Fear of Dying 1

So what about being dead terrifies us? We can make a list of the leading scary aspects.

Fear of pain, confusion, and suffering in dying doesn't compare to the fear of the death itself (at least for most of us, at least with plenty of opium-derivatives available).

The pain our bereaved will feel? A little. The loss of consciousness? We lose consciousness each night. The permanent loss of consciousness? Yes, this leads to our greatest fears, but strangely. I think most of us inhabit a world of story - these stories allow us to "make sense" of our experience. And the dominant story form most of us inhabit? The fairy-tale quest with a stepwise set of achievements, occasional reversals, and a "happily-ever-after" ending+. When this life story collides with death, only two outcomes occur; either the life-story sticks a "happily-ever-after"* or death destroys the life-story.

How does death destroy the life-story of fairy-tale-quest? Most importantly by eliminating the happy-ever-after. What functions does the happy-ever-after serve in the story? Resolution of specific, dynamic, and dangerous story-lines (youth) into a stable and vague contentment (maturity) which serves as reward and eternal togetherness. But more importantly for our purposes here, the happily-ever-after "ending" serves as the target to the trajectories launched in the story. No target means just a bunch of random trajectories.

And I think that sense of meaninglessness disturbs us the most about death - the sense that death retroactively translates vibrant and intentional life story into arbitrary action and event.


+ The French "and they got married and had lots of children" and German "And if they didn't die, they live still today" offer "targets" that reintegrate the exceptional characters back into normal processes, whereas the English version backgrounds the still exceptional but somewhat boring victors.

*I'd rather not focus too much on critiquing the fairy-tale religion - its already incoherent enough that anyone looking skeptically will see its implausibility, and anyone not looking skeptically has already decided not to.