Fear of Anything Was Fear of Death March 13, 2005
Posted by Phineas in : Discourse, Psycho/Spirit , trackbackI used to go around saying that fear of anything was fear of death, ultimately. Not many people listened to me. The few who did argued with me, saying things like “But some people are afraid of life.”
I don’t know if I still think that fear of anything is fear of death. But I am starting to think that fear of death is really a kind of harsh judgment about life. If you have lived a happy, fulfilling life, what is to fear or dread about death? It’s natural, after all, it gets us all eventually. Each person has to face death – it can be a terror or a kind of acceptance. It can be anything, who knows? But I think people who are preoccupied w/ death, fearing death, avoiding risks, obsessing about health or disease, or obsessing about terrorism or violence in the world, must have some kind of idea that if they die for any of the reasons they fear most it will be a “tragic” thing, an unjust thing, a condition to be raged against.
I also used to point out that the meaning of the word “tragic” has almost completely reversed from its original, Greek, literary meaning. In Greek tragedy, the death of the hero was tragic when it was overloaded with narrative or philosophical significance. Today we use tragic to mean meaningless –as when a child is killed by a stray bullet –the exact opposite of the literary meaning of the word.
Nobody listened to me then either.
But anyway.
So this raging against the unjustness of one’s death or the potential of that, speaks volumes about the person’s feelings about their life. I believe that is says that they feel their life will have been not worth living if they die now. If you feel your life has been worth living up to now, then every extra day is lagniappe, something to be thankful for. It may be hard to say that to someone dying in some horrible way, I admit. But that may have more to do with the manner of death than the fact of it. I’m sure, for example, that even the happiest soul most content and satisfied with their life would still fight to keep on living, given half a chance. Sometimes death is tragic, “tragic” when that effort is in vain. But even then there has to be a point at which that person realizes, “OK, this is it.” At that point are you at peace or are you raging?
Well, forget about what you might feel right then, because you don’t have to actually be facing it at the moment of death to face the inevitable fact of your mortality. That you can face now. Go ahead, think about it. Now does it make you feel outraged or sad, or do you just shrug it off? If you’re a shrugger, you’re either not trying hard enough, or you are one of those rare people who are content, satisfied, and believe that their life has been worth living. If you rage, you must feel on some level screwed, disappointed, miserable in life. This feeling then is not really even about death. It’s about your life.
To improve things, you could stand to work on your life. It’s not enough to live in a manner which dodges death – you have to live richly, fully, so that you can look back and love what you have lived. It may be that the more you dodge death, the less fully you have lived, which will amplify that feeling of injustice, making you dread death all the more, because you have lived so much less for fear of death.
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