Staring at the Sun: overcoming the dread of death

by Irvin D. Yalom

this extraordinary Athenian thinker, the more strongly I recognize Epicurus as the proto-existential psychotherapist,

he was far more concerned with the attainment

tranquility

(atar...

the philosopher must treat the soul. In his

you are not only more aware of existence and mortality and life’s other immutable characteristics but also more anxious and more primed to make significant changes. You are prompted to grapple with your fundamental human responsibility to construct an authentic life of engagement, connectivity, meaning, and self-fulfillment.

Ideas have power. The insights of many great thinkers and writers through the centuries help us quell roiling thoughts about death and discover meaningful paths through life.

Epicurus insisted, then we have nothing to fear in an afterlife. We will have no consciousness, no regrets for the life that was lost, nor anything to fear from the gods.

Epicurus held, “why fear death when we can never perceive it?”

Epicurus’s third argument holds that our state of nonbeing after death is the same state we were in before our birth.

Perhaps the important thing was that her ripples persist, ripples of some act or idea that would help others attain joy and virtue in life, ripples that would fill her with pride and act to counter the immorality, horror, and violence monopolizing the mass media and the outside world.

“If they can do it, then so can I.”

Even in death her forbears passed something on to her.

Many individuals report that they rarely think of their own death but are

obsessed with the idea, and the terror, of transiency. Every pleasant moment is corroded by the background thought that everything now experienced is evanescent and will end shortly.

Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.”

Then he offered a powerful counterargument to the idea that meaninglessness is inherent in transiency:

but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.

Thus Freud attempts to soften death’s terror

by separating human esthetics and values from death’s grasp and positing that tr...

what is vitally significant for an individual’s...

Many traditions try to gather power over transiency by stressing the importance of living in the moment and f...

Rippling tempers the pain of transiency by reminding us that something of each us persists even though it may be unknown or imperceptible to us.

adverse experience can leave one stronger and more able to adapt to adversity. This aphorism is closely related to Nietzsche’s idea that a tree, by weathering storms and sinking its roots deep into the earth, grows stronger and taller.

It is only what we are that truly matters.

A good conscience, Schopenhauer says, means more than a good reputation. Our greatest goal should be good health and intellectual wealth, which lead to an inexhaustible supply of ideas, independence, and a moral life. Inner equanimity stems from knowing that it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretations of things.

It is the synergy between ideas and intimate connection with other people that is most effective both in diminishing death anxiety and in harnessing the awakening experience to effect personal change.

that our need to belong is powerful and fundamental:

Dying, however, is lonely, the loneliest event of life. Dying not only separates you from others but also exposes you to a second, even more frightening form of loneliness: separation from the world itself.

Loneliness greatly increases the anguish of dying.

This everyday isolation works two ways: not only do the well tend to avoid the dying, but the dying often collude in their isolation.

At such times, we grow aware of the fact that our world will disappear and aware, too, that no one can fully accompany us on our bleak journey to death.

“You got to walk that lonesome valley by yourself.”

The dying person generally needs to take

the lead in discussing fears about death.

than to offer him or her your sheer presence.

“I never let them die alone in the dark, and I say to them, ‘You will always be with me here in my heart.’”

the realization of your good deeds, of your virtuous influence on others that persists beyond yourself—may soften the pain and loneliness of the final journey.

Rippling, like so many of the ideas I find useful, assumes far more power in the context of an intimate relationship where one can know at first hand how one’s life has benefited someone else.

have decided that there is, after all, something that I can still offer. I can offer an example of how to die. I can set a model for my children and my friends by facing death with courage and dignity.”

a way to imbue her life, to its very end, with meaning.

I worked

for many years with patients facing imminent death from terminal illness.

Many of them grew wise through their ordeal, served as my teachers, and had a lasting inf...

treasure my relationships with my family—my wife, my four children, my grandchildren, my sister—and with my network of close friends, many stretching back for decades. I’m tenacious about maintaining and nurturing old friendships; you cannot make new old friends.

I agree with her—rich connections temper the pain of transiency.

death, isolation, meaning in life, and freedom.

The existential worldview on which I base my clinical work embraces rationality, eschews supernatural beliefs, and posits that life in general, and our human life in particular, has arisen from random events; that, though we crave to persist in our being, we are finite creatures; that we are thrown alone into existence without a predestined life structure and destiny; that

each of us must decide how to live as fully, happily, ethically, and meaningfully as possible.

distinguish between content and process.