For most people, death is not a standard conversation topic. Once, at lunch, a friend began talking about her mother’s death several years earlier. Her voice caught occasionally, but she spoke about it plainly – like a simple fact of life. As we talked, I noticed another friend was shifting uncomfortably in his seat; he didn’t say much.
Afterwards, I asked him what was wrong. “I really don’t like talking about death,” he said, his hands twitching anxiously. “I don’t even like thinking about it. It freaks me out.”
His discomfort struck me as silly – and also the most normal thing in the world. We are all going to die, and so is everyone we know. So why be terrified? And how can you not be terrified?
My friend is far from alone in his discomfort. “We live in grief-illiterate and grief-phobic societies,” says Dr Lucy Hone, a resilience and grief researcher and author of the book How Will I Get Ever Through This?: A Practical Guide to Navigating Life’s Toughest Times.
Hone began researching grief over a decade ago, after the sudden death of her daughter, Abi. On our video call, she wears one of Abi’s old hats, an orange and white beanie with polka dots and a big orange pouf on top. It’s ridiculous, Hone says, but it makes her laugh.
For someone who has experienced such intense loss and spends so much of her time talking to people about their grief, Hone is remarkably cheerful and bubbly. This is in part because of her work, she argues. Hone and several other experts I spoke with said that thinking and being around death was “life-affirming”.
Below, experts share why so many of us are so scared of death, and how we can learn to get a little more comfortable with it.
Why we are so uncomfortable with death
Death disrupts the usual orientation of our lives, argues Dr Todd May, instructor of philosophy at Warren Wilson College.
“People in the west and elsewhere are forward-looking,” May says. We do not just exist in the moment – we engage in projects and relationships that we see unfolding over time. “The thought of our lives ending violates this future orientation we all have,” he explains.
The typically western, individualistic approach to life affects how we feel about death, says Sister Chȃn Trì Nghiȇm, an Australian-born Zen Buddhist nun. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, “there is a strongly shared belief that God created individuals separate from each other … we have a certain lifespan, and we die at a certain time”. This view causes fear and anxiety, argues Trì Nghiȇm.
In the Buddhist tradition, beginnings and endings are far less defined. Take a question as simple as when you first began to exist: was it when you were born? The nine months you were in your mother’s belly? When you were just a precursor cell within your unborn mother? “In Buddhism, we have always existed and there was no time when we didn’t exist,” says Trì Nghiȇm. Seen through this lens, death is less of an ending and more of a continuation.
The idea of finitude can bruise our fragile egos, says Alua Arthur, author and death doula. “We have no control at all, and that’s very disquieting,” she says. “We think we’re infallible, and death reminds us how small we are, and that’s uncomfortable.”
And the thought of death brings about big feelings that most people would prefer to avoid, says Dr Luyi Kathy Zhang, a hospice and palliative care doctor.
“So many of us are ill-equipped to deal with uncomfortable emotions, and death is probably one of the peak uncomfortable experiences,” she says. “It is easier for us to say that death is an eventuality that we will deal with when it comes rather than to face the feelings now.”
Finally, dying increasingly happens out of sight, says Hone – in hospitals or care homes. But it wasn’t always this way.
“Throughout human history, we had death around us,” Hone says. “We’d care for the sick and dying at home, so we were forced to talk about it and think about it.”
This shift accelerated in the mid-20th century. “In Boston in 1912, about two-thirds of residents died at home,” the New York Times reported in 2019. “By the 1950s, the majority of Americans died in hospitals and by the 1970s, at least two-thirds did.”
Removed from our immediate surroundings, for many death became something more distant and abstract.
Why it is important to think about death
Not talking or thinking about death “doesn’t mean that it’s not coming, it just means that you’re going to be ill-prepared when it does come”, says Arthur.
Thinking about and planning for the logistics of death can also make things easier for the people around us. “That way, they’re not in grief and also trying to figure out where your social security card is,” says Arthur.
Planning for how we’d ideally like to spend our last days gives us agency, says Zhang. “You can choose to be involved in it rather than [experience] the overwhelm and stress of being forced to deal with it,” she explains.
There are more immediate benefits too. I spoke to over a dozen experts on death, and they raised the same point again and again: thinking about death helps us live better lives.
“Accepting that we’re going to die allows us to live more purposefully,” says Hone. For her, losing Abi and confronting grief in her work clarified the brevity and fragility of life. Given that, she says, “I need to know who and what matters most to me now and focus my attention on them.”
Reflecting on our mortality can be a good way to keep things in perspective, says Zhang. For example: will this frustrating traffic jam matter to you on your deathbed? And if you are nervous about asking someone out, or applying for a job, ask yourself how you might feel at the end of your life if you didn’t go after what you wanted. “That might be enough of a perspective shift for us to overcome fear or hesitation,” Zhang says.
It can also help us appreciate our life now. “If we ask ourselves, ‘What if this is the last time I get to have dinner with my family?’ that is a very different way of experiencing something that feels ordinary and mundane,” Zhang says.
How to get more comfortable with death
Often, familiarity with death is something we don’t have much of a say about – the loss of a friend, family member or even beloved pet forces us to confront it, whether we’re ready or not.
But experts say there are certain practices that can help one begin to “tolerate” the thought of death, as Hone puts it. “I’m not at peace with the fact that I’m going to die and all the people I love are going to die,” she admits. “But I can tolerate it, because I can tolerate difficult things.”
Don’t feel ashamed of your fear. Fear of death is natural, and often a big part of what keeps us alive, says Arthur. “It’s the thing that tells you to stop walking when you get to the edge of that cliff, and to drink water when you’re in the desert,” she says. The goal, Arthur argues, is not to completely eliminate the fear of death, but to understand where and why it might be holding us back.
Start planning. Whether it’s writing your will or an advance directive – a document outlining who you want making your financial and medical decisions for you if you can’t – thinking about the practicalities of death can be a helpful, less emotionally fraught way to approach it, Arthur says.
Ask yourself some big questions. Questions like, “What will I regret not doing in 10 or 15 years?” and “Will I care about this on my deathbed?” help put the current moment and emotions into perspective, says Zhang.
Think about someone you know who died. Even if it’s just for five minutes, Hone says, reflect on what you learned from that person, and how you might want to live differently because of what they taught you. “That’s quite a nice, constructive way to think about death,” she says.
Think about your relationships. Reflect on the important people in your life and whether you’re holding anything back from them, Arthur says. “Who do you need to say sorry to? Who do you need to say thank you to? Who do you need to forgive?” she asks.
Learn how to balance the present and the future. As important as it is to be present in our lives, we cannot only live in the moment, says May. “We need to keep our engagement in activities with a future,” he says. But because we could die at any moment, “living solely for the future sacrifices the riches of our present”. The aim is to exist in a balance of both, May says, which is “difficult, but perhaps achievable to some degree.”