How to release your fear of death
Death anxiety is more common than you might think. Most people have unconscious fears and questions around death. Yet most of us don't talk about it. But that wondering (even when unconscious) about what happens when we die has a profound impact on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The fear is often so great and so painful that we protect ourselves by repressing the full realization of death and dying.
In order to overcome that fear and to manage anxiety, we need to both face death and also reimagine it. There are many ways to begin to think about death in a positive way. I have found that personally facing death and my fears about it have eased my anxiety in significant ways. When I first began to work in the field of death and dying my anxiety increased as I was forced to stare head-on into the reality of it all, but then after a short time of really having to face it, I realized that I was growing more comfortable and that my fears were dissipating. I've since been able to find many beautiful ways to look at death, one of them being the comparison to birth.
Regardless of your religious or spiritual inclinations, what is like to think about if birth and death are really the same thing? What if birth is simply the death of something that came before? Just as babies are born from the world of the womb into the arms of a mother, maybe the same happens upon death. And maybe if we listen closely enough during this lifetime we’ll hear the heartbeat of something bigger than we think we know now. Fear of death is really just fear of what comes next. But what if that death is really just another birth?
Last fall I gave birth for the third time in my life, an experience so singular and primal that I can only ever liken it to deaths I've witnessed. As I labored that evening I thought about my father and my mother, I thought about friends I've lost, and I thought about patients I've seen through their final moments of life. It is not easy to leave this world, nor is it easy to come into it. I do believe there's an in-between place, because I've felt it in these brief moments of becoming a mother, and I've seen it in the people I've lost.
We are not these bodies. We are so much more. But we come in as these people and are here for a short time to live and to love.
Are there ways in which you can better face the idea of death? Are there ways in which you can even bring yourself to see the beauty in it? Face your fears in order to overcome them. You can start today by simply having conversations about death with trusted friends or therapists. There are also many other ways to think about tackling your fears that I outline in Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. I promise that it doesn’t have to be as scary as you think it will be.
10 Helpful Tips for Resilient Grieving
Resilient grieving is the idea that we can take active measures and steps to find strength and learn coping tools in the face of loss, even when the pain seems unbearable.
An evolving field of research has recently acknowledged our capacity for resiliency, the natural human ability to face trauma and loss by finding ways to thrive, become more in tune with our lives, and create new ways to make meaning out of our experiences.
As someone who has been through my own share of grief, and who has seen hundreds of others move through the process, I know that resilient grieving isn’t for everyone. I believe there are certain personalities and circumstances that more readily lend themselves to this philosophy. But I also believe that there are tools and ideas within resilient grieving that all of us can use. More importantly, many of these techniques can reduce anxiety.
Resilient grieving is about being proactive in your grief process. It’s about letting yourself cry and mourn, but also taking a look at your coping methods and earnestly beginning to reshape your life. It’s about not letting your world fall irrevocably apart as a result of this loss. For some people this may feel out of tune with your natural grief process – some people feel that dusting themselves off and getting on with their lives means letting go of their loved one, but that’s not what resiliency is about.
There are ways to stay connected to your loved one and also begin to live a new life without them, as painful as that may initially sound. I really do believe there is a way to balance the mourning process with resilience, and that building resilience will serve to reduce your anxiety and leave you feeling less overwhelmed.
So how do we go about doing this? Here are some basic ideas about resilient grieving that you can begin to employ in your life right now.
Re-establish Routines
Returning to a regular schedule and routine, despite the changes that you have incurred, immediately soothes the brain and lets our unconscious know that we are safe again. This has a calming effect on the body and central nervous system, leading us away from some of those bodily responses that can easily trigger a panic attack.
When my mother died I took a year-long hiatus from college. I had no sense of routine – I stayed up late, traveled on a whim, did nothing predictable. At the time this felt like what I wanted – my mother was gone; nothing should be the same. But in retrospect, I think it would have perhaps been more beneficial for me to remain in school and continue as planned, while still grieving. Being unmoored like that, out in the world, increased my anxiety and my sense that there was nothing to rely upon.
Examine What is Working
Dr. Hone encourages grievers to ask themselves if their behavior is “helping or harming.” This means paying attention to the thoughts you are focusing on. Are you obsessing on feelings of guilt, continually running through a list of “what ifs”, or replaying traumatic images?
These are all normal responses to loss. It’s as though our mind wants to turn the experience over in our heads like a Rubix cube, trying to make sense of it, trying to line up the events in order to reach a different outcome. Again, this is normal and expected, but after a certain period of time we must begin to release these thoughts and move away from them.
If you find yourself continually replaying certain thoughts stop and ask yourself if they are actually helping in some way. If they are not, then it is time to let go of these thoughts. We’ll cover more strategies for “retraining” your brain in Chapter Eight.
Ask for Help
This one may seem obvious but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve encountered who shrink from this in the face of grief. Either they assume that no one around them will be able to truly help, or they are afraid to ask for help. Letting the people around you know what you need – whether that’s household help, financial planning assistance, or simply someone to listen – can ease the burden you are carrying. I think you’ll be surprised by how ready your community is to help you once they have an understanding of how.
Nurture Your Physical Body
This is often the first thing to go out the window. When we are grieving it is common to experience a lack of appetite, lethargy, sleeplessness. Being proactive about your health during this time is vital. Healthy foods, exercise, and rest will greatly reduce your stress and anxiety levels.
Seek Positives
When we are grieving there is the tendency to look at the whole world through gloom-colored glasses. In the initial grieving process, or if you have let things stagnate for too long, we can become mired in seeing negativity everywhere.
For years I could only look at my life through the lens of having lost my parents. I saw only what I didn’t have, and all the ways in which my life was ruined as a result of their deaths. Finally I began to actively work to acknowledge the positive aspects of my life and doing this turned everything around for me.
This isn’t always an easy process – it requires diligence and focus. Sitting down and making gratitude lists, reminding yourself to bask in positive moments and experiences, and remembering that embracing life again doesn’t mean letting go of your loved one.
Distractions
The habit of dwelling on negative thoughts, or what psychologists calls rumination, can become exactly that – a habit. Actively working to break this cycle by distracting yourself with positive activities can help break this pattern. Go to the movies, take up gardening or some other hobby, beginning to socialize with people who make you feel comfortable, can have a profound effect on reducing negative cycles of thoughts that cause anxiety.
Create Rituals
Find ways that feel good to you to bring your loved one into your life. Our inner selves crave connection with our loved ones. Don’t deny this impulse. Create your own ways to continue that bond. Make their favorite meals, light a candle every night, tell stories about them, start a project in their honor or find a way to be of service for a cause that they cared about.
Connect with Others
Sometimes being around people can be difficult after a major loss. Finding the right people to share company with can make all the difference. Take a look at the people in your life and put distance between yourself and anyone that makes you uncomfortable right now.
Also, seek out people who understand what you’re going through. Join a support group, reach out to a friend who is also familiar with loss. Finding ways to feel a little less alone in your grief will be incredibly soothing.
Make Meaning
Finding ways to make meaning of the loss is invaluable to your sense of peace. This doesn’t mean making sense of why that person died now, but rather, finding ways to make their loss and your grief meaningful.
Did your loved have a cause they were passionate about? Continue the work in their honor. Has your pain made you more compassionate? Find ways to use that in ways to help others.
Accept the Loss
A lot of resilience work involves truly accepting the loss. For many of us this means simply facing our grief, opening ourselves up to the changes in our world, and working to genuinely step into the pain as a way of moving through it. This can feel incredibly frightening but doing this work is never as scary as we think it’s going to be.
*This is an excerpt from Chapter Five of my new book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. To read more, order your copy here today!*
My Story of Anxiety and Grief
Today I want to share my own experience that you may be able to relate with. This is an excerpt from the introduction of my upcoming book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, which will be released next week.
I wrote this book to help as many people as possible to understand what anxiety is, how it’s related to grief and the process of digging deeper to move through the feelings that are causing the anxiety.
To get a better understanding of the whole picture, how anxiety and grief work together, I’d like to share with some of my own experience with anxiety and grief:
I was fourteen when both of my parents got cancer at the same time. I was an only child, and the prospect of losing my family was something that loomed over me throughout adolescence. While my father’s prostate cancer was treated easily and he quickly went into remission, my mother’s late-stage colon cancer took us on a rollercoaster of hospitals and doctors and seemingly endless treatments.
My parents were wonderful people. They’d met and married late in life, both of them each other’s third marriages. My father was an engineer and a WWII POW. My mother was a glamorous artist living in Manhattan. She was forty and he was fifty-seven when I was born, and even though my father had three grown children from his first marriage, my mother had always wanted one of her own. I was born in 1978 in Atlanta, Georgia and for a long time our lives were good.
But by the time I headed off to college my father was in his seventies and my mother’s cancer had begun to win the five-year battle she’d been fighting. She died midway through my freshman year at a small liberal arts school in Vermont. I didn’t make it in time to be by her side during her final moments.
My mother’s death rocked me. I was absolutely floored by it. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Not the five years we’d spent helping her combat her illness, not the talks my father had with me about her potential demise, not the school guidance counselor’s sessions. The truth was I never believed she would actually die. Because: Mothers don’t die. Bad things don’t actually happen.
I now understand that these beliefs were at the root of my anxiety. When my mother’s death disproved the two things I’d so fervently held onto, the whole floor dropped out. If my mother could die, anything, absolutely anything could happen.
I took a hiatus from school and moved back home to Georgia to help my father pack up the house. I got a job as a waitress and I struggled to relate to my old friends from high school who came around to check on me. No one I knew had experienced so significant a loss. Everyone was sympathetic but nonetheless, I felt very alone in my grief.
The anxiety attacks continued to surface. I lived in fear of having them, and I navigated a constant undercurrent of panic. I worried that my father was going to die at any moment. I worried that I would die. And less concrete than those fears, I simply felt a yawing dizziness at the idea that life was completely out of my control.
I turned to alcohol to quell the anxiety, and I attached myself to a young man who had recently lost a family member and who was deep in the throes of his own grief. Together we made our way to New York City, and it was there, in a college psychology class, where I realized for the first time, that what had happened all those years ago on the road trip with my high school boyfriend: I’d had a panic attack.
Understanding this was the first step in my healing process. Recognizing that I had anxiety as a result of my mother’s death actually helped me to better face the loss and enter into my grief. Losing someone we love is so deeply painful that we often turn away from the feelings, rather than letting them course through us. But when we choose to push away difficult emotions they don’t just disappear, they simply fester beneath the surface causing anger, frustration, and anxiety.
Find out more and pre-order Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief today!
Love,
Claire
Why I Support Others with Grief
Yesterday was a big day of loss for so many in our country. In honor of this time of remembrance, I wanted to share a bit about my own journey with loss and grief—and how I’ve dedicated my life to offering support and helping others get through their own loss.
I was fourteen when both of my parents got cancer at the same time. My mother died when I was eighteen and my father died when I was twenty-five. Life was hard after that. Being an only child, I felt that I had truly lost my whole family. I felt very alone in the world and unsure of my purpose.
I experienced debilitating anxiety, coupled with bouts of deep depression. For a while I drowned myself in alcohol and unhealthy relationships. But through it all I wrote -- writing had always been my outlet and eventually it became my salvation. From rock bottom to a yoga and meditation practice that finally cleared enough space in my head and heart to allow myself to really grieve for the first time, instead of running away.
And after that all I wanted to do was help others get through what had been so difficult for me. I got a masters in clinical psychology, trained in hospice, became a therapist specializing in grief, and wrote a of couple books.
Along the way I also got married and had two beautiful daughters. That marriage fell apart five years ago and I experienced grief all over again at the dissolution of my little family.
But even through the hardest weeks and months of that time, I held on to what I've learned to be true: that life is much longer and winding than we think and if we let the most painful moments break us wide open, we get to transform into something better than before.
So here I am at today at forty, in love and married again, unexpectedly pregnant with baby number three, and putting out my third book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, in a few short weeks. These days I find myself grateful for everything hard that's ever happened, and humbled by the life I've been able to live as a result. As scary as it feels some days I now love and live on a level that once seemed impossible.
I hope by sharing my story with you it will help inspire you to finding the other side of grief in your own life.
If you or someone you love is grieving right now, I have a few resources I’d love to share to help you:
- Read my post on What I Know About Grief
- Book a session to work with me directly
- Try my self-guided online grief program, A Safe Place to Grieve
- Listen to my interview on a recent episode of Dear Sugars where we discuss moving on after loss
- Read my recent article on Goop, which lists resources from my upcoming book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief.
I hope this helps you. Please share this with someone who is grieving. We’re all in this together and it’s important to reach out to others during times of loss.
Love,
Claire
How Being Prepared for Death can Alleviate Anxiety
Today I want to introduce you to Amy Pickard and her company Good To Go. But before I tell you about her, let me tell you about what led me to her.
Experiencing so much loss in my life caused me a lot of anxiety about death (my forthcoming book is titled Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief), something that ramped up in particular after my first child was born. In the early days of my daughter's life I suddenly found myself fretting endlessly about what would happen if I died early, just as my mother had, leaving Vera without a mom. I thought about it obsessively to the point where I felt miserable. I didn’t want to think about death all the time; I had just had a baby, one of the most joyous experiences of my life! Eventually, I began to search for ways to alleviate this awful state I’d found myself in.
I knew that in order to do this I needed to face my anxiety head-on, which really meant facing death head-on. I asked myself the question: What if I do die early just like my mom? What could I put in place that would make me feel better? From writing letters to my daughters, to making some of my wishes known to friends, and taking out a life insurance policy, I literally started getting my affairs in order.
But what about all the other stuff?
When I heard about Amy Pickard and Good to Go I knew I had my answer. Following the loss of her own mother, and having to sift through the logistical mess her mother left behind, Amy started her company. Her wish was that everyone leaves this world prepared, not just for themselves, but for the loved ones they’re leaving behind as well. In a Good to Go party Amy will actually come to your house and sit down with you and your family or friends and help walk you through everything you need to do to be prepared to leave your loved ones behind. And she does it with humor, booze, and a rock 'n' roll soundtrack to boot. Last summer I hosted a Good to Go party with Amy at my house. I invited about a dozen friends and was pleasantly surprised with how all of them took me up on the invite. The evening was informative, heartwarming, and ultimately healing.
Amy provides a Good to Go folder and packet that she walks you through and that you continue working on at your own pace. From computer passwords to medical wishes, favorite memories, and on who’s wrist you want your favorite watch to land, the packet covers everything you want your loved ones to know in your absence.
Even though I plan on living to be a grandmother, I feel so much less anxious knowing that even if I don't, my loved ones will be taken care of. Check out Amy and all she does at Good to Go.
Here are some questions for you to begin thinking about on your own. Take your time with them. Create your own Departure File, or reach out to a company like Amy’s who can assist you in this task.
In the Event of Your Own Death
- Do you have a will or advance directives?
- Do your loved ones know your funeral/memorial wishes?
- Do they know your burial/cremation wishes?
- Do you have a list of all of your accounts and passwords?
- Do your loved ones know where to find your legal documents (will, advance directives, birth certificate, marriage certificate, car, home or life insurance)?
- Have you assigned someone to manage your assets or be a co-signer on your bank accounts?
- Have you taken measures to protect your dependents financially?
- Is there anyone particular you would like notified about your death?
- Have you thought about what you would like to happen to your pets?
- Are there personal belongings you wish to go to specific people?
- Are there memories or advice you wish to pass to your loved ones?
- Are there things you would like destroyed (i.e. journals and diaries)?
- Is there anything comforting you can provide to your loved ones? For example, a letter telling them what you hope for them after you are gone.
Love,
Claire
The Missing Stage of Grief: Anxiety
*If you're interested in learning more about anxiety and grief, click here to learn more from my latest book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief*
When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross debuted the five stages of grief in her book On Death and Dying, published in 1969, they were intended for people facing their own deaths. Kübler-Ross later went on to apply these same five stages to the bereaved, to people who had lost a loved one, but upon closer inspection, I’m not sure they work as well. Losing a loved one is not the same as losing your life. Grief thrusts us into an uncertain world where anxiety often reigns supreme. Yet anxiety is the very element missing from Kübler-Ross’ stages.
I had my first panic attack when I was 18. It happened on a road-trip the summer after my senior year of high school. My boyfriend was behind the wheel, driving toward Washington, D.C., and suddenly my heart did a funny flip-flop thing.
I unbuckled my seatbelt, flailing about for something to hold onto, and in between gasps, instructed my boyfriend to find an emergency room. For several months I’d been experiencing moments of breathlessness and lengthy episodes of heart pounding, but this time it felt different. As we hurtled toward the nearest exit, my heart took dramatic pauses, did jack-knives inside my chest and then cascaded into what felt like triple-beats. I was certain I was about to die.
Twenty minutes later I was hooked up to an EKG in a curtained-off portion of a hospital emergency room in Virginia. Beside me, my worried boyfriend murmured into the phone to my father as we watched, with rapt attention, my now-normal heartbeat creating perfect dips and arrows on the long, thin printout unspooling from the machine. Afterward, I sat on the exam table and answered the doctor’s questions.
Do you smoke? Yes.
Do you drink? Not really.
Do you do any drugs? No.
Take any medications? No.
Any history of heart problems? No.
Do you exercise? Fairly regular jogger.
The list went on and on. So far everything was pointing toward me being perfectly healthy, but I was determined to leave with an explanation. Instead, the doctor simply told me that I was among the one out of 10 people who experience heart palpitations. (And that I should quit smoking.)
As we drove away from the hospital, I stared out the window at the warm summer landscape, thinking about all the questions he didn’t ask.
Are you thinking of breaking up with your boyfriend? Yes.
Are you about to leave everything you’ve ever known behind and go off to college two thousand miles away? Yes.
Is your mother dying of cancer? Yes.
I was only 18, but that was old enough to feel painfully aware of the mind-body connection. Although I couldn’t define my problem in clinical terms, I knew that what was wrong with me might not be physical. I’m now certain that if the doctor had asked me just a few questions about my personal life, he could have easily identified my symptoms as a classic example of a panic attack.
My anxiety worsened six months later when my mother died. The panic attacks came with startling frequency, seemingly brought on by nothing at all. I could be pumping gas or lying in bed and suddenly the world would begin to swirl around me, my breath would thin out, and the only thing I felt sure of was that I was dying. But instead of dying, for the next three years I walked through my life paralyzed by debilitating anxiety. Sometimes I wished I would actually die rather than live in such a nervous state.
It’s now been close to 15 years since that ER visit, and I’ve become a therapist specializing in grief. When I look back on that time in my life, it’s easy for me to recognize how my anxiety was linked to the loss of my mother. In fact, anxiety is the most common symptom of grief that I see in my practice. But I also know that it’s often one of the most overlooked aspects of bereavement, so much so that I find myself constantly wishing that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had included anxiety as a stage and saved us all a lot of, well, grief.
In my experience, grieving individuals almost always gravitate to the five stages at one point or another. Many of my clients immediately begin to assess their current state in terms of where they are with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But while the stages were meant to be helpful, this is often where people begin to get confused. I don’t think I’m following the stages correctly, they’ll admit in a worried tone.
I don’t understand the bargaining part. I’ve been depressed for too long. I skipped the anger stage—is that okay? I don’t know where my anxiety fits in. These are the kinds of things I hear over and over again. In fact, I’ve heard them so often that I’ve now come to believe that when the five stages are applied to grief, bargaining should be replaced with anxiety.
When applied to a dying person, bargaining makes sense; following a terminal diagnosis there is often a sense of desperation, of pleading for more time. However, when you’ve already lost the person you love, there isn’t much left to bargain for. In my 2012 memoir The Rules of Inheritance, I used the five stages as a framework to illustrate my own grief process. When it came to the bargaining stage, the only way I could make sense of it was to liken it to the idea of magical thinking, a condition Joan Didion has described beautifully. I wrote about how, for years, I found myself thinking that if I worked hard enough or teetered precariously on enough sharp edges, my mother might reappear from the other side to save me.
Including anxiety in the five stages of grief would better serve the bereaved. Even more than depression, anxiety is the response my grieving clients express a desire to overcome since experiencing loss. They describe feelings of panic and obsessive thinking about their own deaths and potential illness. They tell me about bouts of helplessness and of feeling overwhelmed by life itself, about panic attacks and moments of such paralyzing fear that they pull their cars over on the way to work. I have even heard my own story about the ER told back to me countless times.
When we lose someone we love, we are thrust into a world where we feel more vulnerable than ever before. Suddenly we must face the fact that there are absolutely no guarantees in life. Everything that once seemed sturdy is now fragile, particularly the people we love. These feelings can be incredibly overwhelming and oftentimes terrifying. It takes time and work to overcome them, to feel secure again in such a now-delicate world. And for people who suffer multiple losses in a short period of time, it can take even longer.
The anxiety that comes with grief can be debilitating, but because it is not included in Kübler-Ross’ five stages, it tends to be ignored or dismissed as a different problem altogether. However, anxiety is a very real and very normal reaction to grief and it must be recognized. It is also highly treatable once it is distinguished for what it is.
There is a wonderful and unexpected gift that comes with seeing how fragile our lives are. It enables us to be more present, to feel grateful for what is right in front us, to cherish what we are able to hold onto right here, right now. But in order to reach that level of acceptance we must wade through the tremulous waters of fear and anxiety, recognizing them as a part of a larger process that will see us through to a shore where so many of us have emerged changed, if not healed.
When I look back on my frightened 18-year-old self, I’m saddened that no one was able to see what was really going on. If just one person had recognized how fragile my life had become, perhaps they could have reassured me that no matter how scared I was, I wasn’t alone.
Originally published at Slate.com.
