About Death,
and how my fear of dying vanished in the beginning of my thirties.
We all, to a certain extent, fear the moment of death. It has a lot to do with our imagination of not being any more on our green planet in the future. Foremost about the certainty of an end that haunts us throughout life, as we are all facing the same destiny.
I am not sure when I started consciously thinking about it, about the moment I would stop existing, but I know that it scared me. Very much different to the usual way things scare you in your daily life. I could not stop thinking about it, and it felt as my imagination found its limits.
When I was between six and twelve years old, I often slept at my grandparent’s place because my father had to work night shifts, and I was raised by him. Usually when I went to bed, I listened to children’s stories on tape, and I usually fell asleep while it played. Sometimes it happened that the tape ended and I was still awake. Sometimes that same silence and emptiness in the room made me start thinking about death to a point, where I had to get up, because a feeling creeped inside of myself up to my mind, which I could not stand, nor handle it.
I went out of bed and literally ran to the living room, as if death himself was chasing me. I needed a distraction and sat beside my grandmother and my grandfather, just not to be alone until I calmed down. I never really told them why I was scared, or at least not that I remember.
Fast forward to my mid-twenties, as it became less, but never truly vanished. I still had some lonely evenings when anxiety forced me out of bed in front of the television — again to be distracted, and to help me getting rid of my thoughts by watching random TV-shows, preferable funny ones. It is not a thought that came often, nor did it prevent me from enjoying life.
I guess everyone in one way or another is dealing with it, some the same way as I did, some can cope with it better, some worse. It got to a point where I changed channels and stopped documentaries, when they were dealing with death. I just couldn’t see it, as I was scared that this emptiness, this feeling of nothingness would creep up again within the bottom of my soul.
I have an open mind when it comes to spirituality and things we can’t explain, but although looking into the topic, I did not find anything that helped me. Don’t get me wrong, it did not change who I was, nor did it alter my way of acting or moving along in my life. Just every once in a while, often without a reason, it was there.
Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.
Besides my work, I started studying in my early thirties again. I planned for longer to do another course, so in 2018, I enrolled in an undergraduate course in philosophy.
While the second semester, we went through the history of philosophy, from the old days of Aristotle to the early 19th century and Hegel. When we got introduced to Epicurus and his texts it changed my point of view and I found a solution to my fear.
Until then, I felt that there would be a time, where the two worlds merge, where life leaves, and death embraces you, and this with the imagination of not being anymore would be the scariest for me.
Epicurus wrote that there are three “irrational fears”, one of them was death.
He argued that
Death is ‘not our business’ (i.e. it is not evil)
Argument:
(1) All good and evil is based on sentiment
(2) One cannot feel one’s own death (= state after one has died), because then one no longer exists.
(3) So death is not an evil.
From the Book X of Diogenes Laertios one can read:
“Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience ; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality.”
And further down the feeling of an existence of the intermediate world is abolished when he writes that “when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.” — Book X, p. 651
That might sound naive, or a thought that should have crossed one’s mind before, but it did not float through mine. Especially reading about Epicurus’ point of view inside “Diogenes Laertius, Book X: Life of Epicurus” gave me back a good feeling. I understood his point of view, and it made sense to me.
I am not sure if that helps you, but thinking about what Epicurus wrote and to occupy one’s mind with these lines pretty much took away all my anxious feeling and uncertainty.
