How to Fear Death Less
People tend to be afraid of death because it’s an unknown in our lives. We’ll all experience death, but those that have already died can’t share the experience and what to expect with us.
When you attend funerals at funeral homes in Boones Mill, VA, you may find yourself facing your mortality and being a little fearful about what that means. None of us who are living know what death is like when it happens.
We often see people in the dying process, but we don’t know what’s beyond that last breath. That is one of the great unknowns in our lives. We may have belief in a resurrection to life, and afterlife, or a reincarnated life, and that may ease any fears that we have about what happens after death. However, we may be afraid of that moment in time where life ends.
So, how can we learn or what can we do to fear death less?
One thing we can do is use the fear of death as a motivator to live longer. Longevity is closely tied to a healthy lifestyle, which includes a healthy diet, regular exercise, fulfilling relationships, quality sleep, stress-lowering activities, such as prayer, meditation, and reading.
What this means is that you put aside the unhealthy habits you may have picked up on the way. These can include excessive drinking, smoking, eating unhealthy foods, and not exercising.
When you put the new good habits on and put the old bad habits off, you may lengthen your lifespan in a quality way.
Another thing that tends to lessen the fear of death is getting older. The reason for this seems to be prolonged exposure to the idea of death, which helps us to adapt to the reality that we will die.
Getting older also lessens the fear of death because the body begins to feel the aches and pains of daily living and the toll it takes on us. While there may not be an active anticipation of death, there is a growing sense of being tired and wanting to rest for good.
However, there are some fears related to death that remain. These fears are related the possible steps you may have to go through before you get to death: loneliness, debilitation, decrepitude, and dementia.
Living a life of gratitude can also lessen the fear of death. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “As a well-spent day brings happy sleepy, so a life well spent brings happy death.”
We often forget to be grateful for all the positive and wonderful things we experience and have throughout our lives because we focus on the current negative situations and feelings we are experiencing in the present.
When we change our focus about living life and find the things about it to be grateful for, then we can change our focus about leaving life and find things about that to be grateful as well.
A fourth way that we can do to lessen our fear of death is to create a legacy that will survive our deaths. One of the inherent fears that we have about death is about what will happen to the people we leave behind.
We may have unresolved conflicts, regrets, guilt, and other nagging issues that increase our fear of death because the relationships that matter to us are not set right. Now is the time to do our part to resolve whatever is amiss in the relationships we care about.
While the ultimate resolution and restoration of relationships we value is not something we can do alone, we can certainly do our part to repair and restore those relationships. We may, in the process, accept that some of those relationships are permanently fractured, but we can have the peace of mind that we did everything we could to bridge the gaps.
For information on planning funerals at funeral homes in Boones Mill, VA, our compassionate and experienced staff at Conner-Bowman Funeral Home & Crematory is here to help.
