This essay always rubbed me the wrong way. What is the point of judging someone’s happiness when they are no longer alive? A corpse can’t be happy or sad, it’s dead. So what exactly are we judging? The gestures and attitudes of people in their final seconds? Days? Weeks?

I’m going to attempt a reframe of it by again saying that Montaigne simply got the source material wrong. He begins with a quote of Ovid:

No man should be called happy till his death; Always we must await his final day, Reserving judgment till he’s laid away.

I think we’re simply dealing with an issue of poetic language being taken too literally. I don’t think Ovid was writing about happiness as we experience it day to day in life. Rather, he was talking about whether a life was full and robust.

My interpretation of Ovid is that if you can look back on your life in closing hours with satisfaction for how you lived — the relationships you had, the way you treated other people, the positive contributions you left in the world — then it should be viewed as a happy life.

This has philosophical implications, because our cultural touchstones of what constitutes success in life — wealth, possessions, fame, acclaim — don’t do much to tip the scales of happiness when a life is complete. The rich will die just the same as a pauper and no lavish funeral will bring them back to life.

I have only experienced one person dying in my life, and that was my father. How does his death stand up to the Ovid test? Honestly, it’s confusing, which fits many of my feelings about him.

My father developed an aggressive form of blood-borne cancer in his early 60s and made the decision not to treat it. He lived a surprisingly long time with it considering this, roughly three years. And even before then, my dad had suffered two heart attacks and would regularly guilt me into visits on the possibility that he didn’t have long to live. To me, it felt like he was looking for an exit.

In the weeks leading up to his death, I was told he he taken a turn for the worst and was altered to visit him in Hendersonville, NC to see him before he passed away. I spend about two weeks with him and not just me, but seemingly everyone he stayed in contact with came to visit.

During these visits, he seemed surprisingly upbeat and expressed satisfaction with his life and a lack of fear about what might come next. So, if the scripted ending had come to pass, I would easily say he met the Ovid test.

But then, he rapidly entered hospice and it became unclear exactly what happened to put him there. It seems to me that he and my stepmother had concocted their own amateur assisted suicide via medication, but it had not gone to plan.

So, instead of getting the scripted ending, I went to hospice and saw him one last time — a tube down his throat so he couldn’t speak. All I could sense from him was the look in his eyes, which appeared terrified to me.

Perhaps I misread it. Or maybe it was the result of some medication he was on at the time. But regardless, it changed my perception of the way he talked about his final days. I wondered now exactly what happened to that scripted end. Does he now regret it?

And that’s why this chapter of Montaigne’s essays has always felt flimsy and pointless to me. Why should I judge the happiness of my father at his death in any case? He left the world will just more questions, and I’ll never be able to answer them.