I’m not talking here about people in hospice… or people who have spent their lives battling a debilitating depression. I’m not talking about someone who just celebrated their 102nd birthday.
It’s about the rest of us.
I had conversations with so many people on the topic of death as I was writing my book. Gotta say, it has been head-smackingly mysterious to me when I hear people (outside the category of folks in the above circumstances) say things like:
I’ve lived. I participated. That’s enough.
I don’t have to panic about what I can’t prevent.
Death is natural.
All things are impermanent.
I’m not afraid of being dead; I’m afraid of the dying part.
When it’s time, it’s time.
Well, OF COURSE.
BUT…
Is Acceptance of Death the Same as Giving Up?
What about the raging against the dying of the light?
There’s a continuum, isn’t there? Full-on defiance all the way to (if you can believe it) excitement.
At the defiance end, there is the story of how Susan Sontag approached her death. I explored this in a chapter of my book, frankly because it served as a cautionary tale to me. Her son, David Rieff, chronicled her..IMHO…delusional battle in a memoir called Swimming in a Sea of Death: A son’s memoir. This was his attempt to understand his mother’s desperate struggle against the inevitable.
I guess some people could call her struggle heroic but as I was reading accounts of her approach to her very, VERY obvious impending death, I found it…sorry Susan…pathetic.
On the other end of the continuum are people like Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, both of whom I also wrote about in my book.
When Ram Dass was close to death he was asked when he knew he was ready to die. He said, “When I arrived at my soul. Soul doesn’t have fear of dying. Ego has a very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite.”
And Timothy Leary is said to have expressed excitement about his impending death, calling it his “…next great adventure.”
It seems to me that this continuum lies on the fault line between resilience culture and existential honesty.
Susan Sontag ⬅️—————————————————————————-➡️ Ram Dass
No offense to Ram Dass because, well, he’s Ram Dass. But once a psychologist, always a psychologist. When I hear someone say they have no fear of death—- i.e. folks at the far right end of that continuum—-I tend to chalk that up to what we in the trade might call a counter-phobic response. A counter-phobic response is a psychological reaction in which someone moves toward what frightens them rather than away from it.
Instead of avoiding the feared object or situation (a phobic response), the person does the opposite: they approach it, challenge it, mock it, or try to dominate it. Like that guy who free-soloed the 1,667-foot (508-meter) Taipei 101 in Taiwan.
It’s not the absence of fear. It’s fear flipped outward.
No way will I get anywhere within spitting distance of Dass and Leary—-even if I had three more decades which, of course, I do not.
BUT, I am determined to move as far away as I can from Sontag’s end of the whole thing. Like I said, thanks for the cautionary example, Susan!
Love and peace,
P.S.: If you liked this post, I’d be grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️