The Fear of Death
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in November 2025.
It’s a known fact that we are all going to die. Our culture, and perhaps our generation, seems dedicated to denying that fact. We spend our time and energy and money – in particular our money! -- ‘staying young’. We acknowledge we can’t hold back the years, but we act as if we can cheat them of their power to move us toward The End. The ideal is that we live long and strong until some morning we wake up dead.
I have no quarrel with the ideal. My issue is that we fail to prepare ourselves and those we love to have a good, or as-good-as-possible, death. In what other world would we avoid preparing for a journey we are about to take for which there is no Fedor’s or Lonely Planet, no wisdom from those who have gone before? You’d think we’d circle the wagons and share our thoughts generously and graciously.
But mostly we avoid the topic. How weird is it to include in our condolences a query about what kind of death the person had? Very (although I do it). And why is it weird? Maybe because many of us have not been present at a death. Or that the death was so mediated by medicine that it was hard to see it as a personalized event. Or that we don’t have an agreed-upon definition of what a good death is, so the default position is that death is bad. Or that we think it’s out of our control so there’s no use in evaluating the quality of the experience.
But mostly, I think, we have bought the idea that death is an event rather than a process. It’s a destination without a journey.
Dr. Sally Chivers, Trent prof in Gender and Social Justice, in a thought-provoking key-noter at a recent conference of gerontologists, asked what people feared. Because, she said, what we fear determines how we see the world which in turn determines how we behave. That validated my perception of our general stance toward death – we fear it so we deny it which exacerbates the fear.
My thought is if we move back a step and embrace death as a process, a gradual movement toward a predictable end, we might clear the fog of fear enough to have some useful thoughts and conversations.
I come to this as I prepare to market my book on caregiving for a spouse with dementia. Because there is no cure for dementia, accepting the diagnosis is accepting that the up-coming journey ends in death. Once you swallow that reality, and digest it (admittedly an on-going process as the disease is a long and winding road of a thousand little deaths), you can hunker into managing the trip, even enjoying it.
The fear that Sally Chivers references, as relates to dementia, is that we as a society have decided that death by dementia is a horrible death. It’s the end that people most assuredly don’t want. It’s horrible because it is long and attenuated, not the tidy wake-up-dead that we idealize. It’s horrible because the mind goes before the body, and we believe that we are what we think (thank you, Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am’ guy who did his share in separating us from the natural world), and therefore we disappear or become something other than ourselves before our body allows us to depart this mortal coil. It’s horrible because being a non-person makes us vulnerable (if we’re the one with dementia) or terribly responsible (if we’re the care partner).
But if a culture that can entertain the notion that some who depart this world pass through Pearly Gates and become winged creatures making song, surely we can imagine a new and loveable persona earlier in the process.
My hypothesis based on limited evidence is that aging is the other side of the hill of life, and as we slip down the slope, we become variations of what we were as we clambered up the hill. We become childlike, in the sense of constrained cognition – can’t think like we used to – and also in terms of increasing dependence.
Childhood is a lovely stage of life (if we are fortunate enough to be safely dependent). It is a time of wonder and joy and discovery and becoming what we are. If we weren’t so afraid of death and the road to death, perhaps we could create the conditions under which the end of the life cycle has its own loveliness. We’d need to ensure that we could offer safe dependency, assurance that essential body, mind and spirit needs are met, so that both the person with dementia and the care partner are free to fully experience this stage of life.
We could do that. Let’s put fear of death in its place and give it a try.
