Photo by Nikhil Mitra on Unsplash
Staring directly at death is the only way to live a happy and fulfilling life My father is seriously ill. He is not getting any younger (none of us is!), and I am slowly making peace with the fact that he won’t be there forever.
My dad’s illness made me think a lot about death lately.
I regularly reflect on death in general, as I believe that you need to accept death to live a good life , but this time it is different. I have had loss and grief in my life, but I haven’t lost a parent, brother, partner, or close friend. I was lucky so far, but my luck will run out eventually.
It will be devastating when that happens, so I started getting ready for it.
I keep thinking that to live a good life, you need to face death. You need to look at death in the face, even if that may make your eyes burn and hurt. I have tried to do this but have only done it theoretically and from afar without taking out my protective sunglasses.
Staring at the Sun I read somewhere that having a good library at home was like having a well-supplied wine cellar: books are there waiting for you when the time for them to be read arrives. Some can wait for you for months, some for years, and some will lie there sadly unopened, never to be read by anyone.
Staring at the Sun—Overcoming the Terror of Death, by the existential author and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, has been sitting on my shelf for only a few months, but I felt its time had finally arrived, so I read it.
The title is a play on one of François De La Rochefoucauld’s maxims: “Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder en face ” (you cannot stare straight into the face of the Sun, or death). Staring at death is like staring at the Sun: it blinds you, it hurts, and it becomes unbearable.
And yet, it is something we should do every now and then.
Yalom gives the reader some guidance and solace to face death and death anxiety, which is more widespread in today’s society than we may think. He does so from an existential perspective , although he also finds solace in the teachings of some ancient thinkers, especially Epicurus.
The ancients’ consolations when facing death are still valid
I have written a few times about the Stoics and their views on death , but I am also a big fan of the Epicureans and their quest for pleasure in the simple things of life: good food, good company, and tranquillity.
Their leader, Epicurus, had something interesting to say about death. He said: “Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not, and when death exists, we are not.”
Epicurus thought that a philosopher’s goal was to eliminate human misery, and the root of all misery was our continuous, all-encompassing and omnipresent fear of death. We all have a constant fear of death, and this influences everything we do. Thus, Epicurus might have been the first philosopher in history with some existential inklings.
We all are afraid of death, but as he said, where death is, we are not; we won’t be aware or conscious of our being dead , so what is there to be afraid of?
I get it. I know the theory, and I can rationalise the whole thing as much as Epicurus or Seneca, who said we have all been dead before we were born . This is true, but still, I can’t help not wanting to be dead.
I want to do things, feel things, and spend time doing things I love with the people I love, and I won’t be able to do that when I am dead. Life will go on without me, and that’s a strange feeling. Call me selfish, but I don’t want life to finish.
I can find some solace in Epicurus and Seneca’s consolations on death, but it doesn’t entirely work for me. I’ll need something a little bit stronger to be able to stare at the Sun and overcome my fear of death for myself and the people around me.
Death anxiety or the angst of living a half-lived life Yalom tells us in his excellent book that we all have death anxiety of varying degrees. Sometimes, this anxiety can be so debilitating that it makes having an everyday life impossible, but other times, it is something we can live with.
This anxiety can manifest in other ways, but what lies underneath is our terror of dying. And, if we won’t be aware anymore, what is there to be afraid of?
Sometimes, it is the biggest of FOMOs, just a simple Fear Of Missing Out on what will come afterwards. Still, we have already missed millions of years of the life of the universe before we were born. We don’t seem to miss it that much (slightly off-topic here, but I’d love to be able to peek at different moments in history and be present in battles and where-not, but only for a brief moment. I wouldn’t want to have lived at any time in the past: life was harsh and brutish. What I need is a two-way time machine, but I don’t know where I can find one).
In many other cases, our death anxiety is caused by our living a half-lived life.
Our unconscious tells us we are not living the life we are meant to live and rebels against it by being terrorised of death. We realise we are wasting the life we have, and this is our body’s way of telling us to do something about it.
As Raphaëlle Giordano’s book’s excellent title tells us, Your second life only begins when you realise you only have one . When we realise we are not living the life we are meant to live, we are not following our life purpose , or we don’t even know what that purpose might be, we are in trouble.
Then we start getting worried about death. Because we are wasting the only life we have.
Ways to face death anxiety Yalom describes a few ways to combat death anxiety. The first three come directly from Epicurus, while the fourth one was something the author saw working time and again during his decades of therapy treating patients with excessive worries about their death.
The mortality of the soul
Epicurus thought the soul was mortal and died with our bodies, contrary to what Socrates and his philosophical inheritors through Plato, the Christians and Neo-Platonists believed. If our soul ceases to exist and there is no afterlife where we have to pay for our sins or regret our life disappointments, there is nothing to fear in death.
We will have no regrets, no fears and no consciousness of our death, so there is nothing to be afraid of.
Curiously enough, Socrates, Plato, Christian theology and many other religions try to find solace in the opposite thought: we are not to fear death as there is an afterlife, so death is really a transition between one state and another one.
Which one works best for you? It is hard for me to believe in an afterlife, so I’m more with Epicurus in this one, although I must admit that knowing I won’t be conscious and that there is a void afterlife does not comfort me. It makes me feel empty and anxious.
The ultimate nothingness of death
We have already touched upon this. As Epicurus said, where I am, death is not . We cannot perceive death, so why fear it? We won’t be there to notice anything.
We will not be sad or suffer any loss or pain. We will not realise we are dead. We will not know we are no longer alive. So why be afraid of death?
Still, knowing I will not exist in the future makes me feel sad and empty now, even if I won’t have these feelings at that moment.
The Argument of Symmetry
Epicurus’s third argument is linked to Seneca’s idea mentioned above. We have already been dead for millions of years. You did not exist in the long night before you were born, and nobody else did, for that matter.
I was not around when the dinosaurs went extinct, people painted animals on cave walls, or the Second World War erupted, costing millions of lives. I was not around even more recently, when Kennedy was assassinated, the Godfather film came out, or Pelé won three World Cups with Brazil.
Do I miss all those events? No, not really. I know I wasn’t alive, and I accept this as a fact of life.
Then, why should I miss future events when I won’t be around anymore? Why should I be worried about not being alive, no longer existing, when I have not existed for centuries, millennia, or aeons?
I am a curious person, so I like to know about things. I wasn’t there in the past, but I know more or less what happened. I don’t have a clue about what life will be like in five hundred, two thousand, or two million years. I don’t know what will happen to my family members and friends.
And I want to know, so, yet again, this only works partially for me.
Rippling
Yalom thought rippling was the most powerful idea for better facing the anxiety and fear caused by death. Rippling is the idea that each of us creates circles of influence that impact others for years, decades, and even generations. It is like the ripples in a pond, growing concentrically from a central point.
You are that central point.
Rippling is not about reaching immortality by being famous or leaving your name to posterity for something you did, but about touching and changing people’s lives for the better. A school teacher can have an enormous rippling effect on the children she teaches, so can a manager with her team members, a mentor, a doctor, a nurse—anybody helping others is rippling on them. Rippling is not limited to a profession. You can ripple on others by being a great parent, friend or uncle.
This is how you do the rippling / Photo by NEXT Academy on Unsplash Rippling is leaving behind something from you: a trait, a piece of wisdom, advice, or a comforting gesture. Whatever yours you can impart to others will live through those others.
You leave a piece of yourself with others; by doing so, you live happier and gain more of the terrain to death while living.
This is the technique that works best for me. I am trying to ripple to others with my work as a coach and trainer, by my writings, and by being a good partner, friend, son, brother, and uncle.
The importance of purpose and human connection None of these four measures makes my death anxiety disappear, but they all combined alleviate it somewhat.
What it all boils down to, apart from recognising that you have already been dead and did not miss life back then, is that we all need a life purpose and bonds and connections with others.
We all need something to live for and someone to live with.
We all need purpose and human connections.
If you know why you are doing the things you are doing and you live your life close to people you love, life gets much easier, and death anxiety tends to dissipate.
Death is one of the inevitabilities in life. It will eventually reach some of the people you love before you, and then it will come to you, too. It will definitely happen, even if some people believe it won’t .
You can keep worrying about it and getting anxious about it, or you can use this knowledge to enrich your life and make it more purposeful and connected so that when death finally reaches you, you feel like you have lived a life well-lived, a life worth living, and can depart in peace with yourself.
