Fear of Death

Before funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, you may find yourself fearing the end of life. You are not alone. Many people, especially in the Western world, are afraid of death. But why are you – and a lot of other people – afraid of death?

To answer that question, we need to understand the emotion of fear and how that emotion and the contextual environment of that emotion has changed over time.

Fear is a response to a direct threat. Before human civilizations became so complex, most fears were generated from our physical environments. For example, if we were confronted by a bear or stepped in the path of a poisonous snake, fear for our lives was the natural response. This was a real fear based on real circumstances that were happening.

However, as our human existences have become more sophisticated, in the Western world particularly, and these real physical threats have become more of an aberration than part of our normal existence, our fear has turned toward intangible threats.

Intangible threats are things we haven’t experienced and things that we can’t perceive with our senses. These can include things like the loss of a job, the loss of independence, and the theft of our assets by cyber criminals, and the loss of life.

We think about these intangible threats – that may not have happened and, in most cases, are unlikely to happen – and we develop fears about them. As author Mark Twain famously said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

So, this change in how fear gets generated necessitates another question. Why are you afraid of death?

Death is a unique experience in life. We experience it only once. Those who’ve experienced it before us can’t come back to tell us what happens and what it’s like. Therefore, we truly don’t know anything about death – as an experience – except that it happens.

Because death is an both tangible in the sense that it will happen and intangible in the sense that none of us knows what the experience of it is until it happens and we can’t share that with anyone else, it can evoke a response of fear about something will happen in the future.

But the fear of death is more than just about the experience itself. The other fear can also be about what happens after death. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 9:5 that the living know that they die, but the dead don’t know anything. Jesus Christ Himself, in talking about his friend Lazarus in John 11:11, said that the dead sleep. When we’re asleep, time passes and, for the most part, we are unaware of any of that time.

However, Western literature has been overlaid on the theology of the Bible, and it has suggested that when we die, we don’t sleep, but instead we get an immediate change in consciousness – and place outside the grave – that can either be okay or not okay.

One of the biggest literary influences on how we perceive the afterlife is Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno. Written as a political satire against his enemies in Florence who opposed the Pope and were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Dante created a complex and tortuous multilayered Hell that he consigned his enemies to.

Through time this Hell was integrated into Christian theology as the place where “bad” people go when they die. The fear of going “down” instead of going “up” (even though John 3:13 specifically says that no human except the resurrected and spiritual Jesus has ascended to heaven) is also intertwined with death.

If you want to learn about funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help. You can come by our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can contact us today at (850) 627-1111.