Peering Into The Sun. Life Without Fear Of Death

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

To a greater or lesser extent, the topic of death worries each of us. Almost everyone is afraid of death, just this fear manifests itself in different ways (in the form of anxiety for loved ones, in an effort to leave behind as many children as possible, to leave a mark on history, to write books, in the form of phobias and constant control, protective behavior, unwillingness to leave the zone comfort, in defying death with risky behavior, in helping terminally ill people and even in suicide, paradoxically, etc.).

Anxiety-phobic disorder is always based on fear of death. To reduce the intensity of anxiety, you need to come to terms with the fact that sooner or later we will all die, to form a tolerance for the fear of death and nothingness. Someone is helped in this by religious practices, belief in an extraterrestrial world or extraterrestrial civilizations, reincarnation; some are helped by the practice of caring for the sick who are living out their last days, psychotherapy of the terminally ill, which is unusually difficult emotionally and definitely not for everyone. Such assistance must be combined with personal therapy.

Irwin Yalom conducted psychotherapy with terminally ill people, with people whose relatives and friends suffered from addictions or incurable ailments. This gives an experience with humility, a philosophical attitude to one's frailty and overcome difficult periods of illness of loved ones, brightening up their last days. After all, it is not the duration of life that is important, but its quality.

Only standing on the brink of death, a person begins to truly rethink his views and values, begins to truly live his every day, to notice any pleasant little things.

If he is painfully ill, then death becomes a desired deliverance for him.

As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, quoted by Yalom in his existential books: "As long as I live, there is no death. When it comes, I will be gone."

So is it worth worrying about what didn't happen in advance?

And when you are faced with a serious illness of a loved one, on the one hand, you go through a spiritual hell, and on the other, you gradually come to terms with it, it already ceases to be something unknown and frightening. After all, you are always afraid of the unknown.

As someone said, thoughts about the future drive you into anxiety, thoughts about the past drive you into sadness. In the present, the only meaning is to live each day more fully, so that later it will not be excruciatingly painful.

Thoughts about writing this article came to me when I started reading I. Yalom's book "Peering into the Sun" in order to somehow accept the situation with my father's illness, which stirred up my own fears.

Our psyche does not want to accept the finitude. So, for example, today I had a dream that my father was not sick, but cheerful and cheerful as before, and I was going to some holiday with him and my mother.

A similar case was described by Yalom from his practice. The man could not come to terms with the death of his brother, crippled in a car accident, who was buried in a closed coffin. In the process of undergoing personal therapy, he had a dream that he was attending his brother's funeral, but he looked healthy and tanned.

A separate category of doctors in our city is upsetting. They did not make an official diagnosis so that the father could be granted a disability, did not prescribe a treatment plan, did not give a prescription for medications, did not recommend contacting the local palliative care center. Now we have to legally strive for what is laid down by law.

Time is missed, which is important for people with cancer diagnosis, when treatment is delayed by passing long and painful lines in anticipation of help, to which the patient may never live. And of course, it is not the doctors who are to blame for this, but the ossified health care system.