In his 1996 book about death, Herbert Fingarette argued that
fearing one’s own demise was irrational. When you die, he wrote, “there is
nothing.” Why should we fear the absence of being when we won’t be there
ourselves to suffer it?
Twenty years later, facing his own mortality, the
philosopher realized that he’d been wrong. Death began to frighten him, and he
couldn’t think himself out of it. Fingarette, who for 40 years taught
philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara, had also written
extensively on self-deception. Now, at 97, he wondered whether he’d been
deceiving himself about the meaning of life and death.
“It haunts me, the idea of dying soon, whether there’s a
good reason or not,” he says in Andrew Hasse’s short documentary Being 97. “I
walk around often and ask myself, ‘What is the point of it all?’ There must be
something I’m missing. I wish I knew.”
Hasse, Fingarette’s grandson, turned the camera on the
philosopher in the last months of his life. The two were very close—when Hasse
was a child, Fingarette would invent stories and record them on tape to send to
his grandson, who lived 300 miles away, so that he could listen to them before
bed. “My grandfather was one of the most thoughtful men I’ve ever met,” Hasse
told me.
Being 97 is a poignant film that explores the interiority of
senescence and the struggle of accepting the inevitable. Hasse quietly observes
the things that have come to define his grandfather’s existence: the stillness
of time, the loss of ability, and the need to come to terms with asking for
help. “It’s very difficult for people who have not reached a state of old age
to understand the psychology of it, what is going on in a person,” Fingarette
says.
In one scene, Fingarette listens to a string quartet that
was once meaningful to his late wife. He hasn’t heard the piece since her death
seven years earlier—“her absence is a presence,” he says in the film—and
becomes overwhelmed with grief.
Hasse made the artistic choice to omit his voice from the
film, so while he was filming the scene, he had to stifle the urge to comfort
his grandfather. “It’s very difficult to watch anyone in that kind of pain and
not be able to console them, especially someone you love so dearly,” Hasse
said. “I found myself sitting just a few feet away from him, unable to reach
out because there was a camera between us. All I wanted to do was put a hand on
his shoulder, embrace him, be with him in his pain.” After what felt to Hasse
like an eternity, the filmmaker handed his grandfather a tissue to wipe away
his tears. The scene ends just before this happens.
Fingarette died in late 2018. Just weeks earlier, Hasse had
shown him the final cut of the documentary. “I think it helped give him
perspective on what he was going through,” he said. “He loved talking about
what a mysterious process it had been to film all these little moments of his
life and then weave them together into a work that expressed something
essential about him.”
The day before he died, Fingarette uttered his final words.
After spending many hours in silence with his eyes closed, Hasse said, his
grandfather suddenly looked up and said, “Well, that’s clear enough!” A few
hours later he said, “Why don’t we see if we can go up and check it out?”
“Of course, these cryptic messages are up to
interpretation,” Hasse said, “but I’d like to believe that he might have seen
at least a glimpse of something beyond death.”
In the film, Fingarette admits that there “isn’t any good
answer” to the “foolish question” of understanding mortality. “The answer might
be … the silent answer.”
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