Facing Death
Hope and fear orient us toward very different futures
I just read the brief yet profoundly moving account of Casey Means’ (author of “Good Energy”) mother dying. After having been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and liver failure, the family decided not to proceed with the recommended surgeries and transfusions that had very low chances of success. Rather, they took the remaining days (13) of her life to be together as a family; Mom, Dad, Casey, and Calley. On the last day of her mother’s conscious awareness, she had a sudden surge of energy, and wanted to be driven out to her burial site which overlooked California coast and the Pacific ocean. They went as a family, and her mom expressed her love and gratitude for her family, embracing each of them. She kept saying “It’s so beautiful, it’s so perfect.” She died two days later, with the loves of her life holding hands around her.
Death. We fear it. We try to run away and hide. We give hundreds of thousands of dollars to professionals to delay it, to do anything but greet it. And so death comes to us and our loved ones while we desperately grasp at straws. We can’t escape it, in the end. So it grabs our faces and forces us to look directly into it’s eyes, if only for a moment.
What traumatizes us in the wake of a loved one’s passing is not death, but fear. I want to propose to you that fear is what kills your life, not death. The fear of death is lifelong slavery, but the acceptance of it is freedom.
In a culture that is so hush-hush about the process of dying, reading Casey’s account of her mother’s passing is, odd as it sounds, refreshing. It says “You don’t have to be afraid. You can choose to face the end of your life with gratitude, bravery, and hope.” This alternative path toward contemplating the end of life provides us with a much more powerful approach to life.
Death is what awaits in the unknown. So too does life. The anticipation of death is understandably positioned as a threat, while the anticipation of life is positioned as a promise. As I wrote in a previous article, if the confrontation of the unknown future can be met with either fear or hope, why not choose hope?… (see below for full read)…
You don’t know what is going to happen, so why pull into the present moment the thing that you fear? Why not pull into the present moment the thing which you deeply hope for, namely, life? Anxiety, which is the mental, emotional, and even physical, stance of preparation for a threat leads to negative downstream effects, regardless of whether anything threatening occurs. From a meta-analysis and predictive study regarding the health effects of anxiety (full article here):
An analysis of World Mental Health surveys in 2015 (20) revealed that the presence of any major anxiety disorder increased the risk of chronic general medical conditions, including arthritis, chronic pain, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, asthma, and peptic ulcers.
In my spiritualized paraphrase, if you fear some unknown catastrophe in the future you pull into the present an array of deadly symptoms. There is something of self-fulfilling prophecy in operation here. It isn’t as if being afraid of something specific, like being rejected by a close friend, will result in you being rejected sooner, but that that fear puts you in a mental, emotional, and physical stance which literally deteriorates your health right now. That’s just not good. Crumbling health is bad enough, let alone the strong possibility that fear of rejection probably increases the chances of you being rejected, either in fact or certainly in perception (which, neurologically speaking, is the same thing).
The worst thing that can happen for a chronically anxious person is confirmation. I don’t mean something bad happening, leading to a confirmation that specific bad things might happen. Rather, I mean that their anxiety correctly anticipates and mitigates the arrival of a specific threat. The reason for this is that anxiety is designed to protect us from threats. Anxiety elevates cortisol levels and adrenaline, which prep the body and mind for immediate action, flight, fight, or otherwise. Yet its palliative effect is meager, because not only does it diminish dopamine and serotonin in the present, depressing mood and neural activity, but it ultimately fails to do the very thing which it purports to do; protect you from threat. Anxiety, at best, mitigates one-off encounters with threats. But in the long term it depletes energy, increases cortisol, diminishes mental capacity and efficiency, produces chronic inflammation, and results in numerous chronic disease risks. Having a host of validations for anxiety under the delusion that it is protecting you from threats will make it much more difficult to see through the problem.
The fear of death is a a form of anxiety that, while promising to protect you, actually takes you by the hand and walks you down the path to death’s front door. While living in fear of death you cannot truly live. It is negative by nature. It negates. It is a state of removal, reduction, loss, prohibition, diminishment. The writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews indirectly illuminates a fascinating perspective on the fear of death:
14 Since [humankind] have flesh and blood, [Jesus] too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
The author’s focus is tangential to the topic, but they lay out a curious conception of the role of fear and death the generalized human condition. The power of death is fear, and the action that that power performs is enslavement. Think about how insightful and odd that is: the power of death isn’t that you eventually die, it is that you never truly live, because you’re afraid. It is primarily a loss of freedom to truly do as one pleases. Fear of death holds you in servitude to a certain set of behaviors, beliefs, and feelings. Being enslaved means you don’t have power, and it means there is no benefit for you. There is no reward for being so held. You don’t get paid at the end of the day.
That sounds a lot like anxiety. While it gives the illusion of protecting you, it actually traps you, negating freedom in the present while keeping your focus on the imagined terror of the future. Reduced. Diminished. Small. Powerless. Trapped.
Hope is the exact opposite. It is profoundly positive. It posits you in a reality that prepares you for productive action. It frees up dopamine and serotonin to flow in your neural pathways, improving memory, executive function, and mental efficiency. It boosts your mood by the same pathways, lending you excitement, gratitude, peace, and joy. Expansion. Elevation. Possibilities. Energy.
The real palliative for the fear of death is to find a hope which transcends death. While anxiety and fear seem to protect us from the hidden dangers of the unknown, it is actually hope which delivers on that promise. I think of the way in which the medical establishment enacts our cultural imperative: avoid death at all costs. Literally, empty your bank account to do all that you can to resist the end of days. The irony is that, after having done all to avoid death, not only do people end up dead, but through the illusion of anxiety mediated control, death arrives by degrees, robbing us of hope, joy, peace, gratitude, and love as we slide into the oblivion we most fear.
I am not saying that reasonable, even extraordinary measures, shouldn’t be taken to preserve life. I don’t have any advice on when the call needs to be made to either let go or hold on. I am saying that hope gives us a better shot at living, really living, than does fear.
Hope, despite death’s arrival, is what enabled Casey’s mom to experience joy, peace, and gratitude when only 2 days away from death by pancreatic cancer. My sincere desire, for myself and for everyone, is to find that type of hope. Truly, that is victory over death.
Reference: Aquin, Joshua P et al. “Anxiety Disorders and General Medical Conditions: Current Research and Future Directions.” Focus (American Psychiatric Publishing) vol. 15,2 (2017): 173-181. doi:10.1176/appi.focus.20160044