No More Me

The doctor from the Palliative and Symptom Management Clinic at BC Cancer wrote in her June 24 report:

Discussed pleural effusion with Dr. [my oncologist]: "he has been seen by Resp about the pleural effusion and atelectasis and his lung is trapped, there is no role for any sort of intervention, draining etc. he has also had XRT to that area and it didn't open up the lung. I was happy to see the effusion was slightly improved. but there really isn't anything beyond the chemo and the pain meds that can be done for his lungs."

In Existential Psychotherapy textbook, Irvin D. Yalom, a renowned existential psychiatrist, references philosopher Jacques Choron, who distinguished three distinct types of death fear: (1) what comes after death, (2) the event of dying, and (3) ceasing to be.

The first two do not bother me. It is the third, "ceasing to be" (obliteration, extinction, annihilation), that causes my anxiety. In Staring at the Sun, Yalom documents a patient who captured this exact dread with a simple phrase: "no more me". Yalom writes:

"After all, we are all creatures who are frightened at the thought of 'no more me.' We all face the sense of our smallness and insignificance when measured against the infinite extent of the universe. Each of us is but a speck, a grain of sand, in the vastness of the cosmos. As Pascal said in the seventeenth century, 'the eternal silence of infinite spaces terrifies me.'"

As a child, I was afraid of falling asleep, wondering where I went when I wasn't awake. Yalom validates that exact childhood intuition:

"Each of us has a taste of death when slipping into sleep every night or when losing consciousness under anesthesia. Death and sleep, Thanatos and Hypnos in the Greek vocabulary, were twins. The Czech existential novelist Milan Kundera suggests that we also have a foretaste of death through the act of forgetting: 'What terrifies most about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. In fact, the act of forgetting is a form of death always present within life.'"  

I do agree with Kundera. We usually associate the fear of death with a loss of the future - missing out on milestones, unfulfilled dreams, or stories left unfinished. But Kundera and Yalom argue that the true tragedy of death is the permanent deletion of the past, the massive, intricate tapestry of memories that is entirely unique to you.

As a male engineer, I feel that I have to provide a solution to my existential distress.  I am left with Woody Allen’s quip: "I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens." According to Epicurus, I won't be. He neatly put it long before Allen: "Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not." As Yalom explains, there won’t be any "me" there to feel terror, sadness, grief, or deprivation. My consciousness will be extinguished, the switch flicked off. Lights out.

I am still not fully aligned with Epicurus. It's a work in progress. I find his argument circular: "there won’t be any me there to feel" is exactly the problem.