Death is something that many people fear. The possibility of your life with all your aspirations and regrets, in your current world, suddenly ending can even send you into existential dread. So you try to pass off death as something that only occurs to other people.
However, death is universal and invariable. Everyone’s last day on Earth will come, and only then will you be unable to ignore death. During this, death — in all its aspects — is staring you in the face, through the lifeless corpse of someone you once knew.
This scenario is where I found myself a little less than a year ago, just after the passing of my grandmother. She passed suddenly but peacefully in her sleep with my father and aunt nearby. I didn’t even have enough time to step on the plane to visit her.
Attending my grandmother’s visitation not only allowed me to say my final goodbyes but also forced me to confront my fears of death. Why I was afraid of it and what it truly meant to me.
First, I questioned why I was afraid of death. Its influence over my life is all-encompassing and simultaneously nonexistent. I turned to books made by philosophers who, through atheist views, perceived death to be nonpleasurable and nonpainful and therefore fearing it would be irrational. I then turned to religions that each viewed death as neither the end nor a haven for believers, expressing that the fear of death is irrational because it will not harm anyone.
I desperately wanted to believe in the logical argumentation of atheism or the belief and faith in religion; however, my personal fears remained. No matter how irrational, I could not shake the fear of death. Then, I watched former University of California professor and philosopher Herbert Fingarette share his thoughts on mortality in the short film “Being 97.”
Fingarette touted that the fear of death is irrational. But now, facing death himself, began to rethink his opinion. He realized that even though the fear was irrational, his sense of realism told him that the fear of death would haunt him regardless of rationality.
What I took away from this is that death, and the fear which stems from it, are part of the human condition. That the fear of death, while irrational, cannot be logically conquered and that this fear is a fundamental part of being human. This is known as terror management theory, which suggests that as humans, we create cultural worldviews, maintain self-esteem and build meaningful lives to manage our anxieties about death. If we did not fear death, we would have no survival instincts and we would not seek meaning in our lives.
If the act of death had no meaning, then our lives would have no meaning. If I could never die, what’s stopping me from dropping out of college and getting that degree in a couple of hundred years? There would be nothing stopping me, since immortality would mean there is no downside. There is no time wasted from living my life and no tradeoff to not taking the opportunities provided to me.
It is the reality that we will face our mortality in a set amount of time, which drives us to latch onto and pursue the opportunities we are given. Whether that is money, visiting places in the world, achieving a position of power or any number of goals, death is a driving factor in them all.
Through this lens, recognizing that my life is finite and that people and the world have existed before, and will exist after me, I begin to appreciate the world around me more. Whether that be the tree near my dorm or the progression of human technological advancements, I began to appreciate the gift that is life and the realization given by death.
Death, while sad and naturally feared by the human condition, allows for one to appreciate the world and is the reason why we must pursue what matters most to us in our lives. That is why I appreciate death, in all its qualities.
