Why Fear Death?

It was absolutely the worst flight of my life. I've been flying commercially or flying myself in my own plane for more than 40 years, and now more than 37 years later, I still count it as the worst flight I've ever endured. It was 1979. The Iranians were holding 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage in Tehran. As the Russians continued their invasion of Afghanistan, Afghan refugees were spilling across the border shared with Pakistan. Late one evening I boarded an Pakistan International Airlines DC-8 for a flight from the capital city of Islamabad to the Pakistani port city of Karachi. A DC-8 is a long narrow cigar-shaped airliner. This one had been previously owned by Swiss Air. I knew that because PIA had not removed the "Swiss Air" words or logo; they had just painted "Pakistan Intl" over "Swiss Air."

The plane was packed and I had the window seat in the last row of coach. The other occupants of coach class were members of the Iranian Olympic boxing team. There was a lot of whispering and pointing in my direction.

The weather during the flight was as bad as any I can recall. At first I thought this was a good distraction for the Iranian boxers, helping them to forget the American seated in the last row. As the weather worsened, with almost blinding lightning firing through the dark boiling clouds on both sides of the plane and the rolling and pitching of the DC-8 becoming more severe, something seemingly "snapped" in my brain.

I had never experienced claustrophobia and I didn't understand those who suffered from it. Maybe it was fatigue from my 12-country 14-day itinerary combined with the tension of the flight, but for the first time I experienced the panic of "fight or flight" produced by claustrophobia. I climbed out over the two passengers sitting next to me and stood in the rear galley with two PIA flight attendants until they made me return to my seat for landing in Karachi.

Claustrophobia has continued to plague me - unpredictably - ever since. It has on a few occasions been almost debilitating. It is always immensely frustrating - because the fear it produces is so irrational. (On the positive side, it is at least one "quality" I shared with President Ronald Reagan.)

Fear. Psychologists assure us that fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger. If we never feel fear, we can't protect ourselves from legitimate threats. Hollywood has certainly made billions of dollars on fear. But irrational fear, while great for selling tickets to movies, can be catastrophic physically and emotionally.

The Universal Fear

"I fear death!" blurted the otherwise fearless and unintimidatable Captain of the Starship Enterprise, William Shatner. Shatner and his co-stars on NBC's primetime show, Better Late Than Never, were discussing fear as a motivator. "No, I really do. I fear death!" insisted the then 85 year-old Shatner. It must have been a surprising admission to the millions of fans who had watched the brash and bold Captain James T. Kirk lead his crew to boldly go where no man had gone before. Not only are we connected by death, many of us are knitted together with William Shatner by our common fear of death. Death presents itself as a descent into the mysterious and dark unknown, a place where even the bold captain of the Starship Enterprise fears to go.

The current death rate is 100 percent. Worldwide, two people die every second, 105 every minute, more than 6,300 every hour and an estimated 151,600 every day. If there is nothing else that connects you to every other human being on this planet, there is this: death. You are touched by death every day of your life. Somewhere, someone dies and that death somehow impacts you. Everyday.

Those statistics are mind-numbing and meaningless when one I love so dearly has slipped - out of reach - beyond the mysterious and ultimate wall of death and it's my crushed heart that is throbbing with pain beyond description. Or when I get the dreaded news that my days are indeed much more limited than I wanted to believe.

What a gripping paradox: Many of us live in fear of dying. Some of us don't fear death, but we fear how we might die. I'm a member of the latter group. I don't fear being dead, but I do sometimes fear how I might die. I want to die like the Granddad in the quote above. Fearing the result of death and fearing the process of dying are two different issues.

The fear of death almost always has its roots in the fear of the unknown. It is natural to want to understand the world around us and even more to know where we are going - or going to "end up." That fear is sometimes stoked by both secular and religious professionals who seem determined to convince us that what happens after death cannot be known, much less proven, while we are still alive. So, not only are we "doomed to die," we are trapped in our fear of the unknown until we do.

To employ a "scientific" colloquial expression of my native South, "Hogwash!" We can know what happens after death and we can know where we will "end up." We can confidently know what happens when we die and we can know where we will go when we die. We can enjoy the peace-giving knowledge of what we will be like after we die. This is not to suggest that we can know every detail or every answer to every question we may have. We can't even know that about now. But we can know more than enough to remove the fear. I don't want to live my life in fear of death and I don't want you to either.