How My Fear of Death Finally Died
A message from a (mostly) reformed existentialist
The concept of Heaven used to leave me paralysed with terror. My stomach would clench and drop, my heart-rate would accelerate, my mind would twist into black knots as I strained to imagine the unimaginable experience of eternity. Wandering, alone, in eucalyptus-scented scrub at sunset, a day’s worth of family camping holiday behind me, I would be awash, suddenly, with icy incomprehension and dread. Heaven was forever. It was like walking towards the pink horizon and never stopping — not ever. Nothing would ever start or end or change ever again — it didn’t make sense in my 13-year old brain. I remember hiding from Heaven behind a red-trunked gum tree.
The concept of dying used to leave me paralysed with terror. Gone was my faithful acceptance of anthropocentric concepts of God and souls and place of eternal damnation and rest. My 22-year old sense of self felt naked and raw, face-to-face with its own mortality. Once again my stomach was clenching and my heart-rate accelerating as waves of black dread overpowered mundane moments of my day. I’d eat some toast and fear would punch my mortal gut. I’d ride my bike along a sunny river-path and imagine the ever-reducing line-up of seconds that I had left to live as black-hooded sentinels, leering over my fragile bones. Eternal silence and oblivion was incomprehensible. And inescapable.
I imagined my post-death self floating alone in a void — reaching out forever, hopelessly, to the people I loved.
It’s not going to be like that — my friends would say, when we’d all drunk enough vodka to talk about the things that scared us the most. It doesn’t hurt to be dead — you won’t even know. That’s exactly my point, I remember I wailed. I won’t know anything. I won’t feel anything. I won’t exist and will never, ever, exist again. And don’t try to tell me that whatever happens, I can rest assured that it won’t be bad. Because you don’t know that. No-one knows that.
When I studied in the anthropology department at the LSE, I frequently encountered the refrain that a fear of death was the foundation for human culture.
In the imagined mists of pre-cultural times, disparate homo sapiens pawned at the still, cold, rotting bodies of people they knew, as synaptic whispers suggested that their flesh was likewise vulnerable to demise. Where, then, would their self (a self making itself heard through those very same synaptic whispers) reside? As an ancestral spirit in a non-tangible land? Or an ancient soul re-born from a fresh womb? As part of the earth that feeds off our rotting bones? Collectively, then, we (various human societies, that is) developed practices in accordance with whatever it is that we think happens next. Feed the ancestral spirits with milk, or cake. Give the new-born babe the name of one whose heart most recently stopped. Dance in rowdy festivals to welcome visiting spirits home, and make lots of babies (biology’s response to the reality of death) but with the right kind of people, so that everything that is yours is passed down to the next-best version of you. Did you know that Father Christmas is really about death? What about debt — that’s a death-thing, too. So are swear-words — “you son of a bitch” has more bite than “you son of a porcupine” because bitches (and pigs and whores) are in a culturally-specific mental category of pollution, dirt, danger — and death.
I found that I was sometimes soothed by the notion that my own specific fear was so universal, so productive.
I would cycle home from the library through a freezing London night (yep — still cycling. I do my best death-theorising balanced on a crushable metal frame) and marvel at the platter of post-life theories that humans of every age and stripe had conceived. The ubiquity of such theorising surely suggested there was something there — like the first explanations for sunrise and sunset, or pre-atomic models of matter; we hadn’t quite worked out the problem of what came after death but surely our collective obsession hinted that there was something there to be found.
On other days, the problem would revert to an open wound in my brain.
A collective fate. A collective fear. I would believe completely that atheistic nihilism had the sole model of truth on this particular point and the only way out was to make tons and tons of money and either be cryogenically frozen or uploaded to the cloud.
A Masters degree in Anthropology probably wasn’t going to help me get that rich.
On those kinds of days, I just had to move on. I had to stop probing the wound and let my death-fear form a scar. I had to study for exams, apply for jobs, get hired, get drunk, buy Christmas presents and do a pregnancy test in the fancy bathrooms at Harrods (negative — thank God). I had to fall in love with London, a patchwork city of human history, where everyday cobblestones are indented with the passage of untold lives. I had to hike around Uluru, a sacred site in the centre of Australia, whose Indigenous custodians are spirit relatives of that ancient land. I had to look down at my father, lying in the coffin that my sister and I picked out for him. “Well done Dad”, I whispered. “You did good. I love you”. And then I had to push back the privacy curtain and get ready for his funeral, and the wake, and dinner at the pub afterwards where I was surrounded by family and friends and wondering how a day that marked one of the worst things that had ever happened in my life could somehow also be so full of joy.
And one day, I discovered that I wasn’t scared anymore.
Don’t misunderstand me. Untimely death, or the death of people I know, painful death and suffering — these are still the components of nightmares and cold sweats. But my heart and mind no longer revolt at the concept of bodily death and the silencing of an inner voice. For my inner voice is just one among billions. And human consciousness, as wondrous as it is, is just one way of sensing the world. Joy and love continue beyond the grave and everything I am now, ever was, and will ever be will not be dissolved — even if a time comes when no-one remembers the specific human person who is me. And in the meantime I am supremely grateful, for sunshine, the taste of coffee, tall trees, and enduring friends. I am weirdly excited on behalf of my atoms for the time when they will get to be part of the ocean, or a sequoia, or a beautiful taught-skinned ballerina.
I saw a quote on the wall of the White Cube gallery once in London. It was attributed to Einstein: “Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be changed from one form to another.” I don’t remember what the exhibition was — it involved lots of long squiggly lines. I remember being in the midst of a death-panic and latching onto the quote as a statement of fundamental truth that hinted at the indestructibility of my own consciousness. Now, I thank Einstein for the insight as it’s actually more wonderful than what I had thought. Death is a phase change. And change can definitely be scary and sad. But it’s not an ending, just a cycle with a new form and new significance. Putting far, far, into the future the whole thing about eventual universal heat death brought to us by the third law of thermodynamics (and who knows, maybe there is some other dimension that we and our enduring atomic patterns and consciousness have escaped to by then) — I can now say that death is part of being alive and I am no longer afraid of that.
