Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed by a full stop to demarcate the terminus of life. It hovers there, so sure of itself, this punctuational emblem of an irrevocable end. And yet the surety of science about what happens when we die, like the surety of religion, is only speculative, for it is conceived by the living. Whitman — who often walked Green-Wood — knew this when he wrote that “to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Over and over we have mistaken our suppositions for sureties when both intellectual honesty and spiritual courage demand we concede that death is not a period but a question mark.

Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961) was only twenty and newly enrolled in medical school when he came to see death as a way of understanding life: His father, who had died six weeks earlier, appeared to him in a dream, announcing that he would be returning home after a holiday. Struck by how real the dream felt, Jung began devising a psychological cosmogony of death that would take him half a lifetime to formulate, its crux best articulated in his 1929 commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life:

Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life… For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal.

Five years later, Jung developed these ideas in his most intellectually elegant essay, titled “Death and the Soul” and included in Jenny Yates’s altogether magnificent anthology Jung on Death and Immortality (public library). Developing the idea that “life strives towards a goal and is determined by an aim,” he wrote:

The question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent or more agonizing than when we see the final breath leave a body which a moment before was living.

[…]

Life is an energy-process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. In the long run everything that happens is, as it were, no more than the initial disturbance of a perpetual state of rest which forever attempts to re-establish itself.

This perspective, Jung realized, is not one our consciousness readily takes, for it requires a counterintuitive understanding of the substance we are made of — time. It was his encounter with Einstein — the two dined together in the early days of relativity — that allowed Jung to violate his own creaturely intuitions in order to conceive of death not as the endpoint of a line across the Euclidean space of being but as a curve following the curvature of spacetime itself: eternity as a field in which all directions are relative. Einstein’s great revelation was that space and time are one, that spacetime tells matter how to move and matter ballasted by gravity tells spacetime how to bend. At the heart of Jung’s conception is the intimation that consciousness bends spacetime one way and we call it life, bends it another and we call it death, while the energy that does the bending remains inexorable. The question of where life goes when it goes, like the question of where love goes when it goes, may be a question not of termination but of transmutation.

Jung captured this idea in his response to a pastor who recounted having had a conversation with his brother at the time of his death, even though they were separated by a continent:

It is very probable that only what we call consciousness is contained in space and time, and that the rest of the psyche, the unconscious, exists in a state of relative spacelessness and timelessness. For the psyche this means a relative eternality and a relative non-separation from other psyches, or a oneness with them.

Recognizing that “no one knows what ‘psyche’ is, and one knows just as little how far into nature ‘psyche’ extends,” he observed:

It would seem to be more in accord with the collective psyche of humanity to regard death as the fulfillment of life’s meaning and as its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation. Anyone who cherishes a rationalistic opinion on this score has isolated himself psychologically and stands opposed to his own basic human nature.

Just as Jung was finishing “The Soul and Death,” his sister died. He coped by writing a psychological analysis of The Tibetan Book of the Dead — an ancient instruction for shedding karmic illusions, which Jung likened to psychological complexes, drawing a parallel between the Buddhist notion of enlightenment and the aim of psychiatry: withdrawing our psychological projections in order to see clearly. Our conception of death, he argued, is a projection of our own hopes and fears — the core complexes that govern our lives — lensed through our creaturely intuitions about space and time, intuitions that have regularly misled us about the realities of nature, from the shape of the Earth to the centricity of the Solar System.

Jung collided with his own creaturely intuitions when, in the fourth winter of the world’s deadliest war, he had a near-death experience himself: His heart stopped, then, miraculously, restarted. In the wake of the heart attack he wasn’t meant to survive, he wrote in a letter:

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it… The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.

A year later, he was still thinking about it, about the “glimpse behind the veil” it had afforded him, writing in another letter:

Whatever you do, if you do it sincerely, will eventually become the bridge to your wholeness, a good ship that carries you through the darkness of your second birth, which seems to be death to the outside.

Central to his thinking was the concept of synchronicity — the meaningful alignment of two events in space and time — which he had co-invented with his onetime patient Wolfgang Pauli shortly after the physicist was awarded the Nobel Prize. Decades later, in a letter penned as he himself was approaching death, Jung would insist that we must not rule out “the possibility that there is an existence outside time which runs parallel with existence inside time,” intimating that life is simply the alignment of consciousness and time, but the unconscious could exist on another temporal plane. Beneath the seeming self-contradiction — there are no parallels in curved spacetime — was Jung’s insistence that curves, not parallels, are the best way to understand death by understanding life. A century and a half after the forgotten visionary Elizabeth Peabody offered her abiding wisdom on middle age and the art of self-renewal, and half a century before Ursula K. Le Guin penned her magnificent meditation on menopause as rebirth, Jung wrote in “Death and the Soul”:

The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose. The psychological curve of life, however, refuses to conform to this law of nature… From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve.

Couple with Annie Dillard on how to bear your mortality, then let this spare, stunning poem teach you how to live and how to die.