Does anyone else struggle with the concept of death?

[CrazyOldMe]

I just don't understand death.

I don't get how a whole personality can just disappear suddenly, leaving nothing material behind.

The fact that I, my loved ones, plus everyone on this planet will die, is just incomprehensible to me!

Anyone else feel like this?

I have zero fear of death. Doesn't bother me at all. In fact I'm more upset at the thought of a long life in a miserable body than dying young. That said I can't bear the idea of the moment that anyone who ever knew me being also dead, the point where no human remembers i ever existed. This has always troubled me. The movie Coco really upset me.

And unless someone with a phone camera snaps a picture for something like BillionGraves, they won't even be names on a headstone after a while because of weathering. Especially if the headstone is sandstone or limestone; even marble will rot when rained on enough because rainwater is acidic. Please choose igneous rock for headstones and carve the letters deeply if you want genealogists in 2200 to be able to read them.

I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to get the letters to show properly whilst photographing Victorian and older sandstone headstones, so I've got a bee in my bonnet about this right now.

I don't want to die, I will miss loving my children and husband and extended family and friends. I don't want to be without them.

So I just want to die, without knowing I am going to die

My father had a soul and a body. His body stopped working. His soul can never be undone. It exists in eternity. It doesn't take up any space.

I’m petrified of it. Cremation, the lot. I cannot comprehend it.

I very recently lost my nan. Who was like another mother to me. I’ve helped my grandad deal with all of her admin/death certificate/funeral and sorting of her clothes etc. saw her body the day she died. And saw her in the funeral home.

I was at their house today making tea for myself and my grandad.. just looked around and it’s all her household things just still there. The house as it was… the pile of ironing they she didn’t get to do. Her glasses on her book she never got to finish reading. The bag of birthday cards in her drawer she never got to send. All this stuff, like she’s just popped out and will be back later… but she isn’t. I can’t understand it. We’ve had the funeral, I thought that would be final. But it wasn’t.

this loss has hit me massively. I’m scared of dying but I’m also scared of going through all this again when I lose another person close to me. I honestly feel like a part of me has died. Nothing prepares you for this. Life is bloody cruel and hard

There is no good reason to believe in reincarnation.

There is good reason to think tat, before, conception, we had no form or consciousness.

It's called biological science.

I struggled with the idea of someone important that you love can just be gone and then that’s it, forever!!!

My mum died when I was a teen, and it was the first time death had truly touched me in a way the deeply affected my life. Then in early adulthood I lost my Nana (my second mum) and whilst her loss was sad, it happened when it should. She had lived a long life, seen grandchildren and great grandchildren born, and in the natural order of things died in her old age.

I really very much started my to struggle when I lost my son during pregnancy, the idea that he could be gone was just incomprehensible to me. The fact that I would never see him, hold him, kiss him again, the loss of life so young, a future he should have had and a true missing piece of my heart that will now forever exist.

So now I don’t know what I believe in, but I do know that I don’t believe in the finality and permanence of death anymore. I just can’t, I need to believe that somehow, some way that I will see and hold my son again and give him the lifetime of hugs and kisses that I have stored for him.

No. I struggle with the idea of being alive, but death isn't strange, it's normal.

I've seen two bodies now, my dh's and my dad's. Neither really taught me anything or made me feel anything extra or different about life or death. I think perhaps I am not a very deep person. I'm an atheist having had some shallow but real religious feeling in my youth.

I'm afraid of a painful death but even though I have lived quite a sheltered life I have seen too much suffering to make believing in God or an afterlife tenable. To believe that some kind of being has any overarching role in the way we live and die would put me into a spiritual agony I'm not prepared to endure. To imagine an eternal consciousness without the relief of an end is torture.

Man that is born of a woman
hath but a short time to live,
and is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower;
he fleeth as it were a shadow,
and ne'er continueth in one stay.

*There is no good reason to believe in reincarnation.

There is good reason to think tat, before, conception, we had no form or consciousness.

It's called biological science.*

Actually, science can't explain how consciousness is produced by the brain (spoiler:because it isn't). It's known as 'The Hard Problem'.

Excuse my bold fail! I'll be dead before I work out how to do that

The hard problem is a controversial philosophical theory that is far from accepted by many philosopher or neuroscientists.

And the fact that science can't explain how consciousness is produced by the brain doesn't alter the fact that there is no good evidence for the existence of consciousness before conception or after death.

It doesn't work across paragraph breaks/empty lines. You have to put a star at the beginning and end of each paragraph.

That has resonated with me. It’s the mundane stuff people leave behind- like they just popped out, exactly, that breaks your heart.
For myself I don’t really fear not being remembered in 50 years or whatever. I’m just a blip in the universe, but I hate the thought of leaving my kids. And of course the reverse is much much worse. I am so sorry for anyone who has ever been through ( and continues to go through) the loss of a child.
I think I do sort of believe in a soul. I’ve had such intensely vivid dreams about those I have lost in the weeks after the death and then there’s a day when you just feel they are actually gone.
And it’s true that a person becomes suddenly empty at death. They can be totally unconscious, still, but when life ends they look totally different. The person is no longer in there, it’s just a shell left behind.

Who is that lovely poem by that was posted upthread?

I wish I hadn't seen this thread. Death scares me more than anything.

Everybody, every human and every living thing, dies in the end. The alternative would be immortality, and that's not an option. We all just have to deal with the fact of death, and we do all deal with it.

In about 5 billion years, the sun will die, and all life on earth will die.

Personally, I think most humans will die or become extinct due to climate change much, much sooner. And I think the sooner, the better, as humans cause so much destruction of nature. Earth would be a paradise without the human species.

This is exactly it. I'm living with a medication induced neurological involuntary movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia that means the past decade has been spent in a body that has made me really sodding miserable.

It's a bit like Tourette's and Parkinson's disease combined, but i try to take the view that Michael J Fox does, and think of my problems of my condition only once. Worrying about them before they've happened, as Michael says, is futile as you're then going through the process twice.

I guess the thought of my body being like this for another 40 odd years is Perry depressing, but the idea of being dead is too. 😳😫

So which part of my body does produce consciousness? The liver?

I'm not afraid of death (although not exactly looking forward to the dying process if it's unpleasant) because as a Christian I believe in life after death. I don't even mind that one day I will be totally forgotten on Earth, because my heavenly Father knows me and that's what matters.

I think for me family or friends' deaths are worse because it's like an empty silence, like they are somewhere completely out of reach, in another realm. I find that part of grieving very hard.

I used to hate dead things and find it hard to touch them. Death did freak me out a bit.

Since my DD died though, I'm over all that. Dead things I'm perfectly comfortable with. My DD was the first body I touched and it cured that issue for me. I'm very comfortable with death. We are here for a time, then we die. If we're lucky, we get to stay for a good innings. I'm comfortable with the idea that death is the end and there is nothing after. I'm comfortable with the idea that there is no real meaning to anything other than what we give it, and I live life as fully as I can. I plan to make the most of life while I have it. The only aspect of death that bothers me is leaving people behind who will grieve. The experience also cured me of any religious inclinations.

I strongly believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. So for me death is just a change of vibration, our body ceases to exist but our soul lives on.

search for YouTube videos by Suzanne Giesmann. She explains it beautifully, she used to be a USA navy officer, very left brain, until something happened…

Either you believe in this stuff or you don't.

If your heavenly father knows you and that's all that matters, then he's looking out for them too, right?

Well, if Suzanne Giessmann on YouTube says it, it must be true.

Right let me try this bold again. Thank you @MasterBeth for the assistance!

The hard problem is a controversial philosophical theory that is far from accepted by many philosopher or neuroscientists.

And the fact that science can't explain how consciousness is produced by the brain doesn't alter the fact that there is no good evidence for the existence of consciousness before conception or after death.

In the converse, many philosophers or scientists would dispute the assumption that the brain produces consciousness.

There is good evidence for a close correlation between the mind and the brain, and as a result, both influencing the other, but none for the brain producing consciousness.

I'd subscribe in that respect to Eastern logic more than Western, which I would be in a minority with here I can see! It makes much more sense to me that the mind is a formless continuum that moves from life to life. The idea that consciousness is miraculously produced from a few cells at conception seems ridiculous, to me. I find it fascinating to discuss and explore, but find many people don't want to do that and just want to tell others why they believe they are wrong.

Yes! I’m mostly ok but quite a few evenings when I’m trying to fall asleep will start thinking I’m going to die one day, everyone I love is going to die. I think it’s the fear of the unknown and a concept I can’t get my head around.