This world is to live in and to die in as well. Few of us are afraid of living but most of us are afraid of dying. Death seems to be a most formidable enemy. Death is not the enemy; fear of it is. The certainty of death is your birthright and a source of rebirth. With death you'll finally go home: darkness is just a passage to the ultimate light, and physical losses are a prelude to spiritual union. When we read, the last enemy to be destroyed is death, it speaks of destroying the fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of the end, and fear of disappearing.
The inevitability of dying was placed in our minds when, as it is written, eternity was planted in the human heart. Perfect harmony comes when your mind is subordinate to your heart; that is, when trust dissipates fear. The more you trust, the less you will be afraid of dying.
You die a little death every night and are born every morning. In between, you lose your grasp on everything you have. Whether one day you can gently go to your death depends on how covetous you are of life. "I'll die because I am alive," said a faithful man who had lived every moment of his life. A spiritual man knew he was going home by way of his terminal cancer and he left while fully living his death. He quoted words learned in his childhood: "I want to finish the race I am running." To a woman who lost her infant to crib death, nothing was of consolation until the day she really heard that her loss wasn't a loss, "I gave the child back," she said. We all need to taste death and, like these faithful individuals, to understand death.
The fear of death comes from living in the howling darkness of aloneness—without faith, family, friends, and community. People whose souls are deprived of spiritual illumination neither live a good life nor die a holy death. In fact, they die in life. For them, life is a journey to meaningless oblivion. But if you are a spiritual light-bearer or just imbued with even one beam of divine light, you'll know how to make both life and death meaningful. You'll live life in such a way that you'll never be afraid to die. The fear of the end of the journey preempts the journey itself. The importance of the journey is in experiencing its moments and living thoroughly to its end.
When the time comes, you need not do anything but sail into the mystery of the journey. As the passenger of a ship advances only by the movement of the ship, so too will you advance without any movement on your part.
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T. Byram Karasu, M.D. is the author of The Spirit of Happiness