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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.638)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary. I'm here today with Dr. Harris Bechtel, lecturer in the Department of History, Philosophy and Geography at Texas A And we're here to talk about his book, A Death of the World, Surviving the Death of the Other. Dr. Bechtel, wonderful to have you on today.
Harris Bechtol (00:21.279)
Yeah, thanks for having me PJ.
PJ Wehry (00:24.366)
So tell me Dr. Bechtel why this book?
Harris Bechtol (00:29.067)
Sure. So there's two ways that I could answer that question. And I'll try to keep the two ways separate, but they do inevitably end up intertwining with one another. As a philosopher, I'm a student of the history of philosophy. That's largely what I do. I focus on continental philosophy, but I'm really a student of the history of philosophy. And because of that,
the topic of death goes all the way back to at least the beginnings of Western philosophy. It's also there in some Eastern philosophy as well. So you have these great meditations from Heraclitus and Empedocles about death. Then that theme just continues through the whole thing. And so knowing that history
That's part of the reason why this book. I wanted to intervene in the history of philosophy, engaging this really important topic of death. Then comes the kind of second aspect of it, why this book, and that's the existential side of this. So I have vivid memories of, as a kid, of being at grandparents' funerals.
PJ Wehry (01:52.974)
Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (01:54.668)
And they're some of my most vivid memories. Maybe because of my reading of philosophy, maybe because I wrote this book, that those are the memories that have become much more solidified in my mind. But for whatever reason, those have just kind of always been there. And then in 2005, and I talk about this in the preface of my book, in 2005 I had a dear friend, a mentor of mine.
in Waco, Texas when I was at Baylor University, he died tragically. he died in a church service. He was performing a baptism. His name was Kyle Lake, and it was a Baptist church, so they do the full dunking of the person. And long story short, there was a short in the heating pump.
PJ Wehry (02:29.198)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (02:36.526)
Mm.
Harris Bechtol (02:52.479)
and he ended up touching the boom microphone on the stage.
and he became the ground for 220 volts plus whatever the amperage does when you're in water like that. And he died in front of, I wrote in the book 200 people, but then I had a friend who read the preface after it was published and was like, I'm pretty sure there were 500 people there. And I was like, well, first mistake in the book on page one.
PJ Wehry (02:59.893)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (03:11.352)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (03:19.798)
Wow.
PJ Wehry (03:25.08)
Yeah.
Harris Bechtol (03:26.983)
So I had that experience and that flipped my world upside down in a really bad way. And so I started wrestling with theologically, philosophically, existentially what was happening in that moment and the aftermath of it. And so that again became one of these like really vivid, pivotal moments in my life. And
PJ Wehry (03:36.846)
Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (03:57.619)
So you take that existential moment mixed with Harris trying to become Dr. Bechtel and get his PhD in philosophy and studying the history of philosophy. And I realized that in this trajectory of the discussion in the history of philosophy about death, that very few people engage what's happening when someone else dies. The primary way that Western philosophy talks about death
PJ Wehry (04:22.958)
Mmm.
Harris Bechtol (04:27.639)
is our personal death. What do do with that? And in the history of continental philosophy, Martin Heidegger's being in time is kind of like the holy grail of, you know, being towards death, our anxiety towards our own death. He's kind of the culmination of that conversation about our own death in Western philosophy. And when I read his being in time, I was moved.
challenged, transformed by that text. And there was one part where I was like, man, this is a bunch of bullshit. And it was when he says that when someone dies, we're just merely there. We're just nearby, he says. And I was like, I don't.
PJ Wehry (05:07.961)
Mwahahahah
PJ Wehry (05:15.608)
Thank you.
Harris Bechtol (05:19.371)
I don't think I was just nearby. don't think all these people whose lives were, some of them ruined, some of their marriages ruined, some of their faith was ruined because of that 2005 death of my friend.
PJ Wehry (05:35.342)
Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (05:37.351)
I don't think we were just nearby. And so I started wrestling with why would Heidegger say that? What's mean there? And then is there a way to like unpack how we're not just nearby when someone dies? And that was the birth of what became this book. Started as my dissertation project and then pretty radically transformed after I...
graduated with my PhD and had a lot of life happen and it finally became the book that is now happily in hardback and paperback. So that's the why. Yep, that's why this book.
PJ Wehry (06:14.446)
There you go.
So let me just start by saying, and I think it's important, especially when dealing with something like this, to say, I'm really sorry for your loss. So I know it's been 20 years now, that's it's different, and you talk about this like when it's unexpected, it's different when it's tragic. had Michael Sawyer on and we talked about there is just a real difference between a life
Harris Bechtol (06:26.644)
Yeah, thank you.
Harris Bechtol (06:31.593)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (06:47.436)
well lived to a satisfying conclusion and a life that's cut short. And I want to first start by recognizing that.
Harris Bechtol (06:55.23)
Yeah, yeah, thank you.
PJ Wehry (06:57.678)
The second thing is.
As we look at our own lives and what our projects are, there's only so much that I can do. And I am so grateful you wrote this book because I remember reading Being in Time and he said that it was just, it's like, we're just nearby. And I was like, that's not, that's not how that works at all. I was like, oh, good. I like, I was like, I don't, I can't, you know, I can't take time to write this book. Right. Like I have other like interests and they can only, can only write so much.
and can only study so much. Ed, I'm so grateful that your book is here to answer this specific question. And I think it is important that we train ourselves and think about our own death and how to approach that. But I think it's also really important, really important to have this meditation and to think about and deal with the deaths of loved ones and of other people.
Harris Bechtol (07:30.537)
Yeah.
Harris Bechtol (07:37.097)
Yeah.
Harris Bechtol (07:46.826)
100%.
PJ Wehry (08:00.558)
Uh, so with that said, uh, you kind of start out actually, you know, you mentioned Heidegger, but you start out with, uh, Derrida. And so, uh, as you look at Derrida, I don't want to make sure. You talk about the, uh, you talk about rupture a lot, and I actually ended up looking up, there's a lot of words that have that. So you have, uh, cause you talk about erupt and then you talk about, um,
disrupt. then so I looked up, you know, interrupt, erupt, all those different things. And so why, why eruption, why break into for what's happening here? And then of course, disruption to bring to an end, but
Harris Bechtol (08:37.93)
Mm-hmm.
Harris Bechtol (08:43.612)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Harris Bechtol (08:49.522)
Yeah, great question. So in the book, I'm giving a description of this experience of living through the death of someone and the particular term that I use to be the center point to around which everything unfolds is this idea that the death of the other is an event. And so this is a
The term event is a term of art in continental philosophy. It largely, at least the way that I'm thinking about it in the book, it largely starts with Heidegger, particularly the later period in Heidegger's thinking, which we can go into that.
he, when he starts talking about this German term, Ereignis, the translators of Heidegger, who know German much better than I do, I follow their translation of that as event. And that doesn't mean that it's just like a, an everyday happening, like going to the grocery store or teaching a class or having a conversation. Well, being on a podcast, a conversation could be an event, especially if we.
PJ Wehry (10:16.097)
You
Harris Bechtol (10:16.488)
go with Gadamer. But it's not just an everyday thing, right? It becomes a much bigger event than just the everyday. And so he uses this term, things get very technical with what he does with that term. The French philosophers start reading Heidegger and they...
adopt a lot of his own philosophy and start doing their own thing in French philosophy in this reception of Heidegger. And so that event becomes the French Événement. And it's really Derrida who I think helpfully provides some language that can kind of help us understand.
the way that this term of art gets used. And so that's where this language of disruption, eruption, interruption comes from. So Derrida says that when we look at what an event is, an event has what he calls a symptomatology. It comes with some symptoms. And he uses that term symptom because part of
Part of what's happening when an event interrupts or disrupts you or erupts is that you can't see it coming. It's unexpected. So there's kind of three primary terms that I focus on in the book for understanding what an event is in its aftermath. So the unexpected, the without reason, and the transformative. And so Derrida says, when an event happens,
you really only recognize after the fact, après coup, après événement, after the event, after the fact, that, something just happened that I can't make sense of, and around this thing, everything has been transformed. And so, the symptoms happen after the fact because you couldn't see it coming. And...
Harris Bechtol (12:35.943)
So that's where this language of interruption, interruption, disruption happens because that's the phenomenality of an event in its aftermath, in its wake.
PJ Wehry (12:49.086)
So disruption means to end, interruption means between, which I'd never really put that together. Like in my mind, they're almost synonymous, but it's very distinct. There's a before and after for interruption, and then eruption means to break into. so death as an event, if I'm understanding you correctly, it breaks into. And for the person who passes, that's a disruption, that's an end. But for the person...
Harris Bechtol (13:01.555)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Harris Bechtol (13:09.021)
Mm-hmm.
Harris Bechtol (13:13.704)
Yep.
PJ Wehry (13:15.49)
The person who's experiencing the death of the other, that's an interruption. It is an in-between where death has broken in. Is that a fair way to think about those things?
Harris Bechtol (13:25.895)
Yeah, so I think I'm now realizing maybe I didn't use as carefully all of those synonyms as I should have, but I really like your gloss on it, PJ. So I'm gonna stick to that. yeah, so I, okay, okay, okay. Well maybe, okay. So yeah, I think that's a great explanation of the different uses of that term.
PJ Wehry (13:41.902)
I got that from you. So I was reading it.
Harris Bechtol (13:55.078)
in my book. What I'm trying to do is focus particularly on that interruption aspect where death brings you to a threshold. When someone dies, you're at a threshold. You're at the entryway from the way the world was and then walking into the way the world is going to be in the aftermath of this.
PJ Wehry (14:00.866)
Yes. Right. Yeah.
Harris Bechtol (14:24.609)
and
Yeah, the argument in the book is walk through that doorway. It can be a hard, long road, but it can be a fruitful one to take. And that goes into the theme of survival and living on after and all of that in the book. But yeah, that's a great point about interruption.
PJ Wehry (14:49.134)
Let me ask you this, and this is, I actually have some friends who are currently walking through a difficult moment. And as you described your experience that prompted this book, that was sudden and it was tragic. What my friends are going through right now is, and I want to be sensitive to their situation, but there's an illness that has been deemed
There's nothing they can do. so, and I think the part of this is because when we talk about event, it's easy to think about a moment or an hour or even like a couple hours.
But what is the temporal kind of structure of event, especially like this kind of, it's now become incredibly distended. We're talking, it could be anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months where they're walking through this event and they're not able to really, they won't be able to interpret it until after it's over. Can you, and I'm not even entirely sure what I'm asking. I'm curious what this prompts in you as we think about the sudden event versus
Harris Bechtol (16:02.74)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (16:03.33)
this distended event.
Harris Bechtol (16:11.209)
trying to think how to frame this.
Harris Bechtol (16:16.219)
I think every death, and this is one of the arguments I'm making in the book, I think every death is unexpected. Not in the way that my friend's death for us was, but because the death of someone is much more than just the moment of losing the person, it continues after that.
PJ Wehry (16:19.374)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (16:35.534)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Harris Bechtol (16:40.981)
And it's really that, so back to that image of like you're brought to this threshold, this interruption, as you enter the world anew after the death of the other, you are entering into a world where the presence of that now dead person's absence, the presence of their absence is gonna...
appear all over the place in unexpected ways. And so the death of someone extends temporally beyond just that initial moment of loss. It extends to returning to the home if you lived with that person, returning to the favorite restaurant without the person.
PJ Wehry (17:34.38)
being asked by the waitress or waiter, like, hey, where's so and so, right? And it intrudes.
Harris Bechtol (17:40.071)
Yep, Your phone giving you those randomly generated memory videos, you know? And it pops up and you click and it's like images, it's videos of your, you know, that's gonna happen. And all of that is part of the process of the death of the other and mourning that loss. And so I think what your friends are,
PJ Wehry (17:58.03)
Mm-hmm.
Harris Bechtol (18:10.03)
experiencing is that the moment of losing this loved one is not all at once, but it's this long drawn out who knows when the final moment is going to happen where the disruption, the end for that person happens.
And so there the the phenomenality of that would be a little a little bit different because of that and used a good word there the distension the stretching of this loss of that person. And then once the person dies then you've got the aftermath again of what I was just talking about. So yeah.
PJ Wehry (19:03.672)
So it's always, sorry, go ahead.
Harris Bechtol (19:06.224)
No, no, no, no, no, you're good.
PJ Wehry (19:08.182)
I was gonna say, it's not necessarily, sometimes it's drawn out before, sometimes it's not. Often it's not, but it's always drawn out after.
Harris Bechtol (19:18.768)
Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes. And that's the focus of my book is that, okay, they have been lost. What's the aftermath? What does life after that look like? Which is, again, a way of understanding what survival is, is life after, life on. Yeah. And the temporality of that, which we can get into.
PJ Wehry (19:41.544)
And I'm trying to go ahead, sir.
Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (19:48.334)
is the focus of the last part of the book of like, what does life after look like, temporally speaking?
PJ Wehry (19:58.006)
And that's perfect. That's exactly, that's exactly what I was going to ask. So as we look at that afterwards and we look at the strike, is that still part of the event or that's after the event and we're, working through the or maybe I just asked three separate. Yeah. And so that's all part of the event. Okay.
Harris Bechtol (20:16.26)
It's all part of it, I think.
Harris Bechtol (20:21.498)
Mm-hmm, because again, like...
PJ Wehry (20:22.936)
So an event generally runs for quite a while.
Harris Bechtol (20:26.664)
This one happens to it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to but Yeah
PJ Wehry (20:29.112)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (20:35.362)
What signals that the event is over? If you don't mind my asking. mean, in a more like from, is it, is it the, is it when you feel like you can put it into speech? Is it feel like when you've worked through it or is it, is it some other marker?
Harris Bechtol (20:39.143)
home.
Harris Bechtol (20:53.862)
when we're talking about the death of the other.
I don't think it ends. I think it's a process. I think it's ongoing.
PJ Wehry (21:00.448)
Hmm. Okay.
Harris Bechtol (21:07.784)
And it may have, typically when psychologists talk about mourning, they talk about the phases of mourning. But that makes mourning seem too linear. Whereas I think mourning is much more chaotic and just like, and so you could, you could like.
PJ Wehry (21:15.149)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (21:19.192)
Yes.
Harris Bechtol (21:29.304)
run through a phase of this living on and you're really like in the trenches of mourning that loss and then you you you come over some kind of hump there but then
It comes back, but maybe not as intensely. And there's going to be moments in life where it's just this continual process of working through it. And my name for that continual process of working through this event in the book is what I call workless mourning. So an idea that this mourning process is ongoing.
and that the mourning is part of the event of the death of the other, which is why I think it just continues. Now does every event, is every event ongoing like that? I wouldn't want to make that claim because I'm not sure. Like if you look at Heidegger when he starts using this term event, he kind of...
There's phases of it, but for him it's much more about the history of philosophy and other interesting but opaque things as well. But with the death of the other, I'm reading it and interpreting it in the book as something that's ongoing.
PJ Wehry (23:05.11)
Do you think because of his view on the history of philosophy, that's part of the reason he talks about death is happening just nearby. Like when you worked through that and you wanted to see what he was saying, why does he have this? To me, it felt very kind of casual disregard for what was happening. And I know that that's not the case. for everything else in the book, he's very intentional. Like it's not like he's, I don't, I don't think he was just doing that. What, what?
What do you think he was getting at with the just nearby?
Harris Bechtol (23:37.552)
Yeah, as far as I know, and as far as I've read, it doesn't have to do, it's not connected to his later thinking of the event with the history of philosophy. in the, so being in time has famously two parts, it was never completed, but we've got two parts of it, two divisions. And the stuff on being towards death.
PJ Wehry (23:49.912)
Ha.
Harris Bechtol (24:07.002)
is in the first, the beginning of the second division. there he starts the chapter in this really amazing way where he's just thinking through our own death. And he says, well...
kind of like Epicurus says that as long as we are, death is not. As soon as death is, we are not. So he's got his version of that in his crazy language about Dasein and not being there and all this stuff. And so he has this part where he's like, look, we don't really experience our own death. So it looks like the death of someone else is going to be this particular
phenomenon that structures who we are. So then he starts thinking through that for a few paragraphs and he says these like really wonderful things about mourning the death of someone and attending the funeral and being with one another and it's like wow like yeah he he really gets it and then he just turns and he's like but in the end
none of that is really about who I am. It's really just about who that other person was. And so when the other person dies, I'm just there for all of this. And so he's like, so this isn't really telling in his mind, this isn't really telling him what he's wanting to know about what it means to be this human being that cares about its own being.
And he comes to the conclusion that, well, the death of someone else is never really mine, it's the other person's. And the death of the other is not really part of my, what he calls, existence, which gets translated as existence. So it's not really part of the projects of my own life.
Harris Bechtol (26:21.991)
in my future. It was for them, but not for me. So he's like, well that's interesting. I'm looking for something that's mine and that structures my existence, that structures the future projects that I have for myself. And he's like, well that's why the death of the other can't be this pivotal phenomenon. It's really my own death that is that.
So that's why he turns away from the death of the other and turns towards our own death as this important structuring phenomenon for who we are. And I'm with them all the way on our own death. Like if you've ever had to confront your own death in a situation, it's like go back and read that part of Being in Time, you'll be like, my gosh, he got it just right.
But then it's just weird that like, man, there is a sense in which when you experience the death of especially like a close loved one, it is yours in a sense, because you're the one living on in the world without that person, right? And their absence in that world has now become part of this structuring aspect of your future.
PJ Wehry (27:31.918)
Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (27:49.896)
And so it's like, well, I think Heidegger just missed an opportunity there to talk about this relationality of who we are in a much deeper way. so Ian Thompson, he just had a new book come out with Oxford, and it's on the topic of death in Heidegger.
and I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it's like on the top of the list. And I heard him give a talk about it and...
If his reading of Heidegger on this kind of existential death that he's talking about in that part of the book, Ian's right, Heidegger really missed an opportunity to talk about the death of the other. Because Ian thinks that the death that Heidegger's talking about is actually not like...
our own demising. It's not related to our own physical death, but it's more of something like an intense existential crisis. And I'm like, well, if that's what death means here, then yeah, the death of someone else could be one of those intense existential crises. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (29:08.024)
Hmm. Yeah, that was...
PJ Wehry (29:21.07)
Thank you. Tremendous answer.
And really helpful because all I remember was being annoyed by that part where he said it was, and it's been 15 years, maybe longer since I read Being in Time. So I was like, oh, I forgot about all that. So that's really, thank you for putting that all in perspective. And I think too, there's some interesting things I remember reading about when they study people who coexist together, who live together for long periods of time. I think it was specifically married couples that
Harris Bechtol (29:40.944)
Absolutely.
PJ Wehry (29:57.644)
their brains develop alongside each other. Right? And at first this sounds, you know, it could sound mystical and woo woo, but it's, very basic. Like the actions we take every day shape grooves in our brains. And so of course, if someone's doing, if you rely on someone for something, it literally a part of you dies because that is something your brain has shaped itself around. To as an example, my wife is an amazing woman and she likes to
She likes to do taxes. I don't understand that. I'll be, I'll be blunt. At this point, I did my taxes as an adult for a few years. We got married young. I haven't done my taxes in a long time. If she were to pass away tomorrow at a very brutal level, I would be incredibly incompetent. I would be starting out at like a 17 year olds.
you know, 18 year old knowledge of doing taxes, but I would be doing it without the plasticity of my brain. Right. And so I mean, that's, that's what you're like, that sounds very pedestrian and, you know, I, obviously I'm playing it a little bit for laughs, but it's, that's what it's like. Right. Like if you live with someone, they'd end up, you know, it's a, if you lose someone from a, from a company, it's like, we have gaps.
Right? They're like, where is that? I don't know. So-and-so always knew where that was. That happens in the home. It happens in the company. And so a part of us dies because we are these community, we are social animals, you know, to go back to, to Aristotle. Um, sorry, you're, you're really, you're, I, I, this is just really a fertile ground to speak. So I'm sorry. I'm kind of going on a little bit. Um, how, how do you find, so you,
Harris Bechtol (31:49.7)
No, you're good.
PJ Wehry (31:53.836)
You have it. go ahead. Please, please.
Harris Bechtol (31:53.895)
Can I say something about that really quick? Okay. Because there's some really, you're 100 % right and there are so many things written from a literary perspective, a theological perspective, philosophical perspective about exactly what you're talking about. So just kind of like to sprinkle some things on it. After I wrote the book,
I got hugely into the musician Bon Iver. I mean, I'm a major, major fan of Bon Iver. Was not when I was writing the book, which is an absolute shame. But after the, I don't know why, but after I wrote the book, I like started listening to his music and man, incredible. So he's got this song called Hello Scene.
Who knows? So a lot of Boney Ver's songs are like, I don't know what he's talking about, but for some reason it's moving me so deeply. He's very poetic with his language. He makes up words. But anyways, at the very beginning of Hallow scene, he says, some way baby, it's part of me apart from me. And when I heard that line, I was like, that's exactly what my book is about.
My book is about how when someone dies, and who knows if the, I think Bony Vare in that song is talking about.
Harris Bechtol (33:35.738)
like a breakup, I think. It could be about death, but again, I don't know. But that line just made me think of, what happens when we experience the death of someone that somehow there's a part of me that is now a part for me.
and like I'm living in a world where I've lost part of who I am because of who that person was in connection with me. You hear the same thing in Augustine's confessions. So one of St. Augustine's friends was Nebridius and Nebridius dies and in the confessions, can't remember the exact lines, but he
PJ Wehry (33:53.198)
Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (34:19.95)
He talks about after the death of his friend that the whole world is a torment, that there's something missing in his own life because of the death of his friend. And so it's like, again, there's a part of me, part for me. And then from...
a more scientific standpoint, and I write about this in the book. There was a scientist, his name is David Wegener, and he studies memory. And he came up with this idea called transactive memory, where it's basically an account of how memory is relational and social.
So he says there's, I'm going to forget the third one, but there's three phases of memory. There's encoding, so the writing of the memories, the storage of the memories, and then the recalling of the memories. And in his research, he found that, well, we don't really do any of our remembering things.
in those three phases just on our own. We rely on other people for encoding, for storing it, and for recalling it. And so like your example about your wife, bless her for enjoying doing taxes, she has stored within her for you your memory of like tax stuff, right? And as you mentioned, if...
PJ Wehry (36:05.614)
Mm-hmm.
Harris Bechtol (36:09.23)
God forbid something were to happen and you no longer have her, there's like literally a part of your own memory that is lost with her, that you would rely upon for the storage of and for the recalling of. And so, yeah, this idea that even in our brains, we are connected with others. And so when we lose someone through death, again,
There's a part of us that is now apart from us. And the hard thing about mourning is learning to navigate the world in the aftermath of that. And again, so you think about that, and that's why this event of the death of the other just has this ongoing duration to it.
PJ Wehry (37:01.218)
Hmm. I, as an, and I think I'm feeling a little bad about using taxes, though I think it really illustrates it. Or maybe I'm just afraid of taxes. The, another example, and of course I think we all have this with loved ones, but a particularly powerful example, a friend of mine lost his great aunt. And as they were sitting there and talking after the funeral, everyone talked about how much she listened.
And she would never give advice, but she sat on her porch and she would listen. And you knew that whatever you said with her was safe. And everyone remarked that she took many secrets to her grave, but that's that she was there and allowed people to work through things with her in a way that we all understand there's a difference between a listening ear and even speaking to ourselves. Right. And so.
It's not, there's the memory. There's also just the practices that you lose, right? You have this, you now have this space that's empty. And that's where, and I would love to hear from you because I started to think about what it means, the presence of an absence, which sounds like a paradox, but I think by definition, an absence is a type of presence, right? You can't have an absence that isn't a presence.
Anyways, but I'm digressing. So do you mind talking a little bit about what that presence of absence means?
Harris Bechtol (38:38.531)
Yeah, sure. So, my book has three parts. First part, I'm setting up that language that we started with, the symptomatology of this event, unexpected without reason, transformative, and connecting it with the death of the other.
The last two parts are looking at how that gets played out in terms of what I call the spatial transformation of the world and the temporal transformation of the world after the death of the other. And so when you start thinking about the world after the death of the other, entering, walking through that threshold into this new world after the other has died, the...
The dead other is there in that world, but not in a tangible presence in the way that things are present in the world. And so they're absent, and yet they still have this presence there. Some just concrete examples of it.
My mom lost someone in her life and she told me one time that when they went home from the hospital, the silence in the house was deafening. The silence was deafening. Which again is paradoxical. How can the absence of sound...
PJ Wehry (40:06.712)
Hmm. Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (40:16.761)
be something that causes damage from an intense presence of sound. And that was one of the first times that I was like, I started seeing this presence of absence, paradoxical phenomenality involved with the death of the other.
I opened the book in the introduction with Nicholas Wolterstorff. His son died when his son was 25 in a climbing accident. Wolterstorff is a pretty famous theologian, philosopher of religion, and he wrote a book about the death of his son called Lament for a Son, which is a knockout of a book. It'll also knock you on your ass.
because it's just intense. But he talks about how he walks into his son's apartment for the first time and he said, everything's there, just as he put it. His jacket is hanging on the chair, his spices are where they are, and he said, but the person that gave them all that meaning is not there.
And so his son is there. The presence of his son is there, but in this absent way. And so he says at the end of that passage, he says, and his jacket just hangs limp on the chair. And it's like, wow. Yeah. Like the jacket is a reminder of his son.
and the absence of his son is now palpable because of the jacket hanging limp rather than being on his son's body. And so you see that presence and absence there. You also see it in, again, going back to our discussion about memory, that the absence of the other becomes present to you.
PJ Wehry (42:09.698)
Yeah.
Harris Bechtol (42:27.223)
when you're like, man, I'm always so bad at remembering the garage code. You know, I always, I always asked my wife, yeah, what's the code? And then like, she's not there and you can't remember the code because the place where you stored it is gone. And so now like the, the absence of the person that stored that for you.
is made present. It's brought into the present for you. Yeah, and there's examples all over the place of this present absence, absence of presence that I kind of go in and out of in the book.
PJ Wehry (43:13.198)
And I just want to clarify here, make sure that I'm kind of on track with you.
What you're pointing towards is that to have a son and lose a son is a presence of absence, but it is, and it's very different from the emptiness of never having a son. That's not a presence and that's not an absence, right? It's that's just emptiness. And that's so in the same way that if you have a group of six friends and one dies, there's a, there's an empty chair.
Harris Bechtol (43:36.59)
Hmm
PJ Wehry (43:48.942)
versus if you have just five friends from the beginning and you don't have six friends or seven friends, you don't feel that lack because it was never filled. Is that a fair way to think of it as well?
Harris Bechtol (43:58.979)
Yeah.
I think that's really good. I think that's really good. Woltersdorf even talks about now that his son is dead and people ask him, you're just kind of talking to someone, it's like, you've got kids? Yeah. How many kids do you have? And he writes in his book, do I say four or do I say five? Because like, he had five kids, but one died.
PJ Wehry (44:23.244)
Hmm.
Harris Bechtol (44:30.03)
Well, what do you do with that? How do you do the math of that? So yeah, I think that's a great example. Whereas if you had never had kids, it's just like, yeah, that's an absence. That's a possibility that never was actualized for you, it never happened for you. So yeah, that would be a kind of just maybe pure absence in that sense.
PJ Wehry (44:57.578)
So we talked about kind of the first and the second part of the book. The third part of the book, one of the phrases that really stuck out to me and I really want to hear from you on is the gift of mourning. And I love that idea. I mean, you start out talking about Derrida and the gift, I think in chapter one, and you kind of end with this here. And I think people can glimpse
Harris Bechtol (45:10.446)
Mm.
PJ Wehry (45:25.25)
you know what you mean by that, but it is, it is a, it's certainly not an easy gift. It's not a, it's not a simple gift. Can you expound on that? What you mean by the gift of morning?
Harris Bechtol (45:39.298)
Yeah, yeah. So I'm being kind of cheeky with the title of The Gift of Mourning because one of, so Dairy Dot talks about events and he says one of the like,
predominant names for this event is a gift. there's a sense in which, because an event you never see it coming, but you only know that it happened in its aftermath, so it was like never with you in the present. But you just like have all of this chaos that kind of surrounds it in its aftermath. He says that when we try to give a gift to someone,
for it truly to be a gift, we can't know that we gave it, and if I'm giving it to you, you can't know that I gave it and you received it. Which means the gift is impossible in some sense, because how do you give something without either person knowing that it was given? So I'm being kind of cheeky because...
the impossibility of a gift would mean, we wouldn't know that morning is a gift, right? So when I call morning a gift, it's like, I'm drawing on Derrida, but then doing something a little bit different. The main thing that I'm trying to do in that last chapter about the gift of morning is I'm trying to unpack, okay, you're living in a world where
Your past, the past with the one that has been lost is haunting you. It won't stay in the past. It keeps coming back. It keeps coming back.
Harris Bechtol (47:32.644)
Your future has been transformed. It's fractured because you've lost this person that maybe you had plans with in the future and those are gone and then those plans come and go and it's just this constant reminder. So you live in the present where the past won't stay past, the future's all fractured and so the present is to draw on Shakespeare. It's out of joint.
Right? It just is off. Nothing's right.
So what do you do? And I think, or at least what I'm trying to do in that last chapter is to say that, learning how to wrestle with that disjointedness in the present, learning how to deal with this world that's full of the presence of absence or absence of presence of this death of the other is, part of wrestling with that is,
Is you being hospitable to all of that affecting you? Just saying like, okay, I'm going to be surprised by the random photos that pop up on my phone. I'm going to be surprised by the random width of some stranger that smells like the person that I lost, you know?
And just kind of like walking through the world with open hands to, okay, it's going to happen and I'm just open to it and when it happens, I'll wrestle with it. And I think that if we can learn to survive the death of the other in that way, it gives us this openness to further events to come.
Harris Bechtol (49:39.46)
to surprise us, to not make sense to us, to disrupt the world around us. And again, it's not easy to do this kind of living in the aftermath of the death of someone and being hospitable to their death. But if we can do that, the gift that it...
gives us, not in the Doridean sense, the gift that it gives us is this ability to be open to further events to come. Whether that be more death in the future or some other kind of event. So it's me trying to like lay out what an ethics might look like of mourning in the present.
So that's what I mean by this gift of mourning. It's really this potential way of being open to the surprise of the event of the death of the other.
PJ Wehry (50:55.244)
Yeah, of course the anger is going to be part, not, doesn't have to be, but it can be part of your response. But in terms of an ethic is to eventually see that the other person is to be grateful for the other person's presence in your life, or at least to be, to accept what has been given to you. is that kind of the, a little bit of the ethics? I understand that that could be obviously expanded on quite a bit.
Harris Bechtol (51:23.371)
Yeah, yeah, think that's part of it for sure. And I think by ethics here, I'm really just talking about this hospitality, this openness to the interruption to happen again.
And then how that gets cashed out, might be, it's going to be anger at times. It's going to be despair. It's going to be sadness. It's going to be just like tears and tears and tears. It's going to be silence. and again, that's why it's hard because these, these are dealing with like not, not fun emotions.
So yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:11.31)
Yeah. I want to be respectful of your time. I've really enjoyed this as a final question.
besides buying and reading your excellent book, which everyone listening should, what would you recommend to someone who has listened for the last hour or so to do after listening to either do or to meditate on over the next week after listening to the last hour?
Harris Bechtol (52:40.066)
Yeah.
Harris Bechtol (52:45.441)
think one of the great takeaways from my book is I'm trying to get across that because mourning is a process, it's okay if you don't get over it. I think we're taught, and there's a long history of this, but I think we're taught that someone dies.
You have the funeral, you bury them, you mourn them, okay, time to move on, time to get over it. And there's like some leeway, you know, after the funeral, if people are still having a hard time.
But eventually it's like people run out of patience.
for letting people mourn the loss of someone. what I'm trying to do in the book is to say mourning is a process. Mourning is workless, as I call it. Meaning it doesn't come to an end. It has different phases. You might get to a particular point where things are smoother sailing and then all of a sudden something happens and again, you smell the whiff of their perfume or cologne and...
Boom, you're like right back in it. And my encouragement would be that's okay. Again, just like open hands, hospitality, welcome those things and seek out professional help if you need professional help with it. Talk through it with friends. But it's okay if it's 20 years past the death of a loved one and you still find yourself like.
Harris Bechtol (54:29.123)
crying about it, being sad about it, being depressed that like the world died with that person and you're still trying to figure out how to navigate the world in their absence. So that would be my encouragement.
PJ Wehry (54:48.684)
Dr. Bechtel, absolute joy having you on a poignant and difficult but a poignant application. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Harris Bechtol (54:59.757)
Yeah, you're welcome and thanks for the interest in the book and interest in my thoughts. So thanks for having me.