Philosophizing the Grave: Learning to Die with Costica Bradatan

“It was the hemlock that made Socrates great.”
—Seneca

“Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death.”
—David Buckel

On an early spring morning in 2018, when the stars were still out and Manhattan glowed in all of its wasteful wattage across the East River, a 60-year-old retired lawyer named David Buckel made his way past the Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Museum down to Prospect Park. In those hours before the dawn, Buckel dug a shallow circle into the black dirt, which investigators believed he made to prevent the spread of the fire he was about to set, having understood that our collective future would have enough burning. The former attorney paused to send an email to The New York Times—it read: “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves”—doused himself in gasoline, and lit a match. Buckel was pronounced dead by 6:30 a.m.

As a civil rights attorney, Buckel’s life was one of unqualified success—an early supporter of Lambda Legal, he’d fought doggedly for LGBTQ rights not just in New York, but in seemingly inhospitable places from Nebraska to Iowa. As a human being, his life was defined by companionship and love—raising a daughter with his husband of 34 years alongside the girl’s biological mother and her wife. And as a community member, his life was committed to stewardship and responsibility—rather than using wasteful fossil fuels he walked several miles every day to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden where, in retirement, he organized the center’s composting program. By all accounts Buckel’s life was centered around justice, both personal and ecological, which should go to some length in explaining his death on April reminds us that wherever “self-immolators are going they are not asking anyone with them: their deaths are fierce, but remain exclusively their own.”