Life and death by email: ‘How do you believe in God, professor?’

There are issues — some crucial, others trivial — with a proven capacity to divide humankind. Among the trivial, let’s include soccer, politics, cuisine, and countless other subjects. And, among the crucial ones — setting aside the growing global inequalities and the misery faced by the poorest people — we must include perspectives on death.

Death is certainly divisive. There have long been people with the capacity to contemplate the inevitability of death with coldness, even serenity. They know that one thing (life) without the other (death) — and vice versa — is simply impossible. Hence, it’s best not to make the subject taboo. There are even people interested in delving into the arguments made by some giants of the history of philosophy, who developed positions regarding death. But there are also those who, at the slightest mention of the concept of death, can barely handle it.

The first group of humans will, in principle, be interested in the question addressed here. The second group will already be closing these pages, or clicking away from the digital version of this article.

In the introductory note to his 2025 book, Querido profe, me invaden las tinieblas: Dialogos sobre cómo vivir y morir (Dear Professor, Darkness Overwhelms Me: Dialogues on How to Live and Die), 66-year-old Enrique Bonete, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Salamanca, explains the two main motivations behind this moving, deeply sad and luminous work. First, it’s meant “to present, in accessible language, some sensible ethical reflections from philosophers that can help strengthen our attitude toward fate.” And, secondly, it addresses “the moral good that the existential anxieties of such a lucid and sensitive person — who maintained commendable fortitude until the very end — can generate in readers.” That person being Nuria, to put it simply.

In Bonete’s writings, Nuria is a 33-year-old from Girona, a city in Catalonia. But “Nuria” is simply a pseudonym that the professor chose for his character. Who knows what her real name was, where she lived, how she coped with her illness, what angels and demons haunted her mind?

Nuria is based on a real student whom he taught at the University of Salamanca. His philosophy classes and his course on thanatoethics — the ethics of death — profoundly affected her. Years after graduating, while trying to banish or alleviate the specter of cancer, the young woman decided to write to her former professor, seeking help.

“It was during Christmas vacation, exactly on January 4, 2017. I was with my family,” Bonete recalls, sitting in his office on the Miguel de Unamuno campus of the University of Salamanca. “Checking my email, I saw a new one: it was from a former student of mine in the Humanities department. She told me that she was sick and had suddenly remembered me and my Ethics of Death [course], because she had found the notes that she’d kept since then.”

“I didn’t remember who she was and I was surprised that she’d [written] to me to tell me all of this.” He corrects himself: “Well, not really, because I’m someone who thinks about death, who writes about death, who teaches about death.” Of course, it didn’t surprise him as much as the time that a friend of one of his students called him, saying that she wanted to take her own life: “I want to kill myself,” she told him.

“I tried to calm her down a bit. That really surprised me… [the email] from Nuria, not so much. After a few days, I replied to her email. And we started writing to each other.” They spent a year-and-a-half exchanging messages. Messages of bitterness, anger and incomprehension. The correspondence also brought relief, confession, light and — to top it all off — a bit of humor.

Some time later, that exchange of letters via computer would eventually become a book. In it, the student — suffering from colon cancer, with a grim prognosis — addresses the professor to ask for help. But rather than seeking comfort, the kind of help she requests has more to do with a search for solid arguments. “Communication is difficult with my parents and brother,” she notes. “I can’t be honest with my friends: the conversations are superficial.” She is searching for a “why.”

In one of the emails, Nuria asks him what he’s up to, if he’s published much since he was her professor. He tells her that he’s finishing a book and doesn’t know if he’ll title it Philosophers Facing Death, or something like that. This manuscript would ultimately be titled The Dying of the Wise: An Ethical Perspective on Death (2019). In the book — only available in Spanish — the author unpacks a rich array of philosophical ideas on living with the fear of the end of life. But he also meticulously recounts the final days of the philosophers and thinkers from whom he drew those ideas: from Epicurus to Nietzsche, from Seneca to Freud, as well as Unamuno, Cicero, Spinoza, Descartes, Heidegger, Sartre, Eugenio Trías and Hannah Arendt… a total of 24 authors. Some of them also appear in the pages of Dear Professor, Darkness Overwhelms Me.

One day, after letting her former professor know how much she enjoyed their correspondence — which she came to call “private philosophy lessons” — Nuria expressed her conviction that, if the conversations were ever published as a book, they could help sick people, just as they had helped her. “And I told her ‘okay.’ The truth is that this wasn’t meant to become a book… but in the end, you see [what happened]. We agreed that, every Tuesday, I would send her a text. She was delighted.”

Questions, answers, confessions, laments, hopes, consolations, light, shadows, doubts… and certainties. The beliefs of a devout and practicing Catholic — like Bonete — and the non-beliefs of a convinced atheist since childhood, like Nuria.

“I think I remember arguing with her and her group of friends in class about God and all of that… they were atheists. And, of course, they must have thought that I was a bigot,” Bonete recalls, with a smile on his face. He adds: “But in the end, she became interested in the topic of God; she had a kind of yearning for it. One day, she wanted to get a New Testament to read something, but she was too embarrassed to ask her mother to buy it for her.”

“The problem of God,” the philosophy professor continues, “is present throughout the history of philosophy; it’s in [the works by] Descartes, Hegel, Kant… believe it or not, it’s a philosophical problem. And I think [Nuria] felt the same way as [Miguel de] Unamuno, who, when faced with death, grappled with the question of God. The problem of God isn’t just an intellectual question; it’s an existential one.”

In one of her emails, Nuria ends up confessing to her former professor that she would almost be happy to believe in God, but she didn’t know how. “How do you believe in God, professor?” But in another email, months later, she asks him the million-dollar question: “Could Catholicism be a fiction constructed by men who are afraid of the afterlife?”

Bonete believes that Nuria must have died near the end of 2018. One day, there was no reply to his emails. On January 10, 2019, about two weeks after their last exchange, he insisted: “Could you please send me a short message? I beg you. It would be wonderful to hear from you. Don’t leave me in suspense.” Nothing came.

The Death of the Wise arrived in bookstores in September of 2019 (Dear Professor, Darkness Overwhelms Me was published in Spain last December). Its author had planned — and had even discussed it with Nuria — to visit her at home. It wasn’t to be. The girl’s parents never knew anything about their correspondence: she preferred to keep it a secret. Presumably, now, with the publication of this book, they’ve been able to connect the dots, piece together the story in retrospect, and draw their own conclusions.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, Bonete dedicated himself to selecting what he considered to be the best email exchanges. And then, as it were, he put them away in a drawer. At one point, he was tempted to throw everything in the trash. “It was too unbearable, it saddened me too much, even though she hid her decline from me… but in the last few weeks [of our correspondence], she did tell me that she was very ill.” Then, one day, during a book launch at the Ariel bookstore in Salamanca, the philosopher Eduardo Infante approached him with a glass of wine in his hand and asked him what he was working on. Bonete told him that he had something he had kept for quite some time: a lengthy email exchange with a former student who was ill with cancer. He also mentioned that the student had passed away. “You have to share that!” the author of Philosophy in the Street (2019) urged him. Bonete then spent hours searching through the files on his computer until he found the correspondence. He sent it to his publisher and it became a book.

In it, Nuria sometimes displays — without putting on airs — the desperation of someone who believes she’s approaching the finish line: “I’m blocked, my hopes have vanished” (page 21, January 24, 2017). In other cases, the door reopens: “Reflecting on death doesn’t have to generate fear or anguish. Quite the opposite, in fact. [You make the] most of your time, enjoying the everyday, fully appreciating life and loved ones” (page 25, February 20, 2017). Or: “[Through] your emails, I’ve gradually come to terms, little by little, [with the idea] that dying is less terrifying than I initially thought” (page 159, December 10, 2018).

In any case, Nuria makes it very clear to her old teacher — as a way of expressing her gratitude — what these conversations meant to her in such a difficult situation: “A personal lifeline in the midst of the shipwreck” (page 52, June 8, 2017).

No one emerges unscathed from such a personal experience. Bonete certainly didn’t. Three years ago, angina nearly forced him to confront death head-on. “For me, everything that happened was a life lesson,” he reflects serenely, on a winter morning in Salamanca. “And I’m left with the big questions that arose during those exchanges: In the end, does life have meaning? Does everything we do have meaning? Is so much intellectual, professional, emotional, affective, sexual effort worthwhile? Will everything we do in a lifetime amount to nothing? Is nothingness what awaits us? The nothingness Schopenhauer speaks of? Is it God?”

“[Nuria] was a lucid, intelligent, thoughtful young woman. She taught me so much. I had angina shortly after finishing the book. [And] while I was thinking that I might die, I thought about her a lot, about many of the things she told me in writing.”

And what did Nuria take away from that virtual reunion with her professor?

“Well, I don’t know… but I want to believe that [the correspondence] comforted her. And I truly think that, in the end, she wasn’t afraid. One day, she told me, ‘Professor, this dying thing doesn’t seem so terrible to me anymore… and, of course, if God existed, that would be the icing on the cake.’”

The idea of retirement is firmly in Bonete’s mind: he wants to return to his native Valencia with his wife and buy a little house on the beach there, to enjoy his children and grandchildren. But this professor — with his tentative way of speaking, calm demeanor and unwavering good nature — continues to enjoy teaching. He’s a firm believer in the intrinsic value of education, not as a machine for dispensing skills, resumes and jobs, but as a tool for personal development.

“Teaching isn’t just about transmitting knowledge. It’s also about transmitting attitudes toward life… and, in my case, attitudes toward death, because that’s the subject I’ve dealt with most. And this comforts me. I’m very happy explaining things to my students, because I see that they listen and are interested. If my classes have helped even one of them to better face the adversity of death, everything I’ve done will have been worthwhile,” he explains to EL PAÍS over a lunch of lentils at El Pícaro bar, across from the university.

Bonete passionately champions philosophy — “and ethics, which is practical philosophy” — not just as a tool for learning (which it also is), but for guidance. This is based on the premise that, in contemporary society — which includes classrooms in schools, high schools and universities — technique is valued much more than guidance. “If you read the classics carefully — Seneca, Epicurus, Cicero, Saint Augustine, Montaigne, Spinoza — you’ll see that, while there’s a more or less elevated philosophy there, what they really aim for is to guide the lives of their listeners, their readers. Aristotle said that the fundamental concern of life is to be happy, but that one must know what happiness consists of. [And] he had a completely practical view of ethics: he stated that one cannot be happy without being virtuous.”

Once a week, for the duration of a semester, Bonete teaches an elective course — Readings on Ethics — to a group of about 20 students from various countries. Every year, at the start of the term, he dedicates some class time, as a kind of tribute, to telling his students what happened between him and Nuria, recommending that they read the book.

During the day of his interview with EL PAÍS, in the classroom, they spoke about Heidegger and the notion of death as a constant possibility, its condition as both a fatal and a random destiny, as well as why it doesn’t make much sense to avoid it. They also discussed love — of any kind — as a daily demonstration of attachment to life and as a challenge to death.

The students and their teacher touched on the egocentrism of Miguel de Unamuno. They looked at the work of Julián Marías and the difficulty of accepting the idea of saying goodbye. And the students heard how, in Bonete’s opinion, thanatoethics is a kind of intellectual laboratory where one can learn to curb the fear of thinking about death and talking about death.

Claudia, Aníbal, Abril, Edoardo, Tomás and other pupils listen and take notes. Some of them, afterward, take turns at the board and share their ideas… as well as their doubts. “Unfortunately, we’re talking about a taboo subject, one that practically doesn’t exist,” the professor laments, “but that’s a mistake of Western culture, not of other cultures: I’m convinced that people live happier lives the more they think about death. And I’m living proof. I’m very happy because I think about it quite a bit. So, every new day is wonderful.”

The lecture ends. Class ends. A deathly silence fills the university hallways. Everyone has left. Where has Nuria gone?

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition