Can We (Really) Help The Fear of Death?
Fear, Uncertainty, Regret, and Love: Learning The Art of Balancing Them All For a Square Life Through Literature
“Whenever someone dies, a part of the universe dies too. Everything a person felt, experience and saw dies with them, like tears in the rain.” — Paulo Coelho
The new Covid variant silently asks one to close their eyes for a while and picture the year 2020 and the one after that. You’d taste the horror in that air as if pandemic years had left an imprint on the air of today.
From our early childhood, we see people departing from the world and never coming back physically. This reality has been absorbed in us all, both consciously and unconsciously.
The pandemic, however, attested to the bleakness of life and more to how uncomfortable humans are with the lingering uncertainty.
Mental health issues, for example, in high-infection areas showed the effect the uncertainty had.
Thus, even for the world that survived the pandemic, the old-adage question remains: Can we really help the fear of death?
I learned to hate an immortal life after reading the gothic novel Dracula. I had always envisioned what if people wouldn’t die.
What if we’d sleep without the fear of waking up with the news of a relative’s death? Wouldn’t we be more peaceful and productive?
Dracula simply showed me the loathsome reality of my wish which was physically living an eternal life.
It told me the only way to go against the patterns of nature makes one a burden that haunts the world.
Now, a work of fiction, as we realize while growing up, does not encompass a theme from every reader’s perspective. But what I realized after reading it is: any thought that goes against nature and its patterns binds the thinker in a disgraceful cage.
That’s just about thought. The action seems to promise many dreadful consequences.
And so, I learned to hate being physically here in this world after my time is over. But did it help in lessening my love for my life? For my family? For my parent’s life? For everyone I cared about?
Put another way: Am I less afraid of death even after years of reading extensively researched literature on death?
I’ve started to abhor my former visions of being able to live a physical life eternally. However, nothing has made any difference to both my love of life and my fear of death.
Even today as I’m penning this article and mentally planning the remaining week in the background, I feel an occasional ache.
The primary source of which comes from the family of my father’s friend to which the unexpected death and grief is as fresh as a fresh organ-deep cut can be.
To add another layer of anguish, because of being on the other continent the deceased’s son couldn’t make it to the funeral.
My heart goes out to the dead, to the family mourning alone, and more to those who, being on distant continents, would mostly feel the salt of their tears as the only companion in the freshness of their grief.
Such is the barrenness of death.
It leaves one in a vacuum, an ultra-high vacuum.
While experimenting in the laboratory, if accidentally an evaporative impurity gets added to the material you’d like to characterize, the vacuum breaks. Of course, disturbing the results, but the point is: a vacuum can break in a lab, but not the one that’s inside of you. The one that the death of a loved one leaves within you.
None around us would comfortably discuss death at the dinner. It’s as simple as that. But I’ve found that we are more afraid of the death of our loved ones than we are of our own.
I, for example, find the imagination of my death as an encouragement to stop wasting time and so something as art, science, kindness, and spiritualism to leave an imprint in the world. However, I shudder when the imagination turns its way to my aging parents. That’s simply too much — envisioning that death could happen to them.
However, despite the love and fear, there’s something that I have learned, that promises to make a practical difference and that is: the responsibility of life.
Before coming to that part, let’s have a look at:
Why are we all uncomfortable with death?
Eventually, we will die. That’s the way of things. Why, then, this unprecedented pain with every new wave of uncertainty?
I’ve seen people simply claim to hate their lives. After confiding the trap their choices have built for them, they suggest, more to themselves than to us, death as the only escape.
While mistakes are a chance to grow, some cultures, as I’m sure you’ll agree, aren’t a support system for your mistakes. Even though there’s always something within a person’s control even in the most daunting situations, sometimes that something seems more like fiction than a fact. This, of course, has variations across different cultures and regions.
However, once after having a conversation with one such person, I found that they didn’t really want to die. They just wanted an end to that life, which is to say they wanted to erase some parts of their present lives.
Thus, the paradox is: even when people do not love their lives, they won’t love death either.
In other words: no matter how tough one’s life is, nothing can evade the distantness, the strangeness, the numbness, the surprises of the road we call death.
Why so?
Let’s have a look at what the author O.H Green writes in his book The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory.
“Fear of death is common enough, but we are, of course, certain that we will die. Still, what we are certain about is that we will die eventually; we are typically uncertain whether we will die next month or next year. There is thus considerable scope for fear of death with uncertainty. (…) Given our certainty, we can hardly fear that we will die eventually.”
Simply, fear of death is proportionate to uncertainty.
We will die, that’s certain.
When we will die, that’s uncertain. That’s where the surprise is. That’s where the fear is.
Could We Help The Fear of Death?
We are now, coming back to what I promised to explore in this article. Given that we are uncertain about the timing of someone’s death and are afraid of it as a consequence, is there something we can help?
In my exploration for finding an answer, I loved what an Australian caregiver Bronnie Ware, noted in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
She had been there for the people who were battling to accept the reality of their probable death and the people carrying a load of emotional matters while transforming from life to death. The fear of death also has its roots in regret she noted while identifying the common theme knitted in the regrets of dying patients.
Surprisingly, none of the regrets that people were reporting had anything to do with the people who had been cruel (to the patient), nor did it have any connection to lost passions.
Instead, they had everything to do with the connectivity to the inner self and its simple demands.
5 Regrets of Dying People:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Around uncertainty, thus, there is a lace of regret particularly if one is sure about the approaching death. This is to say when we know the time to live on earth has finally been numbered, it might not be the fear or anticipated regret of death that disturbs one most intensely, but rather the fear that when death does occur one wouldn’t have truly lived yet. We anticipate regret for not leaving a part of myself in the aspects of life I loved.
You see?
It’s the fear of having missed out on the truest journey towards ourselves that bothers us at the thoughts of death.
And, we learn it from our fellow humans migrating to the dimensions of death, while having Bronnie Ware share their woes with the world, so that we may take heed before it’s too late.
When scared, one can not be in love.
We are mortal, which is why the human race has chosen to do something. To put in something in the world before we go!
We could go on talking about how much value the sense of death has added to life. Regardless, the reality of death hurts. It hurts when we see our dreams fade away. It hurts to see people die. It hurts when we don’t feel their (physical) warmth anymore.
The pain is always there.
But, in the darkness of night, there’s also literature telling you:
“A couple more hours to go; it will be light soon.” — Alex Michaelides
Thus, for a good reason, humans have found themselves turning to art or science to help them understand and find a way out of uncertainty.
Nothing will ease the anguish of the unknown road of death than the writings inked in love and kindness, two examples of which you’ve seen above.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneering figure in near-death research, while imparting the soul-touching lessons she had gleaned from years of experience with dying patients, told the world that humans can only experience two emotions, that come in different variants.
One: love, a source of all positive feelings. Two: fear, a source of all negative feelings. In spirituality, they say: the lamps are different, the source is one. Likely so, no matter how we identify an individual emotion, the source of all positives is the same as true for all negatives, says Elisabeth.
You’re right in questioning the link here.
When I was questioning how a plethora of her research would ease this fear that takes differing shapes and develops itself in different versions, I found an answer in what she taught the world:
When scared, one can not be in love.
In other words, when in love, one cannot be scared.
Both chase the opposite out of the window.
Loving life in the best way — that’s how we can evade our fear of death. As she writes,
“It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth — and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest as if it was the only one we had.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The same Curtains of Death
You have just changed the view outside of your window to spend your time satisfyingly, but the velvety curtains of death are as deep as ever.
We won’t get the life or the loved ones back. We’re bound to miss what isn’t there. We’ll miss what’s gone as there’s an unwavering hole left in your life. That could not be helped.
But it can be helped in this sense: we can evade the chance of creating a vacuum in our lives while we live and while the people we love and meet live.
We can push away the regrets (which are common but often heavy). And we can cherish what we have.
At the very least, we can give ourselves the satisfaction that we went the right way (to understand, appreciate others, and enrich our connection with them) with love, responsibility, and deliberation.
So,
“It is not the physical end of life that we should be concerned about. Rather, our aim should be to experience life while we are alive.” Elisabeth Kübler- Ross
As I am writing this, I feel as small as ever while thinking about what time cannot heal. But I am also aware of the joy of satisfying my responsibility. As Paulo Coelho, the author of the world’s all-time favorite The Alchemist wrote: Everything a person felt, experienced, and saw dies with them, like tears in the rain.
That vacuum is simply unbreakable. The grief is non-negotiable. We cannot move them from their places, but we can make room for satisfaction, satisfaction that we have done what our connection with that person demanded from us.
And when the regret of losing them fogs the window, you could show it the light you cultivated as memories, as fulfilling your responsibility, as going out of your way to understand them and extend compassion to them, as celebrating their being, as giving them the gift of your spiritual presence and attention.
“At least then you will know that you have tried and that — whatever the outcome — you have traveled a noble path.”— Elizabeth Gilbert
