The human mind always seeks solutions to problems and occasionally finds itself in a complete stalemate. Death is one of them, the ultimate one. Human beings can't imagine our own absence. The concept of nonexistence for an existent being is, at best, baffling, like endless space or other universes. Such puzzlement precedes enlightenment.
When confronted with a fatal illness and given a short time to live, few can maintain any kind of personal philosophy. This is partly because the threat of imminent death changes a vague, abstract concept to one's own "no longer being." When one is forced, to acknowledge that one's own life is imminently disappearing, it is truly terrifying. There is nothing in our ordinary previous experience that prepares us for this experience. In the face of death, one seems all alone. No one is immune from this. In Eternal Echoes, John O'Donohue writes of Christ's predeath emotions: "Evident in his inner torture and fear in Gethsemane, something awful happened in that garden. He sweated blood there. He was overcome with doubt. Everything was taken from him. Here the anguished scream of human desolation reached out for divine consolation. And from the severe silence of the heavens, no sheltering echo returned. This is what dying is: the bleak, empty place where no certainty can ever settle."
Where we are found or lose ourselves forever. - W. H. Auden
The more closely our "sense of self" is tied to external factors, the more confusing death becomes. We know who we are if our identity depends on a collection of things, from our biography to our possessions, from our partners and friends to the tangible IDs we carry with us, just in case. It is on their fragile and transient support that we give form to the ambiguity of ourselves. When death threatens to take all that away, it's hard to know who is dying. Then, death plunges us not only into the fear of the loss of everything external we hold familiar but also into the dread of the loss of the unfamiliar: our selves.
Without these familiar props to rely on, we are faced with ourselves alone, selves we do not know, and sometimes even strangers with whom we have been living all the time but never really opted to know. Thus, in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche asks, "Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?"
Maybe we wanted to meet that stranger but never spend enough time to do so. We had time for everyone else but not for ourselves. Therefore, when we face death, we are entering an unknown territory not only without the familiarity of friends, roles, and possessions but also without ourselves. Fear is about losing what one has; the dread is about losing what one never had.
T. Byram Karasu, M.D. author of The Art of Serenity
