Transforming Your Relationship To Death
If you are elderly or have a terminal illness, making detailed decisions about the end of your life makes sense. Death seems imminent, so the advantages of thinking about how you want it to go are clear: the more you plan, the more likely it is that your final months, days, and hours will be calm, comfortable and meaningful to you.
But confronting death can benefit anyone and everyone, regardless of your age or health status.
No matter how abstract and far-off death might seem, the truth is that death or serious illness can happen at any time.
You already knew that. The fact that you will die, and could potentially die at any time, is one of the most banal certainties of existence. And, yet, somehow I still feel like telling you that you will die feels like I’m delivering some crushing bad news. Why is that?!
The fact that I hesitate before ‘breaking the news’ to you about your death is because we are just so conditioned to avoid the subject. We live in a death-denying culture. As a result, we have this tendency to ignore the very basic fact of our own mortality.
The problem is that ignoring death doesn’t make it go away. Death is an integral part of life and, if we don’t confront our fears around it, they just sit there grumbling in the background, fueling any number of anxieties that can sap the joy from daily life.
Like exposure therapy, taking death out from the shadows and having a good look at it in the light of day makes it less scary. Unpacking the scenarios that seem so unacceptable and figuring out what you can do to make them more acceptable can soften the hardest edges of your fears.
Photo Cred: Zero Take, Unsplash
Creating a blueprint for your own personal image of a good death can transform your relationship with death.
You no longer have to see your death as a tragedy that fills you with horror. You can start to look at it as something that is simply part of being in harmony with nature. Something sacred and mysterious. Even beautiful. In the same way, we tend to view birth as a miracle of life, death can be seen as miraculous, too. Together they mark the most significant transitions in the whole celebration that is life.
And focusing on death can elevate your day-to-day lived experience, too. Planning for the end of your life helps to clarify your priorities and highlight issues that need resolution. Research on death reflection has demonstrated that when people develop their awareness of mortality, they become more productive, resilient, purposeful, and feel that their lives have greater meaning.
Bringing death into your sphere of awareness reminds you that our time in these bodies of ours is finite, and makes each moment all the more precious.