All I can offer are a few impressions of what the phrase/sentence has meant in various contexts.
Death is a personal matter regardless of how deeply felt the belief that one moves on to an afterlife or into the company of departed friends and loved ones.
Even if part of a mass murder/suicide/accident/catastrophe each individual death is the stopping of one heart.
No matter how comfortable or painless medical science is able to make the actual process of dying, in the end it’s just the passing of life from the body.
There are probably variations on these themes and other themes as well. But at least these have been used in art as messages about the significance of death.
It implies to me that death is an inherently private, individual experience. Even though one is surrounded by loved-ones, they are not in one’s body experiencing that death. Therefore death is a distinct and separate experience for everyone. And that’s before you get into all the metaphysical crap that generally gets piled on there.
As Hung Mung notes, regardless how many people are attending at the moment of death, none of them can accompany the dying person through the passage to death. The most they can do is stand on the dock and wave goodbye.
I think one way of looking at it is that everyone is private to some extent. You may have been married for forty years and still hanging out with your friends fro 2nd grade, but no one ever knows you like you do. And on your deathbed, you realize no one ever will.
I don’t know how many people have been in a room as a person passes on, but I have, more than once. Yes, the room can be filled with loved ones, but as the dying person slips from life to death, I can only imagine how lonely that last step has to be. The trip into eternity cannot be experienced with anyone else. All the living continue living. No one takes that last walk with you.
Well, I’ve never died, but I have experienced an eerie sense of togetherness when I was really close to someone, in more than just a psychological sense, more of a hypnotic altered state. I’d imagine that if two people were dying at the same time, holding onto each other, both feeling this feeling, that would be as close as it could get.
They didn’t die alone in the literal sense, but I think at the final instant they were alone even if they didn’t have time to consider it.
About 18 years ago, a USAir 737 plunged at 300+ knots nose-first into the ground in Pennsylvania. About 130 people died in 1/100th of a second.
Did they die alone? Literally, no. But in that last instant, even though husband, wife, child or stranger might be in the seats next to them I think they met death on a purely individual level.
This puts me in mind of what Livia, Tony’s mother on “The Sopranos” said once–“In the end, you die in your own arms.” It makes me think of a fundamentally negative, pessimistic way of looking at both life and death. (Then again, it’s said in the context of illustrating that there isn’t any real meaning in life because in the end, there’s just death and aloneness.)
I actually never really thought of it as an individual experiencing death alone, regardless of company during the moment. I recall hearing it in Firefly, when Mal chooses to remain with his derelict ship even though the decision is highly likely to result in his death; when Inara implores him to come with her, saying “You don’t have to die alone.” he responds with “Everybody dies alone.”
That’s the only time I remember hearing the phrase spoken in that exact way, and I took it as just another characterization of Mal’s nihilistic nature.
It might also be a method of consolation for someone who believes themselves destined to die alone. To state that everyone dies alone might make one feel slightly better about their belief that they will die alone. Misery loves company, and all that.
So, while I prefer the individuality interpretation, I’m inclined to think of the phrase as another way of saying “Life’s a bitch, and then you die…alone.”
I never took it as a negative statement. I thought it was meant to remind you that your intimate relationships are not the be all and end all of your life. Don’t worry if you are alone at some point because we are all born alone and we all die alone. Lots of things will change in between but take comfort because we are all in that same boat, it’s a constant for everyone who ever lived.
Although that last moment of life (or is it the first moment of death?) is always experienced alone, most people are unconscious and probably don’t realize they’re dying.
