Have You Thought About Your Second Death?

Père Lachaise cemetery is the largest cemetery in Paris, France.

Over one million bodies are buried there, including such artistic notables as Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Olivia de Havilland, Jim Morrison, and others.

It is the most visited necropolis in the world.

One of the benefits of fame is that when you die people still remember who you were. Your name comes up in conversations and media references.

Perhaps a statue or memorial will be erected to honor you. People might even visit your gravesite to pay homage.

But sooner or later, everyone will experience their second death.

Every man has two deaths

Recently I stumbled upon the atmospheric and haunting work of Danish photographer and painter Balder Olrik.

Olrik’s artist biography on artland.com notes:

From sweeping vistas of uninhabited landscapes to close-cropped views of an abandoned gas pump, Olrik is capable of conveying an incredible sense of emotion in his otherwise static imagery. In doing so, he invites the viewer to take a closer look at the subtle details each work contains.

Olrik’s “incredible sense of emotion” is on full display in his soul-stirring photographs of mausoleums at the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Ironically, it was a close brush with death that led Olrik to the Père Lachaise mausoleums project. He had been severely ill for a year, ingesting antibiotics daily, convinced that he might die.

Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.—Ernest Hemingway

Fortunately, Olrik was finally on the mend and convalesced in an apartment near the Père Lachaise cemetery. He strolled the grounds of the cemetery, peering into forgotten mausoleums, and then began photographing them.

A stirring documentary about Olrik’s project, titled “Balder Olrik: We Will Be Forgotten,” was made by Louisiana Channel, a non-profit website based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.

In the documentary, Olrik states:

I looked into one of the mausoleums, and it hit me really hard in the stomach. There was a huge bouquet of flowers made of silk with hundreds of spiderwebs on top of it. It was really painful. At this moment, I realised that we are going to be forgotten.

Olrik notes that during his illness, friends stopped inviting him to concerts and hiking trips. Like a departed soul in a mausoleum, life went on without him.

“Slowly you are kind of counted out,” Olrik lamented.

Somebody has loved somebody

There’s something still and peaceful about cemeteries.

I published an essay in the past titled, “Three Reasons You Need to Visit a Graveyard.” The first reason is to pay your respects and remember. The second reason is to reflect on your life. And the third reason is to focus on your future.

Before I wrote that essay, I visited the cemetery where my parents, grandparents, and Aunt Catherine are all buried.

I’m always touched by the flowers and notes left beside headstones, and I do the same for my departed loved ones.

Graveyards and cemeteries honor the dead, but they also serve the living. They invite reflection, whether hopeful or melancholy.

Baldir Olrik was deeply moved by the relics and offerings left behind in the Paris mausoleums, as evidenced by his remark:

It’s obvious that somebody has loved somebody. The most touching mausoleums are the ones where you actually can see that there was love between some people — someone who is dead, somebody that’s alive. But at a certain point, it is left there. Maybe because the person who loved died. Or fell in love with somebody else.

A few years before my father passed away, we went to our local cemetery. Ever the responsible planner, Dad bought a plot for himself and my mother.

I remember strolling around the cemetery that day, and Dad talking about all the past lives that each headstone represents. “Every one of them had careers, hopes, and dreams,” Dad said, adding, “But nobody can outrun death, sooner or later. The best we can do is live our lives as fully as possible.”

“Live our lives as fully as possible.”

I never forgot that.

An awkward worry

Perhaps the reason people chase fame is because they want to be immortal.

They worry about being forgotten. When the keepers of their memory grow old and die.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead — when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead? —Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

I’ve read about something called “the second death.” When we die, our loved ones live on and remember us. They reminisce about the past and our lives together. They look at the old photographs. Sometimes they pass down stories about us to their grandchildren.

But eventually, we are forgotten. And that is our “second death.”

Of course, for people of faith, death is not the end. It’s a transition to eternal life. Agnostics and atheists argue that life on Earth is all we get, so make the most of it.

Near the end of the documentary, Balder Olrik concludes:

It made me realise that maybe I should just do the things I want to do in life. And maybe it is also an awkward worry — this worry of not being eternal. Why is it so hard for us to grasp the fact that we don’t live forever, that it has an end? Maybe it is causing us a lot of trouble while we live that we care so much about ourselves for when we are not alive.

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Whether you believe death is the end or not, Olrik’s conclusion has something for everyone.

Maybe I should just do the things I want to do in life.

In other words, live in the present. Embrace your family and passions and all the good things that life offers. Stop worrying about legacies and eternity.

Sure, reflect on death once in a while. To make sure you’re on the right course. To stay on top of your commitments and responsibilities. But don’t get hung up on it.

Do the things you want to do in life.

Before you go

I’m John P. Weiss. I write elegant stories and essays about life. If you enjoyed this piece, check out my free weekend newsletter, The Saturday Letters.