How To Face Death

So opined Woody Allen, capturing something of our ambivalence about the one thing about which we can all be absolutely and irrefutably certain: we will die. On the one hand, it is almost commonplace to say that suffering is what we fear, not annihilation. But on the other, anyone who has experience the death of a loved one, or faced death themselves, will know that it is no trivial incident. We might even be a death-denying culture, if the way that we cloth death and keep it out of sight is anything to go by.

And yet, as Wittgenstein put it, death is not an event in life, by which he meant it is very hard to get a handle on. So how can we think about it, what should we make of it, what resources are there to help us deal with it? On this evening, we will look at what philosophers and theologians, film-makers and poets have said about death. We will ask whether there is such a thing as a good death and how we might mourn the loss of others well. We will see if we can catch a glimpse of what J.M Barrie called 'an awfully big adventure.'