Facing The Fear Of Death
The following is adapted from Death Makes Life Possible: Revolutionary Insights on Living, Dying, and the Continuation of Consciousness, by Marilyn Schlitz, Published by Sounds True.
Why, we might ask, is there such a fear around death? What has made death the great taboo topic, in spite of the fact that we all die? Josh, a bright thirteen-year-old boy, has given death some thought and offered this insight:
I know Im afraid of death because I don’t want to think a different way. I dont want to become a different person. I just want to stay who I am. If I change, I want to remember this form or, I guess, person.
The famed writer Mark Twain suggested another reason: The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Luisah Teish, an Oshun chief in the Yoruba Lucumi tradition, echoed both Josh and Twain. She observed that modern society has, in many ways, estranged us from our natural role in the cycle of life.
Everything is constantly being transformed. I dont see any evidence that death is just the end. But I think that whoever controls resources, media, images, and education can cause people to come to fear and hate the natural cycle. The fear of death is an attitude that the media has sold us. It bounces between fear and romanticism. I personally have more fear of an unfulfilled life than of death itself.
As Teish noted, our worldviews about death are informed by many factors. While such factors can bring death to our attention, it is equally true that many in the modern industrialized world have rarely seen a dead body. As Daryl J. Bem, a social psychologist from Cornell University whom we briefly met in the introduction, pointed out…
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