultural, and indeed political life as a harmonious culmination of human potentialities, recoverable from an absolute understanding of nature. We have no reason to believe in that. Once we lose the belief, however, a potential gap opens between the agent’s perspective and the outside view. We understand—and, most important, the agent can come to understand—that the agent’s perspective is only one of many that are equally compatible with human nature, all open to various conflicts within themselves and with other cultural aims. (Williams, 2006, 52)

While Hauerwas does not engage Williams on this question, Alasdair MacIntyre, on whose Aristotelianism Hauerwas regularly relies, does. In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (a book title that surely indicates MacIntyre’s felt need to answer Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy), MacIntyre directly addresses Williams’ doubts. He argues that without something like moral community, self-actualization cannot get off the ground, and what self-actualization requires is the very moral unity Williams puts in doubt. MacIntyre writes, “what [Williams’] account of deliberation does preclude is this: that in the end I have to arrive at the right decision not just for me, here, now, but for anyone so situated. The objectivity that dependence on others can achieve is indeed objectivity, a rescuing of the agent from imprisonment within her or his subjectivity” (2016, 162). In other words, MacIntyre thinks that for Williams’ agent to realize her self-actualizing goals, she needs accountability. Surely, his reasoning here begs the question because in order for a community to call any individual to account in the way MacIntyre suggests, it would need to be possessed of the very unity Williams calls into question. Williams thinks we have no more reason to trust the unity of communities (read as objectivity over against individual subjectivity) than we do to trust the moral unity of individuals.

Our point here is not to endorse Williams’ doubts over against MacIntyre’s defenses; reading them in relationship to each other encourages us to think that each is importantly right and importantly wrong. Our point is rather to question whether the formulation of narrative coherence driving Hauerwas’ fantasy of the good death has all that it needs in order to make good on its claims.¹⁰ While we have little interest in Williams’ advocacy for self-actualization, we do find his account of persons more persuasive than the rather simplistic anthropology operating in good-death fantasies. Indeed, we think that Williams’ description of the disharmonious self comes close to a moral psychology Augustine’s self-description brings to light:

I was not doing what with an incomparably greater longing I yearned to do, and could have done the moment I so resolved. For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a wholehearted will. At this point the power to act is identical with the will. The willing itself was performative of the action. Nevertheless, it did not happen. The body obeyed the slightest inclination of the soul to move the limbs at its pleasure more easily than the soul obeyed itself, when its supreme desire could be achieved exclusively by the will alone. (1998, 147)

Augustine asks, “What causes this monstrous fact?”, answering,

So the will that commands is incomplete, and therefore what it commands does not happen. If it were complete, it would not need to command the will to exist, it would exist already. Therefore there is no monstrous split between willing and not willing. We are dealing with a morbid condition of the mind which, when lifted up by the truth, does not unreservedly rise to it but is weighted down by habit. So there are two wills. Neither of them is complete, and what is present in the one is lacking to the other. (1998, 148)

Notice that in describing the divided self, Augustine does not feel the need to delineate exactly where sin enters in; it is enough to locate willing and sinning within enough proximity of each other that determining with much precision where one stops and the other begins proves illusory. The opaqueness is somewhat the point. Part of Augustine’s contribution to theological anthropology is a moral psychology complex enough to render suspicious even the desire for anything more than opaque narrations of the self.¹¹ When we earlier intimated theological anthropologies adequate to capturing ordinary human experience, we had something like this in mind. It is not necessary for our argument that Augustine’s anthropology maps directly onto Williams’ doubts; all that is needed is that Williams’s doubts find enough resonance with Augustine’s moral psychology that they carry theological weight. Williams (2006) in his turn saw evolutionary biology doing the work of rendering dubious the harmonization Aristotle thinks central to the unity of the virtues. Conversely, we think the complicated history of Ars Moriendi we have already recounted read through Augustine’s moral psychology is enough to blunt valorized critiques theologians deploy against modern attitudes of death. The complexities surrounding death (e.g., the threat of plague scattering communities necessary for goodness) combine with the complexities of death (i.e., inhabiting worlds not of one’s making) to offer a living picture of the broader complexities that comprise humanness.¹² These complexities tempt evasion, but they also invite goodness, truth, and beauty.

V. BIDDING FAREWELL

In the 2019 film The Farewell (distributed by A24), New Yorker Billi goes to China in order to say goodbye to her grandmother, who is dying of cancer. There is a hitch, however, and the film’s drama hangs on it. Billi’s grandma, Nai Nai, does not know she is dying. Everyone else does. Furthermore, everyone else does not want Billi visiting Nai Nai because they do not want Billi spilling the beans.¹³ They are worried about a Chinese saying, “When people get cancer, they die,” which they interpret to mean that when a person receives a cancer diagnosis, they effectively die by living only in terms of cancer. Billi’s relatives are convinced that the best way for Nai Nai to die is in the dark, going to great lengths to make sure she does not know what everyone else knows. They do not want Billi to visit Nai Nai because they think Billi will ruin what precious time Nai Nai has left. In other words, they do not want Nai Nai to know that death is coming. The film’s drama revolves around the question of whether Billi can bear the responsibility of not telling her grandmother the truth. The results are funny, darkly so, and often heartbreaking.

As we see it, what is comedic about the film is the way all these good-death expectations, all these fantasies of the good death, embodied as they are in the film’s various characters, trip each other up. Part of the film’s genius comes in its unwillingness to resolve the drama, to offer simplistic answers to the question, “Who is right?”—a question the movie increasingly shows to be as unhelpful and ultimately futile as hanging everything on something like, “Whatever Nai Nai wants.” The film has been publicly portrayed as a comment about cultural differences, where Billi plays the role of the American point of view and her relatives—with their “When people get cancer, they die” beliefs—the Chinese point of view. For example, in his New York Times piece, “The Cultural Truth at the Heart of the Lies in ‘The Farewell’” Brian X. Chen (2019) depicts the film as contrasting Western and Eastern forms of communication, explaining, “Eastern philosophy emphasizes balance and harmony, and indirect communication minimizes conflict. Some Asian cultures prefer communicating in a ‘show, don’t tell’ manner and value the ability to decode indirect messages.” While we appreciate attention to relevant cultural sensitivities, we think that such depictions obscure something more basically human, which the film is at pains to reach. After all, the Chinese are not the only people who believe something like “When people get cancer, they die” mainly because Chinese people are not the only ones standing by when as sick loved ones spend their remaining days—if not crushed by depression—chasing after experimental drugs, strung up in chemo labs, and otherwise submitted to the promises of modern medicine.¹⁴ More basically than rivaling ethnic cultures, we see The Farewell as a contest of good-death fantasies and the ensuing comedy that plays out.

Billi’s version of the fantasy is not entirely different from the trope Hauerwas floats. She, too, wants Nai Nai to know she is dying so that she can die well, which means knowing enough with enough time to make things right with everyone that matters. In her case, Billi wants a proper farewell with a person she holds dearer than most. There is, of course, no problem with Billi wanting these things. The issue comes in what she does with these wants relative to what everyone else wants in terms of Nai Nai’s fate. Williams’ doubts about Aristotle’s ethics—and the MacIntyrian and Hauerwasian appropriations coming down the line—amount to the problem of how well differences can be harmonized. When he talks about moral formations, MacIntyre seems to presume a unitary, discrete culture easily distinguishable from rivals. As Luke Bretherton observes, this is rarely the case. He writes, “Social life is rarely composed of a single, monolithic, and transparent set of beliefs and practices. Neither is it lived as a stark clash of two or more such worldviews, language games, or civilizations. Rather, in both the ancient and modern world, our forms of life are constituted by the interaction of often contradictory beliefs and practices and involve multiple loyalties that pull us in different, sometimes conflicting, directions (the family, work, state, congregation, etc.)” (Bretherton, 2019, 3).

The Farewell does not portray just those differences that arise between rival cultures—this group’s version of the good death versus that group’s version—but also those rival sensibilities running through each person. The film’s antagonists are not finally Billi’s Chinese relatives, but rather Billi’s own increasing sense of estrangement, pushed and pulled as she is by desires that do not so easily harmonize. Neither are viewers relieved of these tensions by the film’s surprising conclusion, which leaves viewers with not only deeply conflicted choices about what to do with the truth but deeply conflicted views about truth (i.e., the question turns out to be, rather than “What should one do with the truth?” instead “The truth about what exactly?”). Viewers are left, like Billi, not knowing what to think, and yet still having to go on, and in ways still capable of achieving some measure of goodness, truth, and beauty. The conflicts in and around Billi do not end tragically in The Farewell. Rather, they turn out to be occasions for companionship amidst a separateness that can estrange one to others and each to herself, which the film poignantly captures through exquisite uses of silence and timing. A wedding scene near the end of the film shows how the many sensibilities surrounding death—joy, sadness, anger, humor, isolation, and so on—find a way to sit together amidst the many intensities of companionship.

Stanley Cavell, Williams’ lifelong philosophical interlocutor, observed, speaking of fantastical temptations seeking to close the distance between and within persons, “We are each endlessly separate, for no reason. But then, we are answerable for everything that comes between us; if not for causing it then for continuing it; if not for denying it then for affirming it; if not for it then to it” (Cavell, 1979, 369).¹⁵ The hard truth is that while cancer and death on the one hand and sin on the other often separate us, we are each already separate, marked as we are by irreducible bodies and biographies, each on the way to death. Sin and death certainly exasperate things, just as the realization of separateness exacerbates sin and death. Now, separateness is not a function of sin, and neither need separateness cause sin. As The Farewell powerfully demonstrates, beauty, truth, and goodness are found in those spaces between and within us.

If one takes the point to be something about philosophical and cultural relativism or about the perspectival status of moral judgments, one has missed our and, we think, the film’s point. The move here to relativism is but the attempt to further evade these tensions by mapping things in ways that make sense (e.g., “It’s all relative”). Such a view is the other side of seeing Billi’s internal conflict as a sign that something has gone wrong, a failure—according to Williams’ Aristotle—to harmonize loves, order desires, and unify virtues. These are instead constitutive complexities of human moral psychology, complications any serious theological anthropology—or, for that matter, Aristotelianism—needs to be able to take up.¹⁶ Conflictedness may be an indication of disorder, but it need not be. It might also be the natural expression of not knowing what to say or not to say when something as monumental as death comes knocking or of knowing what one ought to do but not knowing how to do it. One is reminded of Cora Diamond’s portrayal of how encounters with death can leave one “shouldered out from our ways of thinking and speaking” (2003, 20). While having a good death plan in place can be a way of mitigating these difficulties, it can also be a way of evading them, of evading death, the very thing Hauerwas worries about.¹⁷

In a time when modern technologies increasingly make death avoidable (i.e., everything from our common fear of corpses to Google’s ambitious Calico life-extension program), death fantasies abound. Fantasizing about death takes many forms, and we have been concerned here with how Christian theology harbors its own, whether through vapid construals of resurrection, overconfidence in death plans, or ideations of dying well (i.e., all those urban legends floating around Christian bioethics conversations). It is one thing for extenuating circumstances to necessitate Ars Moriendi. It is quite another to entertain ideas of dying well when death floats about as an abstraction, as fantasy.

REFERENCES

Footnotes