Fear of Death

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Death is a terrible reality. The fear of death is the root of all fears. Life is being, but death is non-being. No one escapes death's cruel jaws. In the words of Thomas Gray's elegy:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Awaits alike th' inevitable hour,

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Saints and sinners, rich and poor, high and low, old and young, learned and ignorant, righteous and unrighteous, all die. Conquest of death has always been the major preoccupation of the human mind. Science, technology, and medicine are all busy finding ways to make life deathless. Yet death continues to take its toll. In an article in The New York Times (June 29, 1997), the author Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes: America is often called a 'death-denying' society; each year the United States spends millions on efforts to conquer death, or at least to postpone it. The self-help shelves of bookstores overflow with such pearls as 'Stop Aging Now!' and 'Stay Young the Melatonin Way'.

If Americans don't deny death, they often trivialize it, said Joan Halifax, a Zen Buddhist priest who founded the Project on Being With Dying in Santa Fe, N.M. 'By the time a kid gets into high school, he has seen 20,000 homicides on television,' she said. 'Death as a mystery to be embraced, entered into and respected has been profaned in our culture.' Courtesy of the assisted-suicide debate, the concept of a good death has now emerged, though many experts reject the phrase as simplistic. Dr. Ira Byock, president of the Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, prefers 'dying well'. Dr. Timothy Keay, an end-of-life care expert at the University of Maryland, says 'the least worst death'.

There is no blueprint, however, for a good death. Death can't be neatly packaged with a red bow. It is messy, irrational, most often filled with sorrow and pain. More than two million Americans die each year; there are as many ways to die as to live. And so unanswerable questions arise: Not only what constitutes a good death and how can it be achieved, but whom, ultimately, it is for—the person dying, or those going on living?

'I'm a little cynical about this whole notion of good death,' said Dr. David Hilfiker, the founder of Joseph's House in Washington, which cares for homeless men dying of AIDS. 'Death is really hard for most people. Why should people who are dying have to have a beautiful death? That's putting the burden on them to have some kind of experience that makes us feel good.' Indeed, said Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, the author of How We Die, the patient's needs often get lowest priority. 'A good death,' he said, 'is in the eye of the beholder.' In centuries past, a good death was celebrated in art and literature as ars moriendi, the art of dying. Death marked salvation of the soul, neither an ending nor a beginning but, like birth, part of the cycle of life. 'True philosophers,' Plato wrote, 'are always occupied in the practice of dying.'

Buddhism is filled with stories of Zen masters who wrote poems in the moments before death, embracing it as the only time in life when absolute freedom may be realized. In the Middle Ages, Christian monks greeted one another with the salutation Momento mori, remember that you must die.... Americans have been reticent to talk about death; only recently have doctors and families felt obliged to tell a terminally ill person that he was, in fact, dying. Often the truth simply went unremarked, like an elephant in the dining room.

About the author

Swami Adiswarananda

Swami Adiswarananda, the Minister-in-charge of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Centre, New York, USA, is a senior monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He is a well-known thinker and contributes articles to various journals.

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