Facing Death without Faith, Part 2

Reframing fears of our own death

This is a monthly series on death, intended to both start a conversation and to provide practical guidance. The goal is to ease existential angst by familiarizing ourselves with the event that we will all eventually experience, or rather, the event that will mark the end of experience for us all. Religion has taught us to ignore death and to pretend it isn’t real, but growing numbers of people are finding that this doesn’t work in a modern age. Yet there is little in the way of organized approaches to replace religion’s monopoly on the conversation.

If we pare away all of the speculation, hope, despair, and imagined religious baggage that has been projected onto death, it transforms into something much less intimidating, much less terrible, something relatively simple: a return to the state we all shared before we were born, the state of non-being. From the beginning of the universe over 13 billion years ago, all of the matter and energy that currently form you and I, already existed. For all of that time, there was no fear, sadness, distress. Not a semiconscious dreamscape, a dreamless slumber, a stirring of any kind, as each of these implies an eventual wakening; rather, our very reality was the utter lack of reality. There was simply nothing there, no lights on, and further, no lights to turn on. Death, for all the tragic mystique and terrifying power bestowed upon it by religion, is merely the name we give to the restoration of that previous state.

While ‘dying’ can evoke very real fears of physical and emotional pain, death itself has nothing to do with the experience of dying--in fact, it is quite the opposite, as pain and experience evaporate together at the point of death. Pain is a sign that we are alive, a reminder that we are a conglomeration of tiny particles that used to be parts of stars and now briefly exist in just the right combination to allow us to KNOW we are here. Yet all of our matter existed before we were ‘alive’ and all of it will continue to exist after we are ‘dead.’ Modifying a Buddhist analogy, life is a tiny drop of the great ocean that is flung upward to briefly catch the glint of the sun and feel the stark dryness of the air, and yet, all the while yearning to return to the vastness from which it sprang. The ocean was always there and will always be there, and we will always be a part of it, along with all of our loved ones, all the other droplets flung from the ocean and returned to the same. The great ocean is both pre-life and after-life. It preceded us and we will once again become part of it. Life is the exception to the rule, and death, our normal state.

The strategy of reframing of death starts as an intellectual exercise, but it can lead to changes in the typically negative emotional reactions we experience when we think about death. There are many ways to reframe death, ranging from highly poetic to frankly rational, and there is no single correct answer. If death is something that scares you, take a few minutes out of your busy week to allow yourself to think about death. It doesn’t have to be your death that you think about, rather, think about it as a concept. Imagine yourself as an editor with a novel—interested in the story and yet looking for inconsistencies, errors, potential improvements. Familiarity with death is known to decrease existential angst, so there’s no reason we can’t start the process now.

Next up: Reframing the fear of the death of loved ones