(32) What I learned about the fear of death

I have touched on the topic of death in a number of previous blogs. But today’s topic is more about living than dying and I was moved to write it by a dear friend’s sad news over the last weekend.

The death of someone close to us affects us all profoundly. Often we need to make sense of it and people can find themselves able to generate great sums of money or raise mass awareness of a cause, prompted by a sad death. Many of us also decide to be better people, or tell our families we love them more often or throw caution to the wind and do something we have always wanted to do when reminded how short life can be.

But that’s the death of someone else. How do you actually feel about your own death?

Think about it – all you know here and now will end one day and (according to what you believe) will never be like this again. Your time will be up and you are no longer part of this world. In the past I have suddenly had these moments of clarity, that I will die, at my favourite time slot of the day: 3am, wide awake and alone in the world. The truth would pin me to the bed and I have been consumed by the reality of that fact. Strangely enough it has also happened to me whilst in the cinema and watching n all consuming film. I suddenly get the ‘voice’: “it all ends you know”. And I am terror-struck alone in a huge room full of people.

Well to be accurate, I haven’t had a fear of death experience for some years and, although I mentioned my ‘acceptance’ of the death in blog No 6, I also discovered something else was able to abate the fear. I noticed that I would have the 3am wake-up call in times of my life when I have been coasting along. Perhaps guilty of not pushing through with things I wanted to do or neglecting my core values. Also running on somebody else’s agenda or having to do work that was boring or unpleasant would cause my mind to try and shock me into action by reminding me that time was ticking on.

I therefore began to test myself at times when I was fully engaged in a project or happily planning a new scheme. I would test my feeling on the thought of my own death and find that I was much less troubled. And, sad as the event may be, death was a part of life and inevitable. It the  occurred to me that if I was happy and fulfilled I could accept the event of my own death. But if I was anxious or frustrated the fear of death would be stronger because I was ‘off track’’ with my life in some way. It would be as if I still had more to do and that death would rob me from achieving it all.

I still test myself now and then and think “If I were to know I was going to die in the next few months, how would I feel?”. If I feel fear, I know I have to reassess what I’m currently doing with my life. If I feel that it would be OK to die (though perhaps a trifle sad) I know I am following my right path in life and doing exactly what I should be.

We all have to go and we all will. But it’s how you spend your life before you go that perhaps determines your readiness…

(8) What I learned about acceptance

Some ten years or so back I lived through a strange episode in my life. Seemingly out of nowhere, I woke up one Sunday and ‘saw the world as it really was’. That is the only way I can describe it.  I looked at everything around me and saw that it was fake, transient, temporary. I saw that society was just a loose collection of people just out for themselves and the laws and rules that we all lived by could be wiped out in a moment. Anarchy, chaos and the end of civilization would ensue. And, if that didn’t happen the failure of the human race to avoid seeing that life was only temporary would eventually come crashing home when faced with our own mortality.

And so I viewed my new perspective: everything was fake, society hung by a thread and life was ending – sooner or later. It was grim. Unbearably grim. Still to this day I don’t know what triggered it, but I do know that it was an instant, intense depression like I had never experienced before.

I hoped it would fade if I just kept myself busy and had a good night’s sleep. But the feelings were still with me the next day and I had to face the fact that I may not snap out of it. This could be the way I felt now for the rest of my life. How could I ‘unlearn’ what I had discovered? How could I ever subscribe to the herd view of life again? It was the only time in my life I could understand why someone might see suicide as a solution to a problem. I could see that ending my life would have been almost a proactive step to take. To cheat death by taking my own life, when I chose, not having the spectre of death hanging over my every waking moment. Of course I didn’t, nor was even remotely tempted, but it was an overpoweringly clear insight.

At this point I was spending much of my time just sitting alone in my house. Of course it was raining. I had a house mate, Simon, but he was steering clear, as requested. My only companion at the time was my cat, Sup. Sup, a mere kitten, had just turned up one day and moved in. She was a friendly little thing and both Simon and I were devoted to her. Well, during this hard time in my life she never left my side. She lay next to me on my bed as I stared at the wall. She sat with me at the back door as I allowed the rain to match my mood. She trotted alongside as I headed for the tube to try and shake off my mood by a jaunt into town. She greeted me as I trudged home when it hadn’t worked. She was amazingly devoted and it was almost like she knew what I was wrestling with. She was only a young cat yet she knew that life was inevitably followed by death. And I gradually learned too: This was life. The good, the bad, it just was. Life was every day and then death happened. Fact. End of.

As the days passed I gradually felt these intense emotions fade. I allowed myself once more to ‘buy into’ the notion of a stable society. I agreed that there was a point in going on. And that even though it did all end, we are all here now and that that’s fact too.

Since those days I have had to face the deaths of friends and family. In each case the person I cared for, knowing they were dying, went through and interesting process. I have later discovered this is called the five stages of grief as first identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969. It is also discovered that those living through their loved one’s demise also go through the stages.

I renamed to myself as the five stages of acceptance.

Stages of Acceptance: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

Since that day I have lived with the acceptance of death. I’m not perfect and I am not immune. I still have fear attached to death like many others.  But I am not in denial, I am not angry, I do not feel I can make a bargain with God or anyone, I have lived through my intense depression and now I feel I have little of what might be termed acceptance.

Acceptance need not be applied in such an ultimate way. Sitting in traffic when late for an appointment can sometimes require a moment of calm acceptance before rational thought can return. When others disappoint us or plans go awry, acceptance can allow us the grace to see past the immediate and realise that what will be, will be.

Incidentally, though this episode happened ten years back, my little cat Sup has since remained part of the community where she first came to live with us. I heard earlier this year that, after a long struggle with illness, she had disappeared and has not been seen since. My little Sup cat took herself away to die. She knew it was her time and she left, as she had arrived, in style.