Viewing Volume 11 Issue 2 Summer 2008
An Excerpt from
'Sorrow enters my Heart. I am afraid of death.' Gilgamesh.
Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes you human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom and, inevitably, diminish and die. Mortality has haunted us from the beginning of history. Four thousand years ago, the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh reflected on the death of his friend Enkidu with the words from the epigraph above:
"Thou hast become dark and cannot hear me. When I die shall I not be like Enkidu? Sorrow enters my heart. I am afraid of death."
Gilgamesh speaks for all of us. As he feared death, so do we all - each and every man, woman and child. For some of us the fear of death manifests only indirectly, either as generalized unrest or masqueraded as another psychological symptom: other individuals experience an explicit and conscious stream of anxiety about death; and for some of us the fear of death erupts into terror that negates all happiness and fulfillment.
As a psychotherapist treating many individuals struggling with death anxiety. I have found that ancient wisdom, particularly that of the Greek philosophers is thoroughly relevant today. Indeed, in my work as a therapist, I take as my intellectual ancestors not so much the great psychiatrist and psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Pinel, Freud, Jung, Pavlov, Rorschach and Skinner - but classical Greek philosophers, particularly Epicurus.
My personal experience and clinical work have taught me that anxiety about dying waxes and wanes throughout the life cycle. Children at an early age cannot help but note the glimmerings of mortality surrounding them - dead leaves, insects and pets, disappearing grandparents, grieving parents, endless acres of cemetery tombstones. Children may simply observe, wonder, and following their parents' example, remain silent. If they openly express their anxiety, their parents become noticeably uncomfortable and, of course rush to offer comfort. Sometimes adults attempt to find soothing words, or transfer the whole matter into the distant future, or sooth children's anxiety with death-denying tales of resurrection, eternal life, heaven and reunion.
It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face; you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we grow rich, famous, and even larger. We develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
But despite the staunchest, most venerable defences, we can never completely subdue death anxiety; it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind. Perhaps, as Plato says, we cannot lie to the deepest part of ourselves.
Where today, do people with unmanageable death anxiety turn? Some seek help from their family and friends; others turn to their church or to therapy; still others may consult a book such as this. I've worked with a great many individuals terrified by death. I believe that the observations, reflections, and interventions I've developed in a life of therapeutic work can offer significant help and insight to those3 who cannot dispel death anxiety on their own.
I feel strongly - as a man who will himself die one day in the not - so distant future and as a psychiatrist who has spent decades dealing with death and anxiety - that confronting death allows us, not to open some Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
So I offer this book optimistically, I believe that it will help you stare death in the face and, in so doing, not only ameliorate terror but enrich your life.
By:A.T.