Dying without God – The Absence of Belief at Life's End

http://www.christianpost.com/Opinion/Columns/2009/03/dying-without-god-the-absence-of-belief-at-life-s-end-11/index.html

[The Christian Post] 11 Mar 2009--Journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert spent untold hours with the late French President Francois Mitterand, and many of these hours were devoted to discussions about death. After serving two seven-year terms as the French President, Mitterand revealed that he had been fighting prostate cancer throughout his years in the Elysee Palace.

Born into a Roman Catholic family, Mitterand became an ardent agnostic. In Dying without God: Francois Mitterand's Meditations on Living and Dying, Giesbert sheds considerable light on Mitterand's understanding of what it meant to die without any belief in God.

Giesbert describes Mitterand as "a Nietzschean until his dying day." He described himself as a mystic with the mind of a rationalist. He did not deny that form of transcendence might exist, but he described the idea that his spirit might survive his death as "embarrassing." He was fond of paraphrasing Celine: "Eternity must be very long, especially toward the end."

Mitterand lived by a moral code that matched his worldview. Giesbert described Mitterand's hands as made to strangle men and to seduce women. At his funeral, his mistress and their daughter sat close to Mitterand's wife and their children. As a Nietzchean, he was committed above all to the acquisition and retention of power.

In the end, he died, as he had lived, without God.