Like you, I am going to die. Not today, I hope — what do we say to the god of death? — but at some point in the future. There is nothing I can do about this; it is inevitable. Nonetheless a huge part of modern survival is to prepare, as best we can, for the one certainty in our lives… their ending.
Preparation for death and dying comes in three parts:
- Preparing ourselves for death
- Preparing our loved ones for our death
- Estate planning
Different people may find one of these more important than another, but for our purposes today I’ll treat them all as equally important and equally valid. So without further ado…
Preparing for Death — Don’t Fear the Reaper
The first part of preparation for death is to prepare ourselves. And the core of that preparation is to get over, as best we can, our fear of death.
Oh yeah, this should be an easy one.
So let’s talk about death. Fundamentally, we don’t have a good understanding of it. The act of dying, the process of dying, is something that we’re really only now starting to get to grips with in science.
Fundamentally, the scientific understanding of death is one of system failure — the idea that it’s not an instantaneous event, but rather one characterized by a fairly orderly shutdown of bodily processes triggered by the failure of a primary organ.
This will have relevance in the immediate future, as doctors develop new and interesting ways of arresting the dying process to allow repairs, and this my even require new philosophies of death to cope with someone “dying” and then being put in some form of suspended animation and brought back to life days or months later.
I think the best way to understand death is as brain death — the failure of our bodily seat of consciousness and spirit (if you believe in souls). Without the brain, the body is just a shell.
This is a very contentious viewpoint; plenty of people believe that as long as the body is whole, it should be kept alive. I do not subscribe to this belief, and in fact I think that keeping a body alive after brain death is usually detrimental to everyone — the family, the medical establishment, and the body alike — because it is a waste of valuable resources.
Beyond this discussion of bodily processes, we have no understanding of death. We don’t know what happens after we die. The most scientifically likely thing is… nothing. We’ve never been able to prove the existence of a spirit or soul, and so the Occam’s Razor explanation is that death is probably simply a cessation of consciousness.
Strange Universe
But the universe is not only stranger than we know, it’s stranger than we can know, and there is ample room for an afterlife. In this view, some portion of our existence or consciousness could continue on after death.
And there’s no way to know in advance which one of these is the reality we get.
Oh, I know all the religions have opinions on this, but part of the point of that last statement is the fact that I have to say “all the religions,” and I can’t just say, “the religion.” If it was provable that one group or another was right about the afterlife, we’d have proved it by now.
There’s certainly enough interest. But we haven’t, and anyone who tells you that they know what happens after we die is lying. They may believe, but that’s another kettle of fish.
So — we don’t know what happens after we die, and accordingly a lot of our fear of death seems to boil down to uncertainty. People really like certainty in their lives; certainty in the afterlife is not only a natural follow-on to that statement, but perhaps the ultimate expression of this quest for certainty. And in this instance, we simply don’t get any certainty. It does not exist. Death is a great mystery.
How then can I justifiably say “don’t fear the Reaper?” Well, I have a few good reasons for this.
Number one, everyone who has ever existed before you either has died or will die. So no matter what the outcome, lots of people have gone before you. If there is an afterlife, it’s a well-trod path and you’ll have plenty of company. If death is simply a cessation of being, then there’s literally nothing to worry about or look forward to, and we should focus on living our lives as best we can while we have them.
Number two, if what we fear about death is the uncertainty of the experience, then I think it is far better to view it as the next great adventure. All our lives we do new things, interesting things, things we never thought we’d be able to do. Why should our death be any different?
I choose to view death as a curiosity, not as a bogeyman. I do not seek it, but when it comes I’ll be interested to know what happens next.
Number three, if we spend our lives in fear of death, all of our actions will be bent around that fear. We will lose focus on improving our lives, and instead work only to improve (or postpone) our deaths.
Given that we cannot know whether any actions we take in this life will actually improve our post-death experience, that could easily be a waste of time and resources that could be put to better use. To paraphrase an old saying, we can either work toward heaven or work toward heaven on earth.
Taken together, these three reasons provide me ample defense against a fear of the Reaper, and they provide me with a goodly portion of my life’s philosophy: that we should live the best lives we can, in as much harmony with each other and the universe as we can, because the best odds are that this is all we get and we owe it to ourselves and each other to make it as pleasant as possible.
And this, too, is part of our preparation for death — to live a life that is as in accordance with our principles as possible, in order to greet death in the knowledge of a life well-lived.
Adapted from ‘The Modern Survival Guide’ by Allen Faulton, a series published on Medium.com serving as a guidebook for what he believes people ought to know about living in the modern world, Faulton’s views here are his, and his alone.
