Ask Lemmygrad

I have had periods of time where I thought I had come to terms with death, but recently and often I find myself horrified of the concept that I have already died because it is inevitable. I have had periods of time where I came to an understanding of how temporary and fleeting everything is but when I fall in love with the world again I find my fear of death along with it.

I have lost comrades in violent and upsetting ways, sometimes self-inflicted. I have seen death firsthand so many times and I do not feel any better about it. Where I find the strength to go on I also find the fear of having to give up. I do not think I will come to terms with death and I think I will have to live around it.

As for how you can come to terms with death, I've been told the solution is to tie up loose ends. I don't know how this solution can help someone who doesn't want to leave.

I've got a few disjointed thoughts regarding life/death that may help.

Fearing death is a perfectly natural response to living. We have evolved to fear death. It's there so we strive to live long enough to breed and raise our young. Humans are enlightened beyond only fulfilling our natural instincts but they still linger and this can't be helped. It's in our makeup.

They say life is a way for the universe to experience itself. Since you as a human are just one tiny piece of the whole universe, you're not expected to experience and learn EVERYTHING... Rather you just learn and experience what comes to you naturally which will add to the universes "knowledge pool".

All matter in the universe has existed since its beginning and will continue to exist until its end. You and all your loved ones are made of this matter. Even in death, your matter still remains in the universe. So while your consciousness might no longer exist, everything that makes up "you" still does.. your matter has just rejoined the universe. Your matter shares this space with the master of everyone who has ever existed or who will ever exist. This means you will never be leaving your loved ones behind for eternity, quite the opposite.

I hope some part of my ramblings soothes you somewhat.

I currently don't care about death. It's going to happen one day or another.

There's this guy at my (now old) place of work who manages to live every day as if it was his last. For him this means gambling, smoking, not really giving a shit about a lot of things. And he has so much fun doing it. Whenever someone in our group of friends says something about this, his answer is: 'tomorrow is a certainty for no one. You don't know what will happen and you very well may be dead a the end of the day'.

Now, I'm not saying you should be living life like this. Statistically speaking, if you're young and relatively healthy, there's a big chance you will live on for a while. Living life like it is your last day may be counterproductive for your life goals. But the longer I watch my friend live like this, the more I understand his vision and his lack of fear about death. You DON'T know what will happen after life or what your next day will bring. One of my coworkers died recently. He had a random seizure, fell and hit his head against the radiator. He was a healthy 21 year old. His parents found him after a few days after they returned from holiday. Life can be taken away very quickly and without warning.

I know this is a pretty white privileged way of thinking. But at the same time I also get so caught up in politics and making the world a better place that I forget to live a little and worry less. I also don't want to die without having a bit of fun.

So, I don't fear death. I have up thinking about what will happen if I die and I focus on the here and now more.

From the Buddhist tradition, I’d say you can use meditation practice to realize for yourself that the notion of a coherent self is an illusion, and you are losing nothing in death. I’d suggest you listen to Revolutionary Left Radio and Shoeless in South Dakota, because Breht has a lot of episodes about Buddhism and stuff. He often tells the story of when his spiritual practice led him to have a crisis where he obsessed about the fact he was going to die, but he eventually realized he was just mourning the human condition.

Edit:

A fear of not having the time to learn the innumerable interesting things that there are to learn.

I found that relatable, and I guess I think you can’t regret anything if you don’t exist. I think it’s good to try and learn as much is you can, but what matters is that you try to affect the world in a net positive way. I’m still trapped in the illusion of self, but theoretically with how your consciousness is constantly changing there is no need to regret anything, just be present with experiences as they come, and try to be good, but in the end it won’t matter.

I'm going to put it off for as long as bloody possible! But the idea of dying doesn't scare me. Perhaps the method. I wouldn't like it to be drawn out or painful. But I don't fully understand how anyone can fear death itself. Living for eternity seems scarier. And losing others—that's another thing entirely.

There's nothing after, so it doesn't matter. You won't be around to regret or ponder it. It doesn't trouble me to think about death at all. Sometimes I think that I can think this because I'm content that I'm living properly along the way. But then I realise again that even if I died when I wasn't living properly, to the fullest, I wouldn't be sentient to care, so even then it wouldn't matter.

The realisation of what death really is might be the most liberating thought. You've got one go at life, it'll be too brief however long it lasts, so try to make it count and live knowing that your individuality is tangential to being part of history.

I was going to answer "I try not to think about it", but then I saw your last line. Now I have to give an actual answer.

I personally think that death is like before one was born, nothingness. I would say that that belief has helped shape my mentality that you should do everything you want to while you still can. There's nothing afterwards, so gotta hurry up and live while you're alive.

None of us is going to live forever, we won't see how things end up, and maybe that's for the better. I get the fear of missing out on history, that's something that can't be remedied. Just try to imagine the future, remain optimistic, do what you want, find a purpose in life, and you will leave this world peacefully.

I mean, obviously I don't mean to come off as suicidal but death is the absence of pain, suffering, and work, so I don't think it's bad, it's just letting yourself rest without worrying about the stresses of life. Existence kinda sucks, especially if it were to be prolonged beyond finding meaning in existence. The limitations of existence makes it meaningful. I think I would be the most miserable person on the planet if I had to live eternally.

I don't find the concept too scary - I didn't feel anything before I was, I have no reason to think it'll be different when I'm not.

I've got people I love and things I need to do here, so I'll try to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

I'll probably cry and beg to live if it comes violently, but that seems natural.

Well, my fear of death has inspired a couple things in me, both somewhat controversial in their own rights.

One, I refuse to procreate. Never will I sentence another to death by creating a new consciousness.

Two, should I ever die, I want to be cryogenically preserved. I want to keep living, keep making, keep experiencing. The black void of nothingness is the most terrifying thing I can imagine.

Is it individualistic? Self centered? Probably, but that doesn't make me want it any less. Perhaps it won't save me as well, it's entirely possible medical science never advances to the point of resuscitating frozen brains(I only want my upper body, I hope I won't need the whole thing to keep my consciousness). Even still, at least I will have died with the illusion of hope.

If that makes you happy, in the theoretical sciences there exist a number of ways to "cheat" death. According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it could be that you live on in parallel universes. According to special relativity, you are always alive in a spherical shell expanding from the point of your death at the speed of light. According to the holographic principle in string theory, your entire life could be contained as a projection on the surface of a black hole. According to general relativity, our spacetime could contain (or be modified to contain) closed timelike curves along which the time coordinate is circular and objects are bound to revisit their past existence at some point.

Of course, just like the search for the holy grail or the philosophers' stone of the mythological past, these might all turn out either practically infeasible, empirically false, or mathematically contradictory; but it is nice to know - or at least guess with a high probability - that your existence will have left an indelible mark on reality and someone, something in the far future might still find your traces and remember you. In the meantime, perhaps with a bit of black humour considering the topic, I like to close with a quote from Engels' Anti-Dühring:

Freedom lies not in the dreamt independence from the laws of nature, but in their recognition and in the therein contained opportunity to plan and let them act towards certain purposes.

I'm going to answer more generally first: I'm not sure it would really be healthy to. That you are attached to others and cherish your time with them seems healthy to me. If this fear is paralyzing you in some way, I could see reason to be concerned and perhaps urge you to seek out a professional to talk to if at all possible. But if it's just that it occasionally bothers you, that seems pretty human to me.

More specifically: As you do mention some preoccupation with it that you view as abnormal and seem to want to know more about it, I would ask you to consider... is it that you feel you need to understand death so you can cope with it? Is it a knowledge gap? A curiosity thing? If you are someone who wants to be as informed as you possibly can so you can face something, then you may have to either accept it's the one thing about life you will never really know until it happens, or it may help to explore fantasy stories and different religious takes on it to feed your desire to understand it better (if that does apply). Though you can't know, you could get a clearer picture of how human beings tend to view death and what they do about it, dissecting it on a cultural and materialist level, so you can sort of "zoom out" a little.

Another element to consider is, would you consider these thoughts intrusive and obsessive? Because if they are, it may help to practice welcoming them in, rather than trying to push them away (if that is something you think you are doing). Similar to anxiety spirals and being anxious about being anxious, becoming upset about the nature of an intrusive thought can make it worse. (Disclaimer here: I'm not a professional, just going off of what I know from personal research.)

In terms of afterlives I think it’s best to be agnostic. Maybe a will be reincarnated as someone feeling the affects of my karma, maybe not. I don’t think hell exists because that’s kind of evil and arbitrary to lump someone who wasn’t good enough with someone who was the worst person ever. It’s absurd that everyone who hadn’t heard of a religion is damned to eternal suffering.Though, there are some Christian groups that think Jesus abolished hell and now there’s just heaven. It also could be that they are just states of mind, maybe the Buddhist heavenly and hellish realms are also states of mind. However, we can’t know everything, so whether there’s an afterlife, we’re stuck in a Bergsonian loop, or there’s a void, it’s good to do good things and try to affect the world positively. If there is a heaven a dedicated communist is going there.

I figure I am going to die one day but also I don't want to die yet so I'm gonna try to not die... I do fear death but that fear is to remind me I'm not ready to die yet. On the other hand I know it will happen eventually so when the time comes and I know there no real chance or reason to fight it anymore then I figure I will let that at fear go. At least that's what I say now. Not sure how it'll play out when the time comes.