How to you do your dying?

Breathing death into life

It is All Hallow’s Eve, and my thoughts turn to those I have loved and lost. In Sweden we gather in graveyards, lighting candles to bring light to the dead. Others may prefer its fearful offshoot, Halloween, where mocking or provoking the dark gives us a sense of mastery. Or maybe we prefer to dance with death, like the Mexicans on Día de Los Muertos.

Whatever your relationship to those that have passed on, stopping to contemplate your own inevitable demise is a far greater challenge. Most try and avoid it until it catches up with them, unconsciously haunted by an invisible timer. However, I believe we can do our dying well, long before the grim reaper knocks on our door. I believe that facing the fear of your death is the most life enhancing practise there is. Anyone who has been told they only have a few more months to live, will tell the rest of us not to wait for a terminal diagnosis before we start living.

As would the patients of Nurse Bronnie War, who recorded their main regrets as they were dying. As she says in this youtube clip, “this book may be about death, but it is far more about living.”

Avoiding death just makes it scarier

When we try to deny or suppress our fear of death we can end up with a diverse range of symptoms. Severe risk averse behaviour bordering on obsessive compulsive behaviours, or the opposite, an addiction to taking risks. Compulsively laughing death in the face, again and again, thinking you have won. Other common symptoms are hypochondria, phobias, abandonment anxiety, panic disorders and ultimately the fear of failure. Because after all, if you think you can outrun death, you are setting yourself up for the one greatest failure of all.

Another way to by-pass the reality of your death, often not recognised, is to find solace in the spiritual or the transpersonal. There is nothing wrong with the belief that after death your spirit will travel on, reincarnate or join the great Universal ‘I Am’. But if I use it to avoid facing up to the fact of my mortality as a human being, then death anxiety will continue to haunt me. It is a natural fact of life that the Lysanne that I am, writing this article, has a sell by date. How do I use that time? Do I waste it in displacement activities that mask the fear of death, or do I dance joyfully with death on my side?

How do we do our dying well?

We look to the great existential philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre, as well as psychotherapists such as Emmy van Deurzen and Irvin Yalom, for the best clues to how we do our dying well. In his book, Staring at the Sun, Irvin Yalom writes: though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us”. At the same time, he writes that “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.” And so the art of living is to include death on the path without becoming obsessed by it.

And then, when there are times in our lives when we do become engulfed by great bouts of death anxiety, we do well to listen. The question that Yalom likes to ask his patients who present with death anxiety is: ‘what is it that bothers you so much about death?” When I sat with that ‘duh’ question myself, it presented the fear that I won’t be given enough time to suck the marrow out of every drop of life that I’m given. And yet, that then made me realise that there was no one stopping me. That there was no one forcing me to procrastinate in savouring life, except me.

Death can be funny

When we really face the question, humour often comes close on its heels. When I asked one of my clients the same question a few years ago, her answer, after some thought, made us both laugh. With outrage in her voice she answered, “it’s just not right”. Like some cruel cosmic joke where life is given only to be taken away again.

During my Psychosynthesis training we were invited to spend a whole weekend just ‘sitting with death’. We shared how we felt about our impending deaths. We gave one another space to explore our fears of dying alone, or in pain. The laughter came when I expressed my fear of being ‘held back’ in my dying by grieving relatives, saying that in that case I would prefer to die alone. Upon which my colleague accused me of being very anti-social in my dying. In this quiet conference room in Southwark, as the early evening dusk set in, we sat in complete harmony, breathing death into our lives.

And yes, I also want to add, out of respect to those for whom it is no longer an exercise but reality, that contemplating your own death is a bit like sleeping rough one night to experience how it is to be homeless.

That said, the greatest message they have for us is exactly that, ‘don’t wait until you have a terminal diagnosis before you start value your living.’ Of course there is grief and anger, but there is also a kind of renewed vigour, as a long as the physical body allows. Olympic gold medallist Chris Hoy, recently shared how his terminal diagnosis was a great shock, followed on the heels by a deep resolve to turn it into something positive. What else can you do?

And so, on this day of All Hallows, when death wanders closer to our conscious awareness than at any other time, let’s learn to do our dying well, long before our own sell-by date is nigh. Let’s learn from Hoy and the Existentialists and bring awareness to the beauty of life in each moment. Imagining what we will miss most from being alive, and then make sure we do more of it now. Imagining what we will be glad to be rid of, and if possible, do less of it.

Death informs us how to Live. If we live life from moment to moment, as if there is no past and no tomorrow, we become truly immortal.

In these dark days of November when the veils between the worlds are thinning, I want to invite you to spend a few minutes asking yourself the ‘duh’ question too. And ask yourself if you have found ways of bypassing the reality of your mortality or whether both can be true. The great wonderful paradox of life is that nothing ever truly dies, while at the same the ‘you’ that is you will.

I’d love to hear how you answered your question, or any other comments you might have.

Contact me if you want to explore this issue more. I offer a 30 minute trial session for free, so you have nothing to lose.

And finally, a last bit of humour…..