How I Vanquished My Fear of Death…

…and of dying. Random Musings of an ADD #11.

Med students with their assigned cadavers. Source: Queen Mary University of London.

I was inspired to write this piece after reading a most excellent article published by fellow author

Gloria Lesher

on dying, and the three ways she has identified of facing an announced and inevitable death.

My experience with death started when I was a child and my very aged — to my eight-year-old eyes — grandmother passed away. My father, whom I had always thought of as made of the toughest steel, was crushed with sadness. Especially since her death had been unannounced, sudden and brutal (a ruptured aneurysm in the brain causing immediate, catastrophic, and irreparable hemorrhage). I just couldn’t get around to the fact that she had once been my father’s young and loving mother. To the child I was who had always known her as old and frail, it seemed only logical that she would die sooner than later. After all, she was almost eighty, an unfathomably old age. Her death was obviously bound to happen. And I must say my immature brain couldn’t begin to understand my father’s debilitating sadness.

Funny that. Decades later, when my own mother passed away in exactly the same way, a colleague of mine commiserated by telling me her manner of passing had been ‘most merciful.’ He was right.