Thank you Echoes of the Heart, Gail Davidson, and many others for tuning into my first ever live Substack video with John Hopkins!
I enjoyed this conversation between two grown men about fear and death, and I particularly enjoyed the AI filter Substack used on my face in the thumbnail makes me look younger…so who needs to worry about death anyway when we can upload our most wrinkle-free selves into the cyber-verse.
As I’m writing this from a small cafe in the middle of the Peak District, I turn around to see this picture on the window-ledge next to me, which just couldn’t be more apt. In case you don’t know, “it’ll b’reyt” is a Yorkshire way of saying ‘it’ll be alright’. So next time you are worrying about death, just repeat this mantra to yourself in a strong Yorkshire accent and see what magic happens.
John is an inspirational human who has been on a deep mission to live his life with clarity and purpose, and he discovered that having a better relationship with death was absolutely key to that. We have so many fears and anxieties, but at the root of them all is what John called the grandmother fear, the fear of death. The fear of death sits quietly beneath all our other fears, rarely showing its face. And the reason we spend billions trying to treat anxiety, burnout, and depression without ever quite getting to the root of it is, John suggested, that we're putting plasters on smaller fears while the grandmother lurks beneath, unaddressed.
I think its worth naming the many different shapes that fear can take. For some people, death anxiety can be in the words of psychotherapist Irvin Yalom’s, ‘the background music of life’, a sense of poignancy, a bittersweetness that crops up when we see a sunset pass over the horizon, or watch a film with actors that are now dead. This background music can be felt at the edge of train platforms or cliffs, when we imagine falling off, our heartbeat goes up a gear.
For others, the fear of death bangs a louder drum. Some develop phobias about certain death-inducing creatures, or situations: for example, I know a number of mothers who developed phobias of flying after they had kids, and simply couldn’t get on a plane. Some fear they are going to die the same way that loved ones did. When I was working at St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney, one mother I worked with had found her husband dead from a heart attack. Because of the powerful combination of shock and grief, this mother developed what could be described as a traumatic response, where she became convinced she would die from a heart attack too. Several times a day she could feel her chest tightening and was terrified that she was about to keel over and die.
Others fear the death of loved ones. I’ve have seen many times how people who dread losing loved ones end up actually avoiding those same people, as a way to protect themselves against the loss. Then there are those who, with no obvious trigger, wake up at 3am in the morning one day drenched in sweat, their bodies and minds besieged by the acute realisation that they too will be dead one day, and that death is the absolute end of it all, total, eternal black-out.
For many, the fear of death manifests in unconscious ways. The Grim Reaper lurks behind other symptoms like hoarding, hypochondria, obsession with celebrities, or generalised anxiety. Its really important to acknowledge that the fear of death is very real, and can be hugely distressing if not paralysing for some of us.
What we discussed in this call was how, no matter what shape your own unique fear of death takes, this fear is truly universal. Every human being, in fact every living creature, has within them a fear of death. In one of the oldest human texts known, the epic of Gilgamesh, written almost 4000 years ago, the protagonist speaks: “Sorrow enters my heart. I am afraid of death.”
The sympathetic nervous system (which is, when you think about it, a rather apt name for something that genuinely is trying to look after you) is the biological home of all this. Fear was designed to protect us from death. If you were born, by some random mutation, with no fear response at all, you simply wouldn’t survive very long. Self-preservation is a hallmark of life. Even the most simple, single-celled organisms evolve responses that help them avoid damaging environments. Just think of a fish that is caught in a net. Does the fish lie there and think ‘ah well, my time is up now. I accept my fate.’ No of course it doesn’t. The fish flaps and fights, desperately trying to escape the net, and to escape death. There is an impulse in the fish that will do everything in its power to resist death, and to preserve life.
So the fear isn’t the problem. It never was.
The problem is the many layered ways we avoid this fear. And that’s what we kept returning to in this conversation, what happens when we turn towards the fear rather than away from it. When we get specific about it. When we actually look a directly as we can at the fear.
In the conversation we also explore the pre-mortem, a surprisingly useful tool borrowed from management consultancy that I’ve applied to end-of-life reflection. We talk about how to have honest conversations with children about death without traumatising them (short answer: get more comfortable with saying ‘I don’t know’). And we sit with a tension I haver found myself returning to: how death awareness, done wrong, can become just another form of anxious striving: “I’m so anxiously aware of the limited time I have left I am stressed out trying to optimise my time.”
Which rather defeats the point. Presence is the deepest form of purpose.
Watch the full conversation. Let me know in comments any insights or questions that came up for you.
A few years ago I created an audio course on exactly this territory, how to work with the fear of death, how to use mortality as a teacher, and how to move through grief without bypassing it. It's called The Life And Death Wisdom Course, and if this conversation stirred something in you, it might be worth exploring. Substack subscribers can get it for a limited time (your time is limited!) discount, 50% off with the code heartofbeinghuman50 at checkout. See this lovely testimonial below.
