Why Are We Afraid of Death?

One boring evening, pregnant and uncomfortable, surfing online in my room I suddenly heard loud noise from downstairs. The noise came from my younger sisters and had an alarming tone. The pitch of their voices sent a shrill down my spine at the same time as a message was sent to my brain. My heart pulsated for a few seconds until the message became apparent and I realised that it was false alarm. Listening to the sound they were making, I could hear that a spider had appeared in their room and they reacted with fear. Ease took over on autopilot and I realised I had feared the worst; in that instant when the loud noise reached my mind, the fear of death sent a shrill down my spine and instigated my heart to beat faster. It was an unpleasant feeling but a common one when you care for somebody. I have been familiar with death from a young age, my parents never made any attempts to shield us from the reality of death. They spoke of it openly and often, especially since our native country was war-torn, we managed to escape and the rest of the extended family was left behind. Family members were always in the middle of cross fire and casualties were common. Although death of a relative I never met doesn’t cause the uncomfortable feeling, the thought of death in my immediate family scares the shit out of me. Thinking of this, I want to know why we are so afraid of death. Death is inevitable, resistance to death is futile, yet we do all in our effort to resist death. Why? Maybe you won’t even bother continuing to read this book, because your fear of death won’t allow you to understand what death really is. No one will ever tell us what happens after death, but can we understand it through life?

I need to know what death really is, and after googling online I came across this explanation. “Death begins when the heart stops beating. Deprived of oxygen, a cascade of cellular deaths commences, beginning with brain cells and ending with skin cells. Death is a process rather than an event. The moment of death is usually on a point of no return.” This explanation seemed so sterile, but has the effectiveness of explaining death as a process rather than a simple occurrence. However I found it quite useful when wanting to understand what happened. The problem with death is the seizing of existence, and I believe that is what most people fear. The fear of not being in attendance to a continuation we have experienced and know for sure. We fear what will happen to us the moment we can not return, it’s just a human instinct to fear what we can’t see and things we don’t know.

Googling on about death I found this sentence; “the complete and final separation of the soul from the body” Many of us believes in an afterlife, or some kind of continuation, although we are never fully convinced that what we believe in is the actual truth. Think about it, there are so many beliefs out there, so many theories of what will happen to us when we seize to exist in this presence, to think that one of them is right or that all of them are wrong is beyond us. Yet we have the privilege to choose what we want to believe our afterlife consists of and that can give a meaning to living this life, although deep down we rather stay in limbo and not know for sure. But what about people who commit suicide, people who are fed up with the uncertainty during this life, do they believe in an afterlife. Surely they must believe there is something better beyond this existence since they choose to move on.

The term death is ambiguous, the ending of life is one thing, and the condition of having life over is another, all though the word can refer to either we all agree that the actual word death in it self explains the end of things as we know it.