Let your every action, word, and thought be those of one who could depart from life at any moment. (Meditations 2.11)
I cannot find a more fitting passage to describe the last few months of Dirk Mahling’s life. Dirk departed from this life last Friday after a hard-fought battle with cancer. He was the President of New Stoa, a tutor, and mentor to many students at the College of Stoic Philosophers since 2016. Additionally, Dirk is one of several people who worked hard to keep the College alive when the founding Scholarch retired last year. He was bright, humorous, courageous, and a dedicated Stoic who was full of life to the end. Dirk was a friend, a colleague, and, more than anyone I know personally, an example of what it means to face death as a Stoic.
Dirk told me about his terminal cancer diagnosis last August when I returned to the College of Stoic Philosophers after a long sabbatical. At that time, he thought he might have as many as two years left. He told me his challenge was figuring out how to live the rest of his life in that time. He didn’t appear sick in August; he looked like the Dirk I had known since 2015 when I mentored him through the Stoic Essential Studies course. I mentored many students at the college, but only a handful stand out in my memory. Dirk was undoubtedly one of those. When I returned to the College last year to discover he was the President of New Stoa, I teased him about being one of my most challenging students. He was bright and questioned everything. I enjoyed the challenge, and we had a great time together in the course.
Dirk’s sense of humor was unbounded. His essay responses to lessons almost always included comics, memes, and humorous comments. In the Ethics lesson, he included a photo of Oikos yogurt with his essay response about the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis. His answer to the question, “How do we become cosmopolitan?” was, “by reading Cosmo…” and he inserted a picture of a Cosmopolitan magazine cover. Yes, he also provided a correct answer. That was Dirk’s way of keeping Stoic philosophy fun and lite.
He also included a comic with particular meaning as we consider Dirk’s life and death as a Stoic. The comic depicts two men in togas standing next to a grave. The headstone reads, “R.I.P. Zeno the philosopher—dead, but so what? The quote from one of the two characters underneath the comic reads, “He was a Stoic’s Stoic.”
Dirk knew his end was near, but I certainly did not predict it was so close based on his behavior. He remained active at the College until the end and recently volunteered to mentor two students through the next term of the Marcus Aurelius Program beginning April 1st. He even joined the College faculty on our monthly Zoom conference call five days before he passed. Dirk was on oxygen during the meeting and told us he needed it because he gets short of breath when he talks. Dirk dedicated himself to the College’s mission of teaching students about Stoicism, and he remained at his post until the Captain called.
To me, it appeared Dirk was living the practice of memento mori. Like Marcus Aurelius, Dirk did not fear death. Marcus wrote:
In human life, the time of our existence is a point, our substance a flux, our senses dull, the fabric of our entire body subject to corruption, our soul ever restless, our destiny beyond divining, and our fame precarious. In a word, all that belongs to the body is a stream in flow, all that belongs to the soul, mere dream and delusion, and our life is a war, a brief stay in a foreign land, and our fame thereafter, oblivion. So what can serve as our escort and guide? One thing and one alone, philosophy; and that consists in keeping the guardian-spirit within us inviolate and free from harm, and ever superior to pleasure and pain, and ensuring that it does nothing at random and nothing with false intent or pretence, and that it is not dependent on another’s doing or not doing some particular thing, and furthermore that it welcomes whatever happens to it and is allotted to it, as issuing from the source from which it too took its origin, and above all, that it awaits death with a cheerful mind as being nothing other than the releasing of the elements from which every living creature is compounded. Now if for the elements themselves it is nothing terrible to be constantly changing from one to another, why should we fear the change and dissolution of them all? For this is in accordance with nature: and nothing can be bad that accords with nature. (Meditations 2.17)
Dirk was still in his late prime and could have been bitter about his circumstances. He could have complained that his life was not long enough. He did not. As Seneca wrote:
Most of mankind, Paulinus, complains about nature’s meanness, because our allotted span of life is so short, and because this stretch of time that is given to us runs its course so quickly, so rapidly—so much so that, with very few exceptions, life leaves the rest of us in the lurch just when we’re getting ready to live. And it’s not just the masses and the unthinking crowd that complain at what they perceive as this universal evil; the same feeling draws complaints even from men of distinction. (On the Shortness of Life 1.1)
One paragraph later, Seneca wrote:
It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn’t notice passing has passed away. (On the Shortness of Life 1.3).
From what I know of Dirk’s life, he did not squander it. He lived life to the fullest until the very end. Pierre Hadot wrote,
In the apprenticeship of death, the Stoic discovers the apprenticeship of freedom.[1]
I believe Dirk found that freedom as he faced the end of his life. His example proved it to me. I am grateful to Dirk for all he contributed to the College of Stoic Philosophers. His presence will be greatly missed there. However, I am far more thankful for the example he provided for me. He gave me the opportunity to see how a Stoic should face death. Yes, I’ve read all the passages in the Stoic texts related to death, and they are powerful and convincing. However, nothing in those texts was as compelling and poignant as watching a friend and fellow Stoic courageously face death as Dirk did. The manner with which he faced death is a gift to anyone who witnessed it.
Yesterday, I wrote a note to Erik Wiegardt, the founding Scholarch of the College of Stoic Philosophers, to let him know Dirk had passed away. He responded in his typically thoughtful and profound manner. He wrote:
Now Dirk knows the answer to that greatest of philosophical questions.
He’s right. Dirk learned what we the living cannot know: what happens when we die. Marcus spent a lot of time contemplating death. He wrote:
Indeed, the very life of every one of us is like an exhalation from our blood or inhalation from the atmosphere; for such as it is to draw a breath of air into your lungs and then surrender it, so it is to surrender your power of respiration as a whole, which you acquired but yesterday or the day before at the time of your birth, and are now surrendering to the source from which you first drew it. (Meditations 6.15)
I think Marcus’ answer here and in Meditations 4.23 provides Stoics with all we can and need to know about death—we return to our source. Since our soul is a fragment of the logos that permeates the cosmos, it will return to its source. In what form or capacity? No one knows. However, we will all discover the answer in the end.
In the meantime, life goes on for us and provides us with the opportunity to contribute a verse, as Walt Whitman famously wrote.[2] Dirk certainly did contribute a verse—to his family, the College, the lives of students he touched there, and those of us who had the privilege of knowing him. Regardless of what happens to us at death, I believe Dirk’s parting message to us would be similar to that of Epictetus:
You must wait for God, my friends. When he gives the signal and sets you free from your service here, then you may depart to him. But for the present, you must resign yourselves to remaining in this post in which he has stationed you. (Discourses 1.9.16)
I believe that is what Dirk would say to us because that is how he lived until the end. He courageously remained at his post until the Captain called, and it was time for him to depart. By doing so, he gave us a wonderful example of a Stoic life lived well. I can confidently say that Dirk Mahling lived life and faced death as a prokopton whose practice of Stoicism was genuinely on Fire.
Dirk, your legacy lives on in the lives you touched. Farewell, my friend.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Ira Davidson (New York: Blackwell, 1995), p. 96
[2] Whitman, W. (1892) Oh me! Oh Life! in Leaves of Grass
