Quelling the Fear of Death

My Mom, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, is at peace with dying, and I both admire and feel inspired by her calm.  Today’s post is my tribute to her bravery. 

Death is all around us on TV, the movies, and the news.  But we don’t seriously contemplate it or talk about it, in part because we’re too busy climbing the ladder and paying the bills and raising kids, and in part because it’s taboo.  We’re not really allowed, socially, to talk seriously about death until we’re directly faced with it, whether through loss of a loved one, a near death experience, or a diagnosis of a terminal illness.  OK, maybe the philosophers get a free pass on this, but for the rest of us, talking too much or too deeply about death is in poor taste.

Luckily, I’m a philosopher, and I don’t much care about having poor taste, but there are lots of other reasons I’ve been thinking deeply about death:

·       Mom. 

·       I’m 47, the perfect time for a midlife crisis.  I am, for the first time, witnessing the decay of my body.  I have significantly less energy and it feels like half of what I do is just to slow down the decay.

·       I am financially independent and no longer need to work to pay the bills.  My wife and I have no children, and I have few responsibilities, allowing me to be in the position that…

·       I think deeply about a variety of interesting problems in philosophy and physics, and one of those problems is, of course, death.

There are lots of reasons that it’s difficult to talk deeply about death, the most obvious of which is that it’s terrifying to many people.  We can see a skull at some historical site in Europe, or a beheading on Game of Thrones, or kids covered in fake blood on Halloween, because these are mere hints of death.  They’re not real, and even if they’re real, they’re not me.  I can imagine someone else’s death without having to imagine my own.

But death is nothing to fear.  Seriously.  OK, maybe there’s some justified anxiety about the unknown, the same a 16^th-century European might have felt boarding a ship bound for the New World, leaving his worldly possessions behind and not knowing what to expect in his new life.  But an absolute terror of death is unjustified and I’ll explain why.  I laid out the logic more clearly in a previous post, but essentially it comes down to this.  Either:

a)     There is no afterlife – in other words, your consciousness permanently ceases at death; or

b)     There is an afterlife – in other words, your consciousness does not permanently cease at death.

These are the only two possibilities.  If a) is true, then there is nothing to fear at death because you cannot experience pain or sadness or regret or any other scary emotion if your consciousness has permanently ceased.[1]  But if b) is true, then the afterlife is only something to be feared if it’s a net painful place, like the Christian Fundamentalist notion of Hell.  If it’s not – that is, if the afterlife is not, on net, a painful or pleasurable place – then the afterlife will continue, like life, to consist of a variety of sensations and experiences, some of which will be happy, sad, pleasurable, painful, insightful, boring, confusing, scary, liberating, etc.

I’m more than a little bit skeptical of the Christian Fundamentalist notion of Hell.  In my early college book, At Least in Hell the Christians Won’t Harass Me, I laid out some good evidence, much based on logic and even mathematics, that such a Hell does not and cannot exist.  The same evidence rules out an eternally pleasurable Heaven, of course, leaving the only remaining option that one will experience a wide variety of emotions and sensations, some positive and some negative, in the afterlife.

Hence, I don’t know how I’ll feel or what I’ll experience immediately after death, but I have just as much reason to expect pleasure as pain.[2]  In fact, if I am experiencing chronic pain in this earthly body prior to death, it’s likely that death will bring relief.  Certainly, like a 16^th-century explorer traveling to the New World, I’ll be sad about what (and whom) I’ll leave behind, but there is also good reason to be excited about what lies ahead.

Speaking of what I’ll leave behind, it’s important to realize that I don’t own anything, including the body in which I inhabit.  This body, my house, and everything around me will, in the blink of an eye, return to the earth as dust.  They are fleeting and ephemeral.  My wife’s body, the bodies of all my friends and family – they too are decaying and will soon be reabsorbed into the air and soil.  There is no saving them.  The face I see in a mirror will, very soon, look like an old man’s.  And soon I will no longer see out of these eyes at all, nor will I feel with this skin or hear with these ears.  They are not mine and they are not me.  I am my consciousness, my awareness.  I am my experiences and thoughts and memories.  I will continue to have thoughts and experiences and to make memories after this body has perished.  There is no reason to try to save what cannot be saved.  There is no reason to postpone the inevitable for the sake of postponement. 

Unfortunately, the fear of death and our general societal fixation on treating all human life as always worth living lead to cases in which life is irrationally extended even in cases of chronic pain and poor life quality.  Much of the suffering in the world is caused by the belief that any living – no matter what the conditions or how painful – is better than no living.  This belief causes people to increase their pain thresholds to be willing to endure almost anything, but to what end?  More pain, of course.  If people could rid themselves of their fear of death, then I posit there would be less suffering in the world.

Let me offer an analogy.  Imagine you’re at a party.  You’ve had a good time connecting with friends, dancing, whatever, but it’s getting late and you’re tired.  You’re not having fun anymore and it’s becoming positively painful to keep up the effort.  You’d leave, right?

Now imagine there’s a Magic Bus that takes you to every destination and event in your life.  As soon as you leave one event, you get on the bus and it takes you to the next one.  You don’t know what it will be – it could be home to sleep, another party, your niece’s high school graduation, a colonoscopy, your workplace, the DMV, a Nickelback concert, etc. 

Imagine again that you’re at a party.  You’ve had a good time but you’re tired and not having fun anymore.  You know that the Magic Bus is outside waiting to take you to your next (predetermined but unknown) destination.  You’d still leave the party, right?

Of course you would.  Why would you endure pain at Event A just to postpone the possibility of pain at Event B, given that: a) Event B is inevitable; and b) there is no evidence that Event B will be painful?

It’s the same with death.  Death is inevitable and there is no evidence that you’ll have a consciously painful experience after death.  It would be irrational to indulge your fear of the unknown and indefinitely postpone death at the price of, for example, chronic pain.

Having said that, we humans are irrational in many ways.  We often fear pain and loss more than we anticipate an equal amount of pleasure and gain.  For example, let’s say that someone is going to either give you $10 or take $10 from you based on the result of a coin flip.  It’s going to happen right now unless you pay a fee of $1 per hour to postpone it.  Rationally, you know it makes no sense to pay the “postponement fee.”  Now, change these win/loss values to something significant to you – for example, you’ll either win $100,000 or you’ll owe $100,000 – and you will probably be tempted to pay the postponement fee for at least a while.  Tempted or not, you know it’s a bad decision. 

Like my mother, I don’t want to fear death or irrationally extend life, paying a “postponement fee,” to procrastinate moving on to my next destination.  I want to get up in the morning because I am excited about living, not because I am terrified of dying.  I want to be prepared to die and even, ideally, looking forward to it, so that living is a courageous choice, not merely the default.  Life has to be good if it is to be worth living.

Of course, this isn’t an argument to leave the party the very moment you experience pain or discomfort.  Not every moment of a party is fun.  However, there does come a moment when you’re ready to go home, and that’s when it becomes irrational to stick around merely due to the fear of the unknown.

Mom is ready to go home.

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[1] This is an awful mistake made by the entertaining but death-obsessed Game of Thrones.  In Season 6, Jon Snow is revived from death by priestess Melisandre.  She asks: “What did you see [in the afterlife]?”  And he replies: “Nothing, there was nothing at all.”  But this is nonsensical.  You cannot experience nothingness.  If there truly was no afterlife, then Jon’s experience, after dying, would have felt like instantaneously awakening upon his revival.  He would not say that the afterlife felt like nothing, because he would not experience the passing of time, or an awareness of nothing, if he was not consciously experiencing anything.

[2] There is actually much more legitimate scientific literature on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) than I had expected, as in this article and this article.  One surprising observation is that the majority of those who have NDEs not only have a very lucid and positive experience, they also stop fearing death!  This is similar to the experience that some have while taking psychedelic drugs, like LSD or psilocybin, in therapeutic settings.  I talk about my own psychedelic awakening in this video.