Death and Healing the Fear of Dying

Death is the end of physical life. It seems to be a fact, even as science is trying to prolong it and many embrace the idea of eternal life. The physical body can be enhanced to live longer, but it is going to stop living, even though many do not want to hear it, think about it or accept it.

So what would be helpful to know as we live our lives with this fact?

While many of us fear dying, it is not always clear what we are afraid of. Are we afraid that it will be painful, or involve long term suffering? Are we afraid that we will be a burden to our family? Or be alone without loved ones? Is it the uncertainty about what could be next?

While we consider death, it can be helpful to understand what life is, for that is what seems to end. Life is generally seen as what we experience, day in and day out, throughout the years. Those experiences take on many forms, both pleasing and not, and always changing. We find we cannot always be in control of them, and we become anxious in wanting them to be how we want them to be. And as we see the end of our physical life approaching, we become fearful of losing the only thing we know, our experiences and our identity, which is the Personal View of life.

If we envision the good of life as having what we want, what we have can be lost at any moment and it will certainly be lost upon death.

Consider another view of life, the Spiritual View, which is based on losing interest in our personal experiences and becoming interested in non-personal spiritual qualities such as peace, assurance, gratitude and love.

These qualities are readily available to us and are indeed the essence of the good of life in that they are reliable, never change and always beneficial.

All individuals have the opportunity to bring these qualities into their lives. And as personal interest is replaced by spiritual interests, the sting of personal life diminishes, as well as the fear of its loss. Spiritual qualities do not die. Love doesn’t die, nor does humor, gratitude, joy or peace. They continue to be expressed after our physical death and were expressed before our birth. In this way we all can become part of the continuing chain of the expression of spiritual qualities. This is the definition of eternal life in the Spiritual View.

What have we lost when a loved one dies? We have lost their physical presence as an individual expression of the qualities they expressed. And as we mourn the loss we increasingly value the qualities they once expressed.

We can see that those qualities, while no longer expressed by the personal presence of the beloved individual, are still being expressed by others in many ways. So the death that needs to happen is the death of our limited view of life as a personal experience.

This death could be welcomed every day we are alive. We can instead consider it as an opportunity to see what really is good in life with the Spiritual View.

While we cannot prevent our death, we can view dying fearlessly with the understanding that the spiritual qualities we have expressed in our life will live on and be beneficial to others after our physical death.

If we see life as an endeavor to express spiritual qualities in the world around us there is nothing to fear, as there is nothing that can be lost and nothing to lose. In fact, the qualities will survive and their expression will continue.

With the Spiritual View we do not speculate about what happens after physical death. Our interest is in the quality of this life here and now.

We can aspire to have all days of our life, including the last day, to be lived peacefully, with gratitude and understanding.