Strategies That Can Help You Overcome Your Fear Of Death

You are not the only one to have an existential crisis

I was talking to Robert Ralph the other day about death and how we both feel about it. In case you don’t know him, Robert is also a prolific Medium writer with 5.4K followers and the owner of New Writers Welcome Publication.

He was telling me how he even cries when he thinks about his own death. When I asked him about his beliefs regarding the possibility of an afterlife, whatever those are, he said he had none, which made me wonder if that could be part of the problem. Not that I am ok with the idea of disappearing and not being affected by it myself, anything but. The reality is that I deeply empathise with him because thinking of my own disappearance and that of my beloved ones is pretty depressive and mind-blowing.

Doing research for my article Gothic Existentialism, The Gothic Loop and their connection with immortality for my July-August magazine You Are Gothic But You Don’t Know It, I discovered that asking ourselves questions such as: “What were we before we were born?” or “Are we going to a similar place when we die?” are universal questions that have been promoting since the beginning of humanity the necessity of giving the loop of life a purpose and a second chance to come back somehow.

Some think of their existence as a means to perpetuate themselves through their children, others believe in reincarnations, others think of Paradise, and some just believe we are here by chance and accept the idea of nothingness with no more ado.

As we can read in the online article by Annette Markham (Professor of Media and Communication and Co-Director of the world-renowned Digital Ethnography Research Center (DERC) at RMIT Unversity in Melbourne, Australia), Losing your self for a moment: Ontological Insecurity, fear of death is an “Ontological insecurity” “associated with deep anxieties” and “existential disorientation.” Unavoidably this leads us to the next concept: “existential horror,” derived from the idea of “death-in-life.”

In one of my first articles on this platform, I confessed that my main fear is death which would explain my obsession with ghosts and, therefore, why I feel so connected with the Gothic genre.

But maybe it is not death itself that we fear, as I learnt a few years ago when I started this crusade figuring out why we inevitably all die.

As I explained in that article, while doing some research for my A levels in the years I lived in the UK; I read many books that explained the fear of death from different angles. All of them agreed that the problem lies in the thought of transitioning from being alive to being dead.

Some of the books I found highly inspirational were:

• To the Good Long Life- What we know about growing old- by Morton Puner (1978)
• Death, Desire and Loss in Western Cultures by Jonathan Dollimore (1998)
• Sociology of Health and Health Care by Steve Taylor & David Field or Death and Bereavement across Cultures edited by Colin Murray Parks.

At the time I was doing this research, I was also in this strange and toxic relationship that I got myself into, and that made me question everything around me, even the purpose of my own existence. So using the topic of “Fear of Death” made a lot of sense to me in a kind of weird and uncanny catharsis.

Strategies to overcome your fear of death:

From these books, I learnt a whole different approach to death that has stayed with me ever since. Although I have a high threshold of pain, physical changes and bodily decomposition seem to be the things I can’t really put up with. What happens to our body once we have left it is just a horrible vision that keeps me awake at night. Maybe that’s why I hate Zombies.

Beware that the following strategies are not based on any scientific data and that, in fact, is very personal. If you are really struggling with coming to terms with death, I really recommend you seek professional help.

These are my suggestions:

• Be present and enjoy every minute of your life with those who you really love
• Believing in some kind of afterlife can help bring some logic to your existence. Do some research and see what ideas resonate the most with you
• Try to look at your existence by taking distance from yourself and finding some kind of logic to it in the greater scheme of things
• Think about how you felt before you were born. Do you remember any pain? any worries? Why should it be different once you go?
• From a scientific point of view, your cells have memory, and that memory can be passed down to your descendants, who will replicate some of your traits, even your memories
• Read fiction books. A book that I really enjoyed back at university was To The Light House by Virginia Woolf, because as we can read in Margaret Drabble’s introduction for the Oxford World’s Classics, this book was:

Virginia Woolf’s attempt to understand and accept not only her own past and its great sorrows by also the nature of time and immortality. Like Mr Ramsay, Woolf is obsessed by the perishability of fame and the menacing oblivion of death. Margaret Drabble

• Watch films and series that tackle death from different angles. You might find some kind of relief there. I personally found some kind of comfort watching: Meet Joe Black starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, and Claire Forlani. It made death look a lot more appealing. And as per two series that really helped me see death from different angles were The Ghost Whisperer and, of course, Supernatural.
• Keep a diary. Write it all down. At the end of the day, you are probably a writer, and if you are not, this is an excellent exercise, believe me. Sometimes when you write a fear, you naturally also work out its origin and a possible solution.
• Don’t overthink it; while there’s life, there’s hope. Science keeps evolving, and so is our knowledge regarding our own origins

Final thoughts

• Fear of death is universal
• We all cope differently with our own death
• Finding comfort is much needed to keep going
• Being present can help you enjoy the time you have and feel you are in control. There’s no point in worrying about something that is unavoidable
• Read books and watch programmes that target death, both fiction and non-fiction; this will give you an overall view
• Have hope

Question for you:

How do you cope with the idea of dying? Do you have any strategy you could share with me? Let me know in the comment. I am curious to know how others deal with this existential problem.

Thanks for reading

© Alicia Domínguez

I read and write about the Gothic all the time. As well as running my own online magazine I help people learn more about themselves and their fears through Gothic literature, films, TV series, music and all those places where our Shadow- Selves lurk.

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