How to get over a fear of death?

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This is something I've been obsessing on a lot lately, I guess due to the fact that my stepgrandmother has died recently. Though I was never very close to her due to her living so far away, I guess it's kind of messed me up because the idea that a person in my family has passed away and I'll never get a chance to see them again.

It's been making me think a lot about what will happen when I die, because death comes for everybody eventually. I'm not a religous person and I don't believe in God, Heaven, or Hell. I'd like to believe we do have souls that continue to exist after we die, and the idea of reincarnating into new life after we die sounds much better to me then simply going to heaven or hell for eternity. However as much as I'd like to believe that's true I just don't know for sure. But I really hate the idea of there being nothing after death, that we just loose our conciousness and cease to exist while our bones rot in the earth.

There's also the fear of things like "how" I'm going to die. Like what if instead of dying years from now I die tomorrow, and it's a painful death. Like what if I get a horrible disease, die from a terrorist attack or a serial killer trying to murder me for fun, or end up in a bad traffic accident.

I would sleep better at night if I just had some sort of evidence that there is existance after death, like if my grandmother's spirit appeared to me to let me know she's OK. I don't believe religion has any answers about the afterlife because in my opinion it's all twisted up (no offence to religous people), but science has been unable to prove that there's life after death and so it says that it doesn't exist. Then again there's lots of things that science was unable to prove years ago that we've recently discovered, so I have some hope in knowing that science can be wrong.

I just wish I could stop obsessing over death and get back to living life with content like I did before.

Some physicists believe that the universe is in fact infinite in size and uniform with respect to composition and the laws of nature.

If this is true, on some planet a very long way away life evolved in exactly the same pattern as it did on earth.

There is another exact copy of you elsewhere in the universe (an infinite number of copies in an infinitely sized universe). At the exact second of your death, another copy of you is being born somewhere.

Also, there would be an infinite number of variations of "you". There is some version of you that won the lottery last week, a version of you that died in a car accident last week, and a version of you that developed as an NT.

Basically everything that can happen, does happen somewhere in an infinite universe.

This includes the possibility that a younger version of yourself instantly acquires the memories of an older version of yourself through random quantum fluctuations.

Will it actually be you? what is a soul? that question cannot be answered.

when i was an adolescent, i was scared to death [intentional pun] of dying, especially before i had been able to experience sex. my adolescent thinking was "i'll die and never get to experience sex and this will be for EVER!" i could not tolerate worrying about this for very long, so i started reading up on metaphysical subjects [theosophy, near-death studies, etc.], and reading the works of Edgar Cayce and Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Raymond Moody MD. "life after life" was the first book i ever read that discussed what happens to us after we die. "you cannot die" [Dr. Stevenson] was the first book i read that dealt with where we come from before we are born, in terms of the spirit world. "return from tomorrow" [Dr. George Ritchie MD] was the first book i read about what happens to a person when they die "before their time." i read of the third law of thermodynamics, "ALL energy is conserved- it cannot be destroyed, only transformed." all this novel [to me] information was mixed-up like a great cosmic stew in my thumpin' bumpin' brain, and after a few years of chewing on all this stuff, i came to the conclusion that if i die a virgin in this lifetime, there still were all those other lifetimes [which came to me in dreams] in which i DID have sex, plus there is sex [and BEER] in [the lower levels of] heaven as well. and hell is right here on earth. so to wrap it up, to die is to gain, as long as one does it on one's natural schedule. OTOH, to commit hara kiri is similar to ditching class, in that you will just have to make up the credits some other time, so better to get it over with in this present lifetime than to have to take the damned class over again later on.
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just my 2-cents' worth, adjusted for inflation

Sometimes I wish I had more of it

why
please talk about it some more.

You fear death for the same reason that people fear the dark - it's the unknown.

When you realize that is is natural to be wet in a thunderstorm, you will be without fear of death.

Well, look on the bright side. If you die you don't have to worry about keeping yourself alive anymore.

But more seriously, I found this page rather useful on the subject of fear.

http://viewonbuddhism.org/fear.html

Hi there.
I know you're not religious, but I'd better explain that I'm a Christian first, and get it out of the way. This has helped me to come to terms with death.

But something that somebody said to me when my husband died has stuck with me... She said, "don't worry about it. He's not done anything unusual in dying... everyone does it."

Strange to say, that comforted me. There's a song that Johnny Cash sings as well, which helped. Funnily enough the theme of the song is the same as the title of this forum... we're all in the wrong world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY1__G1LRHY

What would be the evolutionary advantage of having a yearning for life after death if there was nothing? It says in the Bible, "God has placed eternity in the human heart." That's what you're feeling... the yearning for something more. It's natural.

And I've felt it more than once in my life, after my mother's death, after my Grandfather's death, after my husband's death. It will get easier.

I've had an intense fear of death, all summer. Pete passed away, in June. Now I can't lay down for a nap, without the feeling of death taking over my body, and I jump off my bed and bolt to my Wii, which I'm on now, or my netbook.

Death has its good and bad sides - to think of all the painful memories being erased, no more worries, struggles, pains - and for some reason most of us cling to living (because we're used to it? Fear of unknown?)

We were dead (or more accurately - we were inanimate) from the dawning of time (if time really exists and isn't just some illusory notion because we can't perceive more than four dimensions) and this life is basically an anomaly.

Some fear the death of "self" while I look forward to it - this personality is nothing but a projection of my brain, whatever I see is distorted, mangled to fit my already existent view of the world, so what is there to fear? Except the pain - which is nothing but chemical impulse in the brain anyway.

There are a few people from my past I *hope* to again see, and in a small way I actually look forward to "death" to find out whether I will.



Just like we have each already "come forth" from a physical womb, I tend to view life here on earth as time spent within a spiritual "womb" from which we will each eventually emerge into a much larger environment of whatever kind.



Just two nights ago I suspected either a stroke or a heart attack had me in its grip, and I am with you: Let it be swift and relatively pain-free! Personally, however, I suspect our fear of dying painfully is far greater than whatever discomfort most of us might actually feel.



I use some simple logic there: What other explanation might there be for the fact all my potential got used up during a lifetime of finally arriving at a point where I no longer spend it foolishly? Even "reincarnation" says this life sets us up for the next.



I am sure you have heard it said it is best to enjoy the journey at least as much as we hope to eventually enjoy our destination.

Besides waking and the occasional dream, I suspect there are few differences between death and his little brother, Sleep.
There is nothing I will lose in death that I have not already lost many times in unconscious sleep. I see no reason to treat the two differently.

As for pain, I doubt my body is capable of causing me any significant drop of pain compared to the vast ocean of pain experienced by the millions of people and animals in the world.

I don't death - per se - is terribly threatening. It's the decline towards it that terrifies me.

I've been insulin dependent for a quarter of a century now, still fending off that decline. I'm accustomed to the occasional wakeup call from the ambulance men. Any one of those threatens brain damage.

Next week I'm scheduled for prostate surgery. Just the benign sort, though again the risk of a bad biopsy is always there like the risk of a bad result. Being an incontinent impotent old man is well down the scale of desirability.

And then there's aspergers.

I from time to time, and quite a bit when I was younger, had fears of death. Well, not so much death itself but the infinite nothing afterwards and not knowing what happens after (presumed nothing.)

Eternal nothing is kinda scary.

Thanks guys, at least it's comforting knowing that many people understand how I feel.

I like the idea the one guy said, about there being infinet worlds in the universe where other parts of myself can live in different ways. That kind of sounds like something that could be true.

I've also heard the theory that nothing completely goes away in this world, that our atoms (or something like that) continue to exist after we deteriorate. Maybe the tiny peices we're made of is what our "soul" is? And they just continue to go through cycles and rebuild into new things? Then after our planet dies as it'll happen eventually, our particles float through space to become new life on other planets.

Does my idea sound too crazy or based on misinformation?

My paternal grandfather had prostate trouble and some surgery, and I am right there with him and you hoping to not end up in diapers and drooling on my chest. But no matter what, and at least partly out of respect for my grandfather's endurance, I will not speak against the day of my birth.



That goes bit beyond the stretch of my own imagination, but the typical "harps or pitchfork" thinking of my past definitely falls way too short!