Fear of death: A realistic way forward

Practice essay writing.

Much of human behaviour is driven by the need to manage death anxiety – or so do some psychologists claim. As animals we have a deep instinct for self-preservation, yet as humans, we have a clear understanding that our lifespan is finite and unpredictable. This creates uncomfortable conflict in our minds. But we also have great potential to free ourselves from conscious torment. Most importantly, through awareness.

Fear of death can be better understood as three separate fears.

The first concerns our own experience of being dead and the finitude of life. You might be afraid of having a short life and missing out on experiences, or scared of the experience of being dead (total isolation, nothingness) or what happens to your body when you are dead. This is fear of being dead. Have you done and said enough? Have you achieved your goals or are you running out of time and missing some opportunities?

The fear of dying, on the other hand, stems from the possible experiences before death. Degeneration, pain, disability. Maybe you’re afraid of being a burden to others. Maybe it’s the sudden, unexpected, premature, or the unjust, lonely, and indignified. Or perhaps the unknown, preventable, or prolonged kinds of dying. Many also struggle with the uncertainty about whether they can face death with the bravery that they expect from themselves.

Yet the death of loved ones may be the worst of all. The fear of death of others is a reaction to permanent and complete loss, or loneliness, regret, or seeing a person’s dead body. Experiencing the dying of others can seem like a horrifying ordeal of empathic suffering. While anticipating the loss and grief, you’re also reminded of your own death in the most distressing way.

So how do we die actually?

Most deaths are preceded by damaged arteries, insufficient heart, energy-sucking cancers, lung infections, and brain decline (dementia), but hundreds of paths are possible. There may be obstructions in different systems like the gastrointestinal, respiratory, urinary, and circulatory systems. Pressure on the nervous system can bring it offline swiftly. Fluids in all the wrong places like the abdomen, thorax, airways, and lung tissue, are not uncommon. At the end, all comes down to the vital organs and how they’re able to maintain the chemical soups that make up your body.

A dying person may experience pains and shortness of breath. Death rattle is the sound from breathing through the accumulating fluids in the upper airways. Mouth is dry, painful, and it’s difficult to swallow. Nausea, vomiting, constipation, and at the end, incontinence. Extraordinary fatigue – with insomnia. Insatiable thirst but no appetite. Failing senses, memory, language, and consciousness. Confusion and restlessness. Muscles waste away and all movement with it. Skin may present itching, persistent wounds, and sweating.

But dying is not as nightmarish as it seems. You won’t be alone – almost certainly – and you will be helped with both simple and advanced tools that can relieve suffering. Billions have gone through it before you and no-one returned to complain.

You can receive advance care planning where your values are heard. Unnecessary procedures may be stratched off to tame the tendencies to prolong life by all means. Pain and other symptoms are often visible even if you weren’t able to describe them.

Strong opioids can cut down severe pain and shortness of breath. Air flow and mask ventilators ease it too. Fluids can be drained, tumours shrunk, retentions relieved, and pressures reduced, to ease symptoms. Mouth can feel much better with lip balm, ice, numbing agents, and antiseptics.

Psychosocial methods and drugs exist to reduce both anxious and depressive symptoms. You may be helped to look back at your life with appreciation, acceptance, and meaning – this experience is more than possible – and it’s certainly possible to face mortality with peace.

When the palette is empty and life will be a matter of days, sedation can be used to avoid extreme suffering. Life is impermanent, and so is dying. Perhaps even the universe itself.

Defences that shield us against fear of death are similar with the ones we use for other negative thoughts and emotions: denial, distraction, suppression – fantasy, humor – logical thinking and channelling. Channelling is to go boxing when you feel anger, or to help others when you feel hopeless. Or to live more vigorously when you feel fear of death.

The cost-benefit analysis for fear of death is quite simple. Fears provide safety up to a point after which it becomes useless because of lack of control. Western philosophers always emphasized that fearing death is irrational. But rational understanding doesn’t often lead to an emotional one.

We are good at avoiding the topic. Death is ever present in our environment but still talking about it directly can be a taboo or a stroke of bad luck. While dying is moving to healthcare facilities, we want to stay busy in a sense of immortality. This does unfortunately backfire because everything unusual is prone to become more scary.

Funerals are a part of how we manage death anxiety. As all rituals, they serve to coordinate emotions and to increase the sense of belonging into a group which can create new positive emotions to the group members. And as symbols, it creates tombstones and photographs with which the spirit of the funeral can be carried over to the future. People even plan and think about their own funerals.

And one of the core beliefs that people hold concerns what they think about death itself. For millenia, religions have said that death is actually an illusion, and this consoling idea is still one of their bedrocks. In Medieval times priests ran the first hospitals – now they visit the hospital to talk with the dying and their loved ones. But as our culture has slowly cleared out supernatural beliefs, the idea that death is the final moment of existence has become more and more common. What’s often left, is the bleak picture of death as the enemy, or the failure, or the mere physical destruction and annihilation.

It’s important to fill the void with some greater values that, in some sense, exist forever. But why do many non-religious people still doubt the finality of life?

People seem to be convinced especially by accounts of disembodied or other-wordly experiences. For example, near-death experiences have been described to be like what you can imagine of the concept of heaven: soul leaving the body, undescribably positive emotions and deep peace, sense of cosmic unity and purpose, and lights and spiritual beings including deceased relatives. Which one came first, the heavenly near-death experience or the idea of heaven?

People who have experienced it have shown a change of world view and priorities, a new sense of aliveness, vitality, and vividness, and also heigtened compassion, purpose, appreciation of life, and drive for self-actualization. The experience seems to dramatically reduce fear of death.

Of course, we know that the brain can produce hallucinations and dreams. Similar experiences can also happen on some drugs or during brain hypoxia (lack of oxygen) or psychiatric conditions. Religious ceremonies, meditation, can sometimes have unusual effects. And we know the brain is capable of extraordinary yet natural phemonena like hypnosis and perfect memory (as part of Savant syndrome).

Some accounts are claimed to be more unexplainable because they happened during nonexistent brain activity, they were shared by two people, or they contained information that couldn’t have been accessed by natural means. But, scientifically, the burden of evidence is so heavy that none of this is good enough. Infact it is quite telling that we are still in the unknown about such claims.

What is clear though, is that working on the fear of death could increase happiness a lot. The problem is, of course, that emotions are infamously difficult to control. If you try to turn them down, they they hide and masquerade and hunt you down eventually. And many have day-to-day trouble controlling their incessant thoughts, emotions, and – most importantly – internal reactions.

Because the key form of control infact lies within the reactions – the indifference. And while it is impossible to be perfect, it is easy to become significantly better. What you need to internalize is this: the contents of your consciousness are just data, and while a lot of this data contains useful information, as a free being you could look at this data and choose what to do with it. The brain keeps throwing you terrible impulses but it’s truly possible to just let them sit in your consciousness – and watch them float away.

This is the way forward for the fear of death as well. The brevity of life can help you connect with the present moment like never before. The present moment is immensely valueable! It is possible to find happiness in your consciousness without conditions and judgements of its contents.

As we try to observe this emotion, we can use it to reset our priorities in a powerful way. Awareness of death can cut through all the most meaningless things in your life. It can show you effortlessly if you’re caring about the wrong things.

Imagine vividly that you have a week left, or a day, or five years. How do you want to spend your attention? Imagine that you are dying right now. How would you have preferred to spend your attention? And then let awareness of death push you through the new priorities you set.