The Five Fears of Death
What is it we fear, precisely, when we fear death?
The answer would seem simple, indeed utterly obvious: we fear dying! Being dead! Not existing any more! You have to ask?!
—It is only when you stop to consider that those three answers are all, despite what may seem at first glance, utterly different, do you think that there might be a question here.
What is it we fear, precisely, when we fear death?
If on one level the answer is unitary and the same for all (death), and if on another level is different for reach of us (we each have a life to lose, and our fear of losing it is in some sense different from everyone else's), there is a level in which the answer lies between those two extremes.
I claim that when we fear death we fear three or four or five things. It depends how you count. It may be helpful to enumerate them.
The first fear, in some ways the least, in some ways the base of all the rest, is a simple, instinctual animal will to live that enkindles terror at its threatened end. This is the fear that causes us to flinch back from the precipice, to run from flame. It is one of the categories that makes me say "or" when counting fears, for it is not entirely clear if it should count, that is, if it rises to the level of "fear". It is, as I said, instinct—or largely instinct: it can also overwhelm, even in the dead of night, not only if we wake and find we are struggling to breathe, but even when simply the thought of the sole inevitable strikes us, and we are gripped with terror while snug in our beds. This is the terror that wraps around our spines, that lives in our gut. No reasonable list of fears of dying can leave it out. If the rest of this list enumerates the fears one has in calm contemplation, when surveying, from a safe distance and great height, the prospect of ceasing to be, I do not feel we can leave out the base panic which is, for so many of us, the last thing we ever feel.
The second fear has to do with what is left behind. We are afraid of dying because there are things on this Earth we wish to see or do or complete or help or experience, and dying will end that. We fear for a child if we are not there to care for them; we have a task to complete, an organization to hold together, a hill to defend. We need to still be here because there are things that only we can or will do: and we are scared at the thought of ourselves undone leaving them undone.
When Susan Ertz sneered that "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon," it was only that fear that she thought of. Not the first; and not others.
The third fear has to do with the process of dying. Dying is a breakdown, in some form or another, of the body's systems; that tends to hurt. Tends to, I say, not always does: if it's over in an instant, or happens in our sleep, or involves a peaceful ebbing away, perhaps it doesn't hurt. But a lot of deaths hurt. We don't want to hurt—not only because of the instinctual, gut-level fear of death, but to avoid pain for its own sake. Dying is, often, a lot of pain. We fear that. This fear is no more—but also not one jot less—than the fear of torture or wound, the rational response and irrational, animal panic that wants not to hurt. Who can deny that fear? Who can scorn it?
The fourth and fifth fears may be considered as either one or two (this is another source of imprecision in my count). I think they are better considered as two closely related fears rather than one complex one, but some may differ.
The fourth fear is a fear of the afterlife. Humans have painted many images of the afterlife in our history, and a great many of them are grim or cruel. Even those that are not grim are often paired with a grim alternative, and we are given no absolute assurance about which fork we shall chose. This is the fear of embarking on a great journey without knowledge of the destination; the fear that Hamlet in his most famous soliloquy described as the "dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns". This is the fear of death that Lucretius was thinking of when he assured his readers that they had nothing to fear of death, since there was no afterlife and after death they would just not be.1 Against this fear, it was a comfort.
The fifth fear of death is a fear of nonexistence. Some may see this as a subcategory of the fourth—another type of fear of what comes after. But I think it is most usefully understood as the fourth’s opposite (which, like all opposites, is in some way alike): the fourth fear was fear of what we might experience or endure after death; the fifth is that we will experience nothing. That we will be nothing. That we won't be.
This is the fear of death that we try to comfort by saying that we having nothing to fear since there will be no us to mind; the fear that Larkin dwelt upon in his brilliant poem "Aubade"2. The fear of nothingness.
Please note that I am attempting to catalog fear— terror, the sort of thing that keeps one up in the long dark hours or threatens the ease of breath. I am not speaking of regret, and certainly not of desire to live. Those are, at least to my mind, very different things. There are a great many more reasons to clutch at life, than that we are afraid of death.
For some of us—some of the time—life can be full of pleasures and wonders and delights: we can wish for more of these, yearn for more pleasures, to read books unread, to love people unmet, to see sights beyond the next horizon. This is so intense a desire that the losing of its chance can feel like—can be, for what is it for a feeling to be if feeling like will not suffice?—fear. This, however, is the second fear in my list: there are things undone. It is a more selfish variety, perhaps: pleasures untasted rather than people who we fear to leave unaided or work we fear to leave incomplete. But if rich and unharmful pleasures are good—and if they are not, it is hard to see that anything could be—then there is every reason to fear their loss. All the same, however, I think that loss of pleasure tends to bring regret not fear, sorrow not terror: we want more, and we are not wrong to want more: but it is not the same as the dread of things undone.
Similarly, we might say that we fear the pain of others upon our loss. This too is rather like our fear of tasks undone, the fear that our child or aged parent will suffer if we are not there to care for them. But is it what causes the flinch of fear? Or is this simply a wish that things were otherwise: that a pain might be spared, a sorrow lifted. All of us have those we love, and those who love us: and that love would not be worthy of its name if we did not pregrieve the grief that those who do not precede us will suffer when it is our turn to end. But any of us who have suffered true grief know that, however sharp and deep it may cut, most wounds heal; most grievers will still live to be whole. Of course we would spare those we love pain (even if so doing brought it upon ourselves: if we do not go first then we must go last.) But—save for those who need care to live, in which case it is a true fear, but a fear already enumerated—I do not think it is something we are afraid of, rather than something we wish not to be the case.
And above all there is the simple desire to continue, the wish to go on. Spinoza said that everything, but which he meant not only people but institutions, trees, stones, and possibly even abstract things like ideas, tries to continue, to keep going.3 We, too, wish to continue, not for any reason nor for any fear, but simply because being wishes to be. We wish to still be here; dying is our not being here.
Perhaps the possible contravening of this simple wish to go on might be called fear. But I think it is something else: desire, a desire for more, a desire to continue. We may in some sense fear the thwarting of our desires, but I think that, seen in the clear light of mid-day and not the dark ruminations of the early morning's aubade, this is not quite fear. We want to go on; we try to go on; we hope to go on. But this is not the same thing as fearing not to.
So with some uncertainty—who would not be cautious, to try and nail with small numbers so vast and omnipresent a thing as the fear of death?—I will reiterate that while we may seek to live for a great many reasons, and while we may seek to avoid death for each of those and more, we will fear death for the five (or four, or three) reasons I have listed above.
What do we learn from enumerating all of this?
For one thing. counting may serve (it has served me) to lessen the fear a bit. The uncharted is full of half-imagined terrors; the cataloged may be overwhelming and intimidating, but is less darkly fearsome. We reckon by reckoning. It is often good to count.
But another, more important thing that we might learn is to think about exactly what, if we are afraid, we are afraid of: a nebulous fear of death/dying/being dead may be more terrifying than one which we have sorted through.
For myself, I believe in no afterlife; like any person raised in a God-drenched culture, I doubt my own beliefs, and occasionally fear to be tortured at the sadistic whim of an omnipotent being for eternity; but it is a very occasional doubt. So the fourth does not much bother me. And while I certainly fear the third, I mostly have a sufficient trust in modern medicine that I hope that pain management will be adequate to the task. And the first, of course, is hardly a fear at all: I will probably flinch from death when it comes, as do many of us, but that is from the spine, not the head.
The fifth gives me more pause. "The anasthetic from which none come round" certainly chills me more than "the undiscovered country". But for the most part I think that the comfort Lucretius offered and Larkin dismisses as inadequate is true: we will not be here to mind, so it will not matter, to us. While we are here, we are still here; when we are not, there is no we to mind.
But it is the second which, for me, tears at me most. I have things to do, people to speak with, words to lay in a line. It seems almost impossible that I will do all of what I want to do. I fear how little I will accomplish.
And you, reader, my fellow traveler to the grave?4 What do you fear? Have you found a sixth fear I did not think of? A comfort to or terror in one of my five I have not addressed? I am still here; you are still here: speak now, for both of us have limited time.
The sun is always sinking. We are all in a race against time and waning light. I must hurry to sow my seeds, and look lovingly on the distant hills.
"If it happens that people are to suffer unhappiness and pain in the future, they themselves must exist at that future time for harm to be able to befall them; and since death takes away this possibility by preventing the existence of those who might have been visited by troubles, you may be sure that there is nothing to fear in death, that those who no longer exist cannot become miserable, and that it makes not one speck of difference whether or not they have ever been born once their mortal life has been snatched away by deathless death." — De rerum natura, Book 3, lines 862-869, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith.
"the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere,… this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round."
Spinoza referred to this as a thing's "conatus" (a preexisting term of post-Roman Latin, but one which he essentially redefined), and said that "The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself." (Ethics, Pr. 7, III) But he also distinguished this desire to go on from fear of death; he wrote "A free man, that is, he who lives solely according to the dictates of reason, is not guided by fear of death, but directly desires the good; that is, to act, to live, to preserve his own being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own advantage. So he thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life." (Ethics, Pr. 67, IV; cross-references omitted). (Spinoza quoted from the translation of Samuel Shirley).
I can't help but note that the word "conatus" is etymologically related to our activities here; the derivation is "from Latin, effort, from conatus, past participle of conari to attempt".
"Christmas time… the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." Dickens, A Christmas Carol, stave 1.