14.2 — The Fear of Death, and the Practices That Dissolve It

First: what is actually being feared, because it is usually several things bundled together and they have different answers.

The five fears

Separate them and each becomes more tractable.

Fear of the process. Pain, breathlessness, indignity, being unable to communicate, machines.

This is the most rational of the five and the most addressable. Modern palliative care is very good and Volume V covers it. And a great deal of what people fear here is specific and can be arranged in advance — an advance directive, a conversation with your family about what you want, and knowing that pain control is available.

Naming this one separately frequently removes a substantial part of the total fear, because it is the part that has practical answers.

Fear of non-existence. The metaphysical one. 14.1 and Epicurus below.

Fear of leaving people. Not fear for yourself at all — fear that your children will be unprotected, that your partner will be alone, that somebody depends on you.

Which is not a philosophical problem. It is a planning problem, and it is answerable: insurance, a will, a letter, telling somebody what you know, and — most importantly — making sure the people who depend on you have other people.

Fear of not having lived. This is the one that gets mistaken for fear of death and is not. A person who is afraid because the years went somewhere and nothing was done is afraid of a life, not of an ending, and 14.4 and 14.8 are the chapters for it.

And fear of being forgotten. The Norse answer's territory (11.6), and it is real and it is worth separating out.

The instruction: write down which of the five you actually have. Most people have two or three, and treating them as one large undifferentiated dread is why nothing helps.

The four arguments

Now the ones that have historically worked on people.

Epicurus

From 10.6, and it is the sharpest.

Death is the end of sensation. What is not experienced cannot be bad for you. Therefore death is not bad for you.

Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not.

And the symmetry version: you were not troubled by the infinite stretch of time before you were born. Why is the stretch afterwards different?

The strongest objection: what is bad about death is not the state of being dead but the deprivation — the things you would have had and now will not. And that objection lands, and Epicurus's argument survives it partially: it removes the fear of the state, and does not remove the loss.

The Stoic

From 10.5.

Death is not up to you. What is up to you is how you conduct the remaining time. Spending it in fear of the one thing you cannot influence is the whole error of the system, in the largest possible case.

And Marcus's version: you could leave life right now; let that determine what you do and say and think.

Which converts the fear into a filter rather than trying to remove it.

The Buddhist

From 6.7.

What you are afraid of losing was never a fixed thing. The self you are trying to preserve is a process, and it has been changing continuously for your whole life.

The version of you that existed at seven is gone and you did not mourn it.

And Parfit's modern version (10.11): identity may not be what matters; psychological continuity is, and it comes in degrees. He reported that working this out made him less afraid, and he said it changed the feeling rather than the argument.

And the Hindu

From 5.2. What you actually are was never born and does not die; the body is a garment.

Which works entirely if you hold it, and 5.2 was honest that it is an unproven metaphysical claim.

The practices

And the practices matter more than the arguments, because nobody was ever argued out of a fear.

Negative visualisation, done properly

The Stoic exercise (10.5), and it is uncomfortable and it works.

Deliberately imagine losing what you have.

And the reported effects are two: the eventual event lands less heavily because it has been rehearsed, and — the larger effect — what is present becomes visible again.

Epictetus's version is the harshest: when you kiss your child goodnight, say to yourself that tomorrow they may die.

This reads as monstrous and it is doing exactly what 3.10 describes: refusing the exception. And the reported result is not gloom; it is that you actually see the child.

Do it once a month, not daily. Daily produces preoccupation (14.1).

The charnel ground, and its modern version

The Buddhist practice (6.9) was to go and look at bodies in various stages of decay, and to reflect that this body is of the same nature.

The modern equivalents that are actually available: being present at a death rather than avoiding it; going to the funeral; visiting the person who is dying rather than staying away because it is difficult.

And the observation from people who work with the dying is consistent: proximity reduces fear. The people most frightened of death are generally those who have never been near it.

Memento mori as a daily object

7.9's instruction: something physical, unavoidable, that you encounter every day.

A note. An object on a desk. A specific minute in the morning.

The whole difficulty is that this is the easiest thing in the world to agree with and forget, and only a physical arrangement survives that.

And the conversation

The most practically useful item on the page, and almost nobody does it.

Tell one person what you want. What you want done, what you do not want done, what should happen to your things, and who should be told.

And ask one person the same.

Two effects. The planning fear is largely dissolved by having answered it once. And it converts death from a thing that will happen to you into a thing you have made arrangements about, which is a completely different psychological object.

What does not work

Three things, stated because they are what people actually try.

Not thinking about it. The avoidance maintains the fear, exactly as it does with every other fear, and Volume VI's evidence on this is unambiguous.

Accumulating. Achievement, wealth and status do not reduce it, and there is reason to think they can increase it, because there is more to be separated from.

And arguing yourself out of it. The arguments above are useful and none of them removes the feeling. The fear is not a belief and it does not respond to being refuted (5.4).

The honest limit

And it should be said.

None of this removes the fear entirely, and anybody claiming otherwise is selling something.

What it does is reduce it to a size that does not distort a life — which is the actual goal, and which is achievable.

And there is one further observation, reported consistently by people who work in palliative care and worth knowing in advance: the fear tends to decrease as death approaches. People who were terrified at sixty are frequently calm at the end.

Which is not a reason to postpone the work. It is a reason to be somewhat less frightened of being frightened.

What to carry from this page

Separate the five fears and write down which you have. Process, non-existence, leaving people, not having lived, being forgotten. Three of the five have practical answers.

"Where death is, I am not." It removes the fear of the state and not the loss, and that is a real reduction.

Imagine losing what you have, once a month. The reported effect is that you see it again.

Have the conversation. Tell one person what you want, and ask one person the same. It is the single most effective item here and it takes an hour.

And proximity reduces fear. Go to the funeral. Visit the person who is dying.

Next: 14.3 — grief, and the most practically needed chapter in this volume.