I cope with death by knowing that it’s a part of life. I don’t want to die, at least not now anyway, but when I do I don’t have anything to fear. If anything there is more sadness in death than fear, sadness for things unsaid and unaccomplished. But if I live to some ripe old age then I imagine I will welcome death. At a certain point you’re just paying medical bills to stay alive.
I live for life, if that makes any sense. I love a good beer, a close game, looking into the eyes of my wife, yelling at call of duty (videogame). I enjoy painting and writing (despite being pretty bad at both). Life is what you make it. I don’t feel that it should be some sort of pre entrance exam for the ‘real’ life beyond this one.
I don’t. It is not here for me to cope with; as such, it is not something I have to cope with.
If I am faced with death, I will take that as life with death known. This won’t require me to cope either; I will instead have a perspective shift on the value of various aspects of life.
Life; it is what I live to experience. That is my place. All things have their time, this is my time for life.
I cope with death, as said earlier, by viewing it as a natural process. Aside from that, I cope with it by being prepared for it, and by not caring. I am only 21, but I have made arrangements (in the form of an extensive post-mortem letter to friends and family; last goodbyes, final wishes, etc.) to make sure that my death is understood by those I love and my funeral is performed in some manner that I would have found pleasing. When it comes down to it, though, we’re all worm food. In order to help cope with the fear of death, I think that a few things must be understood (which I will address later*. But first,)
I live to make my short time alive worthwhile to the lives of those around me, to make some attempt, however vain, to improve the social world, and to have the largest possible amount of fun while here.
*Here I will list the various conclusions I have come to that help me cope with death.
–Death is a natural process that happens to anyone and everyone.
–The fear of death is better stated as the fear of no longer living/existing.
–The fear of not existing is caused by:
[list]–Fear of worthlessness (once one is dead, the body which they know themselves as becomes no more significant than any rock or piece of dust.)
–Fear of being forgotten (as social creatures, we take pride in our relationships with those close to us and fear being mentally brushed aside by them.)
–Fear of the unknown after death (this is the most commonly stated; fear of the unknown is the same reason we’re afraid of the dark.)
–Our bodies are nothing more than mechanical organic transport vessels for our brains. Our brain is somehow an organic housing for our mind. We do not know what causes the mind to exist.
–It is therefore pointless to take life for granted, because it could be snatched away at any minute.
–To combat the feelings of worthlessness, what works for me is being well informed on the social world and attempting to change problems where I see them.
–The fear of the unknown after death doesn’t really bother me, and never has.[/list:u]
There’s about a million more things I want to say on this subject but it’s 1:42 am here and I am dead tired. I will explain any confusing points later in more detail.
How can one fear what is not known or even knowable? That’s an oddity of human thought that I have no answer for, in any respect.
What I live for?
There is nothing to live “for”, I live because of my children, they are both my mortality and my immortality. I fear their death, but my own is meaningless; my only purpose for continuance is that they do well, I’m just a sometimes useful tool to their ends.
Wasn’t it Buddha who believed that to spend one’s time concerned about what would happen to them after they died was pointless because there is no way for us to know what’s going to happen to us? I believe it was something like finding out then rather than worrying about it now.
I’m not an atheist, but I still don’t claim to know what’s going to happen to me when I die. I cope with this by concentrating on living, and I live for myself.
I zoom out (as I call it), i.e., I appreciate the relative insignificance of my life. When you realise how little your life matters in the grand scheme, you realise how insignificant your death is. It’s a surprising comfort, atcherly.
If you’re anything like me, in that you remember so few dreams you’d swear you don’t have them, you pretty much head into a dark place where you cease to exist whenever you go to sleep. What is existence but your ability to perceive your environment? I’m not consciously doing anything as I sleep and since I can’t remember subconsciously doing anything, it becomes irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, I may as well not exist during those hours. I see death as much the same way. I suppose you could say I “die” every night?
lol, ditto!
I’ve never heard it put quite that way.
Further…if that’s what death is like, then those moments before death…man, those are going to be just euphorically golden if my state before dropping off into sleep is any comparison!
A person that is always concerned about questions and answers about death is already dead. All you can do is think about it. Thoughts are something dead, they have no life. A living creature never asks questions about death because it is too busy living.
I discovered this little gem of reasoning within my first year of high school. You’re quite right. It is rather comforting, especially during those high stress years of equivalency exams and college preparation. Perhaps it attributed to my complete academic apathy, but it was comforting nonetheless.
A slight augmentation of that is this:
To know that “this” will pass and “that” will become “this”.
This method, rather than zooming out to small view (which I did around the same time as you Meaty), was something I did a bit after that and found more rewarding as it doesn’t lose focus on yourself or your value to yourself, but it removes the instanced experience you are in by projecting time that hasn’t occurred yet into your mind and allowing you to trick your mind into seeing the present as the past for consideration.
It’s essentially mental time travel, instead of space travel, with an interest in looking back on the moment currently under experience.
The point is to realize that this moment will become but a memory and memories are vague things that time seems to slip right over, rather that stick to, like the present can.
In relation to the topic, this allows you to accept time moving forward, as you can move forward to dying fairly easily in imaginative time and pre-cope with the ideas of such by moving beyond that point of death and looking back on it…kind of.
You can move up to death, which hasn’t happened yet, look back at the consideration of dying (which you have now), then move back from the moment of death to your current consideration of dying, but hold the perspective you imagined having at the event of death but now at this moment of considering death.
In imagination, this is like moving forward and coming back with a piece of your future mind in exercise.
For instance, when I did this for the first time; I found I didn’t care that I was dying; I was very happy about my life and only wished it could keep going, but was comforted in the acceptance that everything has it’s time to give it value and that my time had been good.
Upon, “returning”, I was able to adopt this perspective in life; that my life is good and to enjoy it as it is in it’s time for the value that this time limit provides.
Why fear death…? I mean, if it’s quick and unexpected, you won’t really have time to get a good fear going, and if it’s slow and protracted, then by the time it comes you’ll welcome it like an old friend.
You guys are weird.
Like Mas, I fear the deaths of others, or rather, life without them.
That’s a pretty interesting mental exercise, Stumps. I may try that myself, but I don’t think I can put my current self into my future self’s mental state, as it were, simply because…I don’t yet know what that will be. It should prove to be interesting, nonetheless.
