The most powerful thing we have in common is that we live and die. All of us are in this repetitive cycle of physical dialectic, a beginning, an end, a call, and an answer. But what connects us to humanity can also shatter us individually. Death anxiety is the price to pay for our shattering self-awareness in this cycle.

The highly original psychotherapist Irvin Yalom (born June 13, 1931) addresses this cost in his empathetic book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death.

Each person fears death in his or her own way. For some people, death anxiety is the background music of life, and any activity evokes the thought that a particular moment will never come again. Even an old movie feels poignant to those who cannot stop thinking that all the actors are now only dust.   Yalom's words remind me of short story writer Lydia Davis' flash fiction entitled "Happy Birthday":  
"105 years old: she wouldn’t be alive today even if she hadn’t died."  
I know exactly what she means, don't you? I think that way about American President Abraham Lincoln. He wouldn’t be alive today, even if he hadn’t died. He would have died. Death comes for us all.

Unlike many who try to intellectualize death as a way to deal with its unbearable intensity (Joan Didion and C.S. Lewis come to mind), Yalom carries us through gently and patiently, allowing for pause and feeling. He discusses what he calls "awakenings," moments of self-awareness when we realize we are.   I found one such "awakening" moment in the writing of contrarian and essayist Christopher Hitchens. “I don’t have a body, I am a body” noted Hitchens when he was dying from cancer. In that simple sentence he recognizes his lucid mind is forever hitched to his ailing body. He understands that he is. And that he will soon no longer be.  
A more uplifting "awakening" experience is found in Charles Darwin's 19th century journals of flora and fauna in South America. Darwin writes “No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”  
Nature not only often delivers "awakening" experiences, it is, argued Ralph Waldo Emerson, the key to such experiences. (I wholeheartedly concur)  
Fascinatingly, there is a W. B. Yeats poem that seems to cover the exact opposite of awakening, a time of closing down and pulling back to the dream reality of daily life.  
"O Rocky Voice,  
Shall we in that great night rejoice?  
What do we know but that we face  
One another in this place?  
But hush, for I have lost the theme,  
Its joy or night seem but a dream:  
Up there some hawk or owl has struck,  
Dropping out of sky or rock,  
A stricken rabbit is crying out,  
And its cry distracts my thought."  
From “The Man and the Echo”

How do you move out of the mode of everydayness into the more change-conducive mode? Not from simply wishing it or bearing down and gritting your teeth. Instead, it usually takes an urgent or irreversible experience to awaken a person and jerk him or her out of the everyday mode into the ontological ones. This is what I call the awakening experience.

Once we realize that we are, we realize that we might not be. As Yalom explains, death is everything, and it is nothing. The nothingness of death, the question of where we exist when we die, will never be answered by conscious minds.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Forging profoundly human connections while alive is the only antidote to our fear of non-existence (rather than precious things we keep around us and imbue with sentiment that we touch to feel again as we once did.)

Human connection is more than one of passing or proximity; it is being deeply present for another human being in need. And more than that, this presence gives meaning to our lives in the first place, making it bearable.

One can offer no greater service to someone facing death (and from this point on I speak either of those suffering from a fatal illness or physically healthy individuals experiencing death terror) than to offer him or her your sheer presence.

The strong presence (my look at What Is Presence?) and generous openness that Yalom describes remind me of the memoir of nurse Christie Watson, who wrote kindness could be simply staying next to someone and not leaving.

An early dinosaur footprint formed ~200 million years ago. The mounds are precisely what they look like, sand shaped by ocean currents. Learn more.

Yalom wrote this book at age seventy-five, and he addresses his own death anxiety. For him, the pain of his wife without him is what he fears the most.   Since adding Staring at the Sun to the Library, I've kept abreast of the mortal status of Yalom's wife (with a macabre intensity) and held some feelings in abeyance for him and for her. Yalom's beloved companion, Marilyn Yalom, died in 2019 at the age of 87. Yalom believes that death is nothing we experience, and therefore it is nothing to us.

But to those who love us, our death is everything.

There won't be any me there to feel terror, sadness, grief, or deprivation. My consciousness will be extinguished; the switch flicked off. Lights out. I also find comfort in Epicurus' symmetry argument: after death, I will be in the same state of nonbeing as before birth.

"In order not to feel utterly isolated," proposed German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, "We need to find anew unity." Yalom urges: do not let death anxiety stand in the way of human connection.

Loneliness greatly increases the anguish of dying. to often, our culture creates a curtain of silence and isolation around the dying. In the presence of the dying, friends and family members often grow more distant because they don't know what to say. They fear upsetting the dying person. And they also avoid getting to close for fear of personally confronting their own death.

This everyday isolation works two ways: not only do the well tend to avoid the dying, but the dying often colludes in their isolation...Such isolation compounds the terror.

Rethreading our social fabric as a way to mitigate our death anxiety and our existential loneliness is exemplified in Maira Kalman's generous observations of strangers, Oliver Sacks' search for personhood in disconnected patients, and Terry Gross' life work extracting and enabling the humanity inherent in art.

Rune stone, 1100-1150, Sweden. The carving reads, 'Lidsmod had this stone carved in memory of Julbjörn [his] father.' Learn more.

Reaching beyond our wordlessness is a theme I return to frequently in my search for human commonalities. Read more in Hands Outstretched and Met, The Word is Not Enough, and An Implacable Call for Kindness. Our great need to create, to commune, and ultimately to be seen as the superlative individuals that we are - our greatest vulnerability, if such is possible - is gently examined in this book so beautifully and reverently.