Less than four minutes later, a doctor with glasses leans over your deathbed. Nobody in the song mentions God, heaven or a soul. So can thinking about your own death be a spiritual experience when none of that comes up?
A song about firsts and lasts
The song is called Een dokter met een bril, Dutch for A Doctor With Glasses. Jan Boerstoel, a Dutch poet who writes song lyrics for the theater, wrote the words. Karin Bloemen, a Dutch singer and stage performer, recorded it in 2002 with the pianist Cor Bakker.
In the verses, Boerstoel runs through your firsts. First bath, first word, first steps while the whole room claps, first bike, first kiss, first house. Halfway through, he turns it around: from here on, the last times start to win.
Your last cigarette. You sell your surfboard, and your tango shoes too. Your last day at work, your last big trip. You walk through the rooms once more before you leave your last house. Then your very last hour strikes.
In the closing line, Boerstoel turns it around one more time. With your last breath, there is still something you get to do for the first time.
Where the word spiritual comes from
What does spiritual actually mean?
The word comes from the Latin spiritus, which means breath. It goes back to spirare, to breathe. Long before it had anything to do with souls or churches, the spiritual part of you was the air going in and out. In that oldest sense, the song ends on the most spiritual moment of a life.
Do you need to believe in anything for it to count?
No. In my FAQ I put it this way: "You can make this experience as spiritual or religious as you want. And if that is not your language, it can still move you deeply." What happens after death I leave entirely to you. Kierkegaard did the same, at a grave, in 1845.
A talk at a graveside, written in 1845
Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and Christian writer who lived in Copenhagen from 1813 to 1855. In 1845 he published Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions: three talks for a confession, a wedding and a funeral, written for occasions he made up. The third one is called At a Graveside.
In it, he draws a line between two ways of facing death. Translated from his Danish: "To think of yourself as dead is earnestness; to witness someone else's death is a mood."
A mood passes. You are sad at a funeral, and by dinner it has lifted. Earnestness, as I read Kierkegaard, is taking something seriously enough that it changes what you do next. And the one death you can think about in that way is your own.
What did Kierkegaard say happens after death?
Nothing. He refused. "That is why the talk must hold back from every explanation," he wrote. "As death is the last of all, so this must be the last thing said about it: it is inexplicable." At an imagined grave, Kierkegaard chose to leave the question open for everyone who stood there.
Then what is the thought of death for?
He answers in the very next sentence: "The inexplicability is the boundary, and the only point of saying so is to give the thought of death a force that works backward, to make it urge you on in life." You stop at the boundary, turn around, and carry the thought back into the days you still have.
He even described how to begin.
Earlier in the talk, Kierkegaard writes about someone whose days are sliding into gloom and distraction. That person says: "I will call up the earnest thought of death." And it helped, he writes. "For the earnestness of death has helped to make a last hour infinitely meaningful, and its earnest thought has helped to make a long life meaningful, as in a time of scarcity."
A shortened version of that line is on my FAQ page. The second half of his sentence is about the thought alone. Held during a long life, it makes the days count, the way bread counts when there is not much of it.
A death meditation in Kierkegaard's terms
How do you do a death meditation without any religion?
Sit somewhere quiet for ten minutes. Picture your own death, the one death Kierkegaard counts as earnestness. Leave out every idea of what comes after; that boundary stays where he put it. Then take the thought back into tomorrow and ask what you would do with one ordinary day.
Where my hour fits
In South Korea I took a six-hour seminar in which you reflect on your own last day. At the end, as an exercise, I lay in a coffin for a while. With the Last Hour Experience, the guided audio journey I made, you can do it at home in about an hour. You put on headphones and live through your own final hour, from the news that you have one hour left to the silence once it is over. That is your own death, in Kierkegaard's sense, and what comes after it is yours to fill in, or to leave open. What you carry back into your days is up to you.
Questions people ask. One of them is me.
Can an atheist find death meditation spiritual?
Yes, if you use the word in its oldest sense. Spiritual comes from the Latin spiritus, breath, and nobody needs a belief to notice their own breath.
What if I feel nothing when I think about my own death?
Then your thought may still be general, a death in the abstract. Kierkegaard warned in the same talk that a general reflection on death only confuses the mind. Make it smaller and more concrete: your own room, your own last ordinary evening. And if you still feel nothing, that is an answer too. Nothing has to happen on the first try.
Where can I hear Karin Bloemen's song A Doctor With Glasses?
It is on Het zou toch moeten bestaan, Dutch for It Ought to Exist, the album Karin Bloemen made with the pianist Cor Bakker in 2002. You can find it on Apple Music and other streaming services. The lyrics are in Dutch.
Do you have to be Christian to read Kierkegaard's At a Graveside?
No. Kierkegaard wrote as a Christian, and his faith runs through the book. In this talk he leaves the afterlife unexplained and asks only that you think of your own death. An English translation by Howard and Edna Hong was published by Princeton University Press in 1993.
Sources
Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Kierkegaard's 1845 book in the original Danish, which you can read online at the Royal Danish Library, in the edition of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, the Danish institute that publishes his complete works. The talk Ved en Grav, At a Graveside, is the third one. The quotes in this article are translated here from that Danish text.
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, the English translation by Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton University Press.
Een dokter met een bril, sung by Karin Bloemen with Cor Bakker on piano, lyrics by Jan Boerstoel and music by Marnix Busstra.
Spiritus in Wiktionary, the online dictionary, with the Latin meanings breath and breathing and the root spirare, to breathe.
My FAQ, with my full answer to the question of how spiritual this experience is.
About the founder, about the six-hour seminar in South Korea that led to Last Hour Experience.