The Fear of Death

OK, so having sorted out the meaning of life, sort of, I'd like to turn my over-simplifying attention next to the fear of death...well, I never said it would all be snowflakes and kittens. Never mind, I'll soon turn back to funerals, for a bit of light relief.

It's surely a biological function, an evolutionary priority, to seek to preserve one's life. Sometimes, people have managed to put that function aside and either risked or actually given their lives seeking to protect other people. We call them heroes, and are moved and astonished by their ability to put a moral choice and a willed action in front of their natural human fear.

They themselves tend not to use the word "hero," but say things like "I just found myself doing it," or "seemed what had to be done," or "just doing my job." Self-preservation can be put aside, but for most of us much of the time, it's a priority. In a comparatively safe society like ours, self-preservation can give rise to all sorts of neurotic stuff - the so-called "worried well," and if I catch myself thinking like that, I try to remember that the human body at any age is not perfectable and totally stable; health is relative, and OK at the moment is OK.

So most of the time most of us want to keep on living, unless we are very ill, profoundly unhappy and distressed, or just tired out and resigned. Because mostly, people fear death, or if they don't fear death, they fear dying.

"Staring at the Sun," by Irvin Yalom, opens with these enlightening words:

"Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. ...But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom and, inevitably, diminish and die."

That awareness, he explains later, can lead to various death-fears and anxieties which, if not looked at and faced, can cause all sorts of personal problems and tensions. And yet looking into one's own mortality, looking into death itself, is like staring at the sun - you can't do it for long.

His words quoted above linked, for me, to another insight from Dorothy Rowe: it is not so much a fear of death that haunts many people, it is much more the fear of the annihiliation of the self - in fact, the loss of self-awareness. Some people would say they would rather die than lose all sense of their own identity, (i.e. face the destruction of their personalities, their memories, their egos.) They might describe such states as a living death. (Sorry - but I said, no snowflakes and kittens...)

So maybe, with respect to Yalom (it's a tremendously worthwhile and helpful book, I've found) but maybe sometimes self-awareness is not as precious as life, it's more precious to us than life, since without it we don't see ourselves as fully alive. And Rowe looks at the way people will defend themselves against a perceived threat to their sense of identity (even if the threat is hardly or non-existent.)

So maybe to accept our own mortality, to deal with the dread death holds for us, we need somehow to come to terms with losing our self-awareness. (I'm beginning to find "dread" a more useful word than "fear," in this context.) I'm going to hold that idea, and come back to it in a moment.

Yalom uses the insights of Epicurus, who points out that death is a non-state. There is no individual awareness after death, just as there wasn't before life. We didn't exist before we were born, and (in a literal and basic sense) we won't after we die. So, nothing to fear about being dead. There's nothing there, and no "me" to know that there is nothing there. Or, like the Venerable Bede quoted in a recent Good Funeral Guide post, we simply cannot know anything about before and after life, even if - like Bede - we believe in an immortal soul. So, still, there is nothing to dread about being dead. There's no point in dreading a state of non-being.

Except - we have to come to terms with losing our self-awareness, our very selves. (Even if you believe in a soul, you will still surely have to say goodbye to yourself in this life as you are now.)

You've been waiting for that second boot to hit the floor, if you've read any of my meanderings before, so here it comes. For many of us - well, for me and I hope maybe for you one day - some reconciliation with mortality, with acceptance of the prospect of the end of me, some resignation, can come from mindfulness meditation. (Other kinds of meditation too, I'm sure.) And that's because while you are meditating, you achieve some relief from the demands of the ego, all the "what ifs," the "should haves," the "I'm gonna.." and you exist, as far as possible, just in the present. And when you return to the usual flow of thoughts, plans and worries, you may find an increased acceptance of your life, and of its inevitable end.

I'm pitching the mindfulness thing fairly low today; I could say that a meditative state puts one into contact with non-rational, profound states of mind (what non-believers still call "spiritual," lacking another term, or what some sorts of believers might call God) and that these states of mind are deeply rewarding, and yield calm, compassion and general well-being, even back in the onward flow of the old hurly-burly.

And this may help you to a view you'll find in a comment on my last posting, from Comfort Blanket, where she says: "What I do know for sure is that if there is one thing that gives life meaning, then that one thing is death. Because it puts things into perspective, brings them into focus, sharpens us up, gives us a limit on how much/how long...
So perhaps the meaning of life is death? Can it be that simple?"

Yup.

Only death can give life its meaning. We are here to be, we are not here "because"....or "so that"....
It is only not being here that makes being here possible, significant, capable of creating meanings.

The meaning of life is death, the meaning of death is life.

The other meanings, we create for and between ourselves.