Death is inevitable, but can we control the fear of it?

For some, the fear of death can be paralysing. For others, the idea of death can be an awakening experience.

- Chong Siow Ann

"I found I was absolutely, completely at ease about death," and "I'm going to live again." Those were the words of Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States who died recently at the age of 100. In his long life, he had thought much about death, written about it in books, and discoursed about it in speeches and in correspondence with others. His views were shaped by his own life experience which saw the death of many of his closest family members, including his wife and all his younger siblings, and an advanced old age beset with various health problems, including a cancer that had spread to his brain; and buttressed by his longstanding steadfast Christian faith.

As much as we would admire him for his humanitarian achievements in the public sphere, we could also envy him for his equanimity towards death. Most of us would lack his calmness. More likely, we'd be inflicted with that fear of our death which sticks to us like a shadow showing itself on and off.

And for those who ascribe to no religion which could otherwise offer the reassurance of an afterlife with a separate and more durable existence than the finite corporeal one on this earth there is that unsettling and frightening thought of nothingness. Our consciousness will be obliterated and we resent that life will go on as before without us and we will never know what will happen to our family, friends, or one's world. As Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French philosopher and theologian, had said: "The eternal silence of infinite terrifies me."

THANATOPHOBIA

For some, this fear of death manifests itself less overtly, usually evoked by some reminders of our mortality, disguised either as a vague uneasiness or some other psychological symptom; others have a more persistent, excessive and debilitating fear that crosses the border into a disorder.