Am I Afraid To Die?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I (like many others) was forced to confront the uncertainty and inevitability of death. Suddenly, all the existential anxiety I had buried since becoming an atheist resurrected. Without a comforting belief in an afterlife, *oblivion loomed large.

And so, I did what I do with all menacingly unpleasant things in my life… I devoted myself to the subject. I committed to reading 50 books about mortality, hoping I’d find a way to navigate my anxiety, hoping that someone out there had found a cure for existential terror (smart people write smart things down, right?).

It's been one year since I started reading. I finished my 50th book on Nov/15/2021.

So, did I find the cure for death anxiety? No. Am I less afraid to die? Yes. Much less. It took the full year, but I can say that my dread of death is gone. I oscillate between acceptance and the occasional bout of existential nausea.

Not too shabby.

Here’s what helped:

1) Accepting that this wouldn’t be an acute intellectual exercise. How many times do you read a book and feel different forever? Not often. The secret sauce was the constant, sustained effort to keep death at the forefront of my mind. I read and wrote about death every day for 365 days (and the writing was key because it forced me to frame and understand and retain). Re-wiring neurons requires repetition. As Irvin Yalom said, “good ideas, even ideas of power, are rarely sufficient in a single shot: repeated doses are necessary.” Additionally, it wasn’t until I read Caitlin Doughty’s “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” that I realized this enterprise would be a felt, experiential operation, not a detached, conceptual undertaking.

2) Fully realizing that death is not oblivion. Death is not a void, a black abyss, or endless darkness. All of these are states devoid of life, not states devoid of my own subjective experience. Nothingness is not a state I will inhabit, and the notion that non-existence could ever be experienced is a conceptual fallacy. Dispelling this irrational conflation of death with oblivion was a critical step, and it took lots of time to go from cerebral understanding to assimilated affect. Like Yalom said, repeated doses. Stephen Cave’s book “Immortality” finally got me there. On that note,

3) Epicurus. Epicurus was the mastermind behind this idea that death is nothing to us. In essence: when you are here, death is not, and when death is here, you are not, so there’s no reason to fear being dead. I encountered this innumerable times, and it failed to comfort. It baffled me that other atheists found it comforting. I understood it intellectually, but it never stuck until I read Jesse Bering’s “The Belief Instinct.” In it, Bering says “your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective.” That unlocked it for me. You may feel yourself slipping away, but you will never be dead. Your disappearance, your death, is not something that you, as a first-person narrator, can ever be present for. I appreciate that this is the Epicurean argument, repackaged, but having it framed exactly like this resonated.

4) Thinking more about the role of death in life, and the story I can choose for death. Stephen Jenkinson’s “Die Wise” was the invitation to this creative exercise. In a deep way, I had to acknowledge that death is the life-giving thing, and life is the death-giving thing. Death creates the world. Buddhist sentiments about impermanence didn’t get me there, but Jenkinson did. The book “Death and Philosophy” also offered this great perspective on death as the value-giving border to the narrative of our lives, which was additive to the storytelling exercise. Like so many other things, what really matters is the story we tell ourselves about reality – and stories can be poetic and comforting while still being rational.

5) A hodgepodge of comfort from a variety of sources: from Sam Harris’s recent podcast episode (#263) on death and the continuity of consciousness from the perspective of consciousness (elaborated in this fantastic paper, which also addresses the conceptual fallacy of death being oblivion); from Greta Christina’s book “Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God;” and from discovering other atheists like Stephen Cave, Todd May, Irvin Yalom, Sheldon Solomon, and Julian Barnes who have devoted so many interesting pages to the topic of mortality.

Irvin Yalom offered that we will never “overcome” our fear of death, it’s too deeply ingrained for that. But it can be managed – ameliorated to some extent. Julian Barnes (far less serious) quipped that there will forever be that “grim cluster of brain cells scaring you shitless until the very end.”

All that to say, you’ll always be a little scared, and that’s perfectly alright.

A little scared I can deal with.