There are many moving personal and reasoned discussions of death and dying. (See reading list, below.) While few knock eagerly or even willingly at death's door, all of us will eventually enter there.

I invite you on a brief exploration beyond death because in western society a lot of our fears about death come from our belief that we are just material beings. We are stuck in a Newtonian paradigm of classical physics where we view the body only as matter. Medicine does this regularly. To many doctors we are just a bag of chemicals, and these doctors see their job in terms of helping us find the right biochemical rebalancing in order to get better. 

This is pretty crazy, because the one condition that every person who comes under my care is eventually going to face personally is death. In most medical schools they don't teach us as doctors to deal with that very well, nor do they teach us how to deal with bereavement.

I went along believing what I had been taught. I believed that the body was thebasis for life, shaped by Darwinian evolution - from primordial chemicals many eons ago, through selection to the fittest survivors of today. I was taught that the mind and all consciousness were products of the brain because damage to the brain produces disorders of perception, thought processing and action. I was sure that belief in an afterlife and other spiritual beliefs were just wishful thinking or denial of the seriousness of what's going to happen to everybody when their body dies.If we fear death and believe that there is nothing more after our physical life, we often do our best to avoid thinking about death or dealing with it. Every soldier going away to war knows that death is a clear possibility - an absolutely certain probability for some soldiers but hopefully not for himself (and in today's army, also herself). 

In clinical practice I have often seen fears and denials of death that were paralyzing to the people who were dying, as well as to their friends and families. By not talking about their feelings, barriers were set up which kept the dying from dealing with their fears and the family members from dealing with their grief. Relationships were strained and tensions were often palpable - with everyone tip-toeing around in fear of upsetting others, and a pall of frozen feelings chilling the atmosphere. If the mutual protection pact is not dissolved, the dying may carry positive as well as negative feelings with them to their grave, and the living may end up with barrels of feelings sealed away in the caves of their unconscious minds - never to be opened but still fermenting a bitter brew of unresolved hurts, resentments, guilts, and gobs of positive feelings that got sealed away along with the negative ones and never reached the ears of those who departed with the pact of silence intact. (Ways to deal with these pacts of silence are discussed below.)

Even though we bury our thoughts and fears of death somewhere deep within our unconscious mind, it is impossible to avoid being reminded of some of the fear because there are frequent reminders of death in our everyday lives.