* I took this photo at the Nashville National Cemetery, which is a United States National Cemetery. It encompasses 65 acres, and over 35,000 interments. I was alone in this cemetery. Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
(Note to Reader: All the live links in this article are in bold, and exploring them are useful.)
There are countless aspects of death that we do not understand. Let’s start with what we do know for sure:
This is a 100% mortality rate.
We deal with our mortality through denial.
You don’t bring up death at a dinner party.
Death effects everyone. Right? No one makes it out alive. According to the latest research, our angst about death impacts virtually everything we do. This isn’t a new discovery. William James, often credited as the founder of American psychology, stated that knowledge of the inevitability of death is the “worm at the core” of human experience. The meaning of the phrase is that the unconscious fear of death governs almost everything we do.
The idea that nearly all human individual and cultural activity is a response to death seems far-fetched. However, in the book The Worm at the Core the evidence the authors present is compelling, and offers a convincing explanation to many otherwise intractable mysteries of human behavior.
The top coping mechanism to death is denial. This does not remove the problem of death; it merely buries it. This can lead to a collective neuroticism, all in the service of creating an effective psychological barrier against reality.
French philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “Face up to death. Thereafter anything is possible.” My interest in writing this article is hoping to encourage us toward a healthy death acceptance.
I should probably be upfront about my conflicted feelings about death before proceeding with this article. Death has impacted my life personally in many ways. My grandparents, parents, and two siblings are no longer living. Each of those deaths is its own story, tragedy and heartache. My best friend in high school committed suicide, and my first college girlfriend was killed in a freak accident, racing her bike across railroad tracks in pouring rain, trying to beat the train. These losses were devastating.
Over the years, I have had to put down four beloved dogs and three cats. I’ve had two close brushes with death, both of which I should not have survived. One of them was a hit-and-run incident on a highway that involved fatalities. My vehicle was pulverized from behind by a drunk driver, sending my car into a roll down an embankment and crushing my vehicle. Using the Jaws of Death, I was miraculously pulled out alive. The other scenario was having heat stoke at the end of an ultramarathon competition in the mountains of Tennessee. I was rushed to a hospital unconscious and was told that had I arrived 15 minutes later I would have not survived. Both these experiences had a profound impact on my life.
As a pastor, I officiated countless funerals. For a season of my life, I traveled the world doing human rights work, specifically cases of forced child prostitution and child slave labor in Southeast Asia. I encountered death on multiple occasions in these endeavors. Brothel raids can often include fatalities. As a first responder chaplain I have been called to many tragic scenes with loss of life, including teen suicides.
In the most recent past, I was the primary and sole caregiver of an individual, dying from terminal cancer. It was traumatic to witness and care for a person through the disturbing and heartbreaking stages of their physical, mental and psychological deterioration, and to be with them for their last breath. The initial impact of this was my hatred of death with an intensity I had never felt before.
“We all know death is wrong.”
I recently did a debate on the subject of death and the afterlife. I was identified as the “secular thinker” and the other person, the “Christian thinker.” There were many of his beliefs with which I disagreed, but one particular view he espoused during our debate stuck with me. He assumed that everyone would agree that death is a bad thing. From his particular Christian point of view, death was never part of God’s original and perfect plan. Death is essentially a curse, abomination, enemy and evil that God ultimately reverses, overcomes, and fixes.
During the debate he said, “We all know death is wrong.” This mindset is prevalent in our culture as a whole. We depict death as the “Grim Reaper”. In many mythologies, the Grim Reaper is the black-cloaked, scythe-wielding personification of death. He causes the victim’s death by coming to collect that person’s soul.
If you google “death” word clouds, you find this:
Notice the words: depression, evil, grief, dark, black, hell, broken, disaster, horror, murder, punishment, spooky, prison.
In contrast to the Grim Reaper, the idea of the “elixir of life” is a wishful antidote. The elixir of life (also known as “elixir of immortality"), is a potion that grants the drinker eternal life and/or eternal youth. We can’t leave out the “philosopher’s stone”, the mythic alchemical substance, useful for achieving immortality.
No one wants to die. There is a long and gruesome history of people seeking to live forever. People fight aging, dying and death as their last stand. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 32 years. It doubled to 71 years by 2021. In 2022, the CDC estimates life expectancy in the U.S. increased to 77.5 years. The global anti-aging market was estimated at $64 billion in 2022 and is expected to surpass $122 billion by 2032. Modern science pours its energies into medical advances to extend life. Some avenues for addressing the extension of life are controversial such as cryonics, and “augmented eternity”.
Is it true that “death is wrong”? If so, every human being’s life is wrong and cursed because it will end in death. We all die. Mortality always lurks in the background. Religion helps the medicine go down by offering compelling afterlife narratives, such as Heaven.
Death Anxiety
Death anxiety is anxiety caused by thoughts of one’s own death. This can be referred to as thanatophobia (fear of death). Individuals affected by this kind of anxiety experience challenges and adversities in many aspects of their lives.
Imagine this insane conversation between you and me:
Me: Death anxiety impacts everyone.
You: Not me.
Me: Yes, you.
You: Nuh-uh.
Me: Uh-huh.
You: No!
Me: Yes!
Here’s the point, consciously or unconsciously, death anxiety impacts all human beings at some level.
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