Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

by Irvin D. Yalom

Indeed, in my work as a therapist, I take as my intellectual ancestors not so much the great psychiatrists and psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-Pinel, Freud, Jung, Pavlov, Rorschach, and Skinner-but classical Greek philosophers, particularly Epicurus.

As the years go by, adolescent death concerns are pushed aside by the two major life tasks of young adulthood: pursuing a career and beginning a family. Then, three decades later, as children leave home and the end points of professional careers loom, the midlife crisis bursts upon us, and death anxiety once again erupts with great force.

Freud believed that much psychopathology results from a person's repression of sexuality. I believe his view is far too narrow. In my clinical work, I have come to understand that one may repress not just sexuality but one's whole creaturely self and especially its finite nature.

The Czech existential novelist Milan Kundera suggests that we also have a foretaste of death through the act of forgetting: "What terrifies most about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. In fact, the act of forgetting is a form of death always present within life."

Years ago, the psychologist Rollo May quipped that anxiety about nothing tries to become anxiety about something. In other words, anxiety about nothingness quickly attaches itself to a tangible object.

In these ways and in many others, great teachers down through the ages have reminded us that although the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.

When absorbed in the everyday mode, you turn toward such evanescent distractions as physical appearance, style, possessions, or prestige. In the ontological mode, by contrast, 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.

In other words, the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.

Epicurus addressed the unending and unsatisfying search for novel activities by urging that we store and recall deeply etched memories of pleasant experiences. If we can learn to draw on such memories again and again, he suggested, we will have no need for endless hedonistic pursuit.

How did Epicurus attempt to alleviate death anxiety? He formulated a series of well-constructed arguments, which his students memorized like a catechism.

In other words: where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not. Therefore, Epicurus held, "why fear death when we can never perceive it?"

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."

`When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."'

Yet the elegant phrasing and the reminder that her experience was shared even by a great spirit like Nietzsche helped her grasp that her toxic state of mind was only temporary. It helped her appreciate, in her bones, that she had once conquered her inner demons and would do so once again.

What if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you.

No positive change can occur in your life as long as you cling to the thought that the reason for your not living well lies outside yourself. As long as you place responsibility entirely on others who treat you unfairly-a loutish husband, a demanding and unsupportive boss, bad genes, irresistible compulsions-then your situation will remain at an impasse. You and you alone are responsible for the crucial aspects of your life situation, and only you have the power to change it.

If you engage in this experiment and find the thought painful or even unbearable, there is one obvious explanation: you do not believe you've lived your life well. I would proceed by posing such questions as, How have you not lived well? What regrets do you have about your life?

What can you do now in your life so that one year or five years f•om now, you won't look back and have similar dismay about the new regrets you've accumulated? In other words, can you find a way to live without continuing to accumulate regrets?

I was able to make her own dynamics crystal clear to her by quoting Otto Rank, one of Freud's colleagues, who said, "Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death." This dynamic is not uncommon. I think most of us have known individuals who numb themselves and avoid entering life with gusto because of the dread of losing too much.

Such ideas as the Epicurean arguments, rippling, the avoidance of the unlived life, and emphasis on authenticity in the aphorisms I cite all have usefulness in combating death anxiety.

When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings. SOCYAL RINPOCHE, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

The second form of loneliness, existential isolation, is more profound and stems from the unbridgeable gap between the individual and other people.

Nowhere is the loneliness of death and the need for connectedness depicted more graphically and powerfully than in Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Cries and Whispers.

One can offer no greater service to someone facing death (and from this point on I speak either of those suffering from a fatal illness or physically healthy individuals experiencing death terror) than to offer him or her your sheer presence.

The lesson here is simple: connection is paramount. Whether you are a family member, a friend, or a therapist, jump in. Get close in any way that feels appropriate. Speak from your heart. Reveal your own fears. Improvise. Hold the suffering one in any way that gives comfort.

And then, one fine day, a member opened our meeting with an announcement: "I 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."

I often counsel myself and my patients to imagine one year or five years ahead and think of the new regrets that will have piled up in that period. Then I pose a question that has real therapeutic crunch: "How can you live now without building new regrets? What do you have to change in your life?"

E. E. Cummings poem

I'm tenacious about maintaining and nurturing old friendships; you cannot make new old friends.

The existential therapeutic position states that what bedevils us issues not only from our biological genetic substrate (a psychopharmacological model), not only from our struggle with repressed instinctual strivings (a Freudian position), not only from our internalized significant adults who may be uncaring, unloving, or neurotic (an object relations position), not only from disordered forms of thinking (a cognitive-behavioral position), not only from shards of forgotten traumatic memories or from current life crises involving one's career and relationship with significant others, but also-but also-from a confrontation with our existence.