Staring at the Sun summary

Many people shy away from thinking about their mortality. Then, one day, they find themselves unable to avoid it. Maybe it’s a sign of aging, a health scare, or the death of a loved one. Maybe it’s just a thought they can’t shake. Death is the most fundamental fear in nature, and it’s something everyone has to confront at some point.

Mary was 32 years old when she described waking to the stark realization that her death wasn’t just hypothetical. Up until that point, she’d always pictured another version of herself at the end of their life, old or sick maybe, ready to go. But the truth was that one day, she’d die. That person wasn’t going to be some character she’d conjured up, someone separate from herself. One day, the person she was now would experience death. Suddenly, she was terrified.

For weeks, Mary was haunted by her mortality. Her fear was what’s called overt death anxiety – conscious contemplation of your inevitable demise. Others have more specific fears, particular deaths that play out in their minds, or dreams of violent ends.

But sometimes a death phobia isn’t so obvious. Often, covert death anxiety lurks just below awareness. The subject of mortality itself is sidestepped, placing unconscious anxieties onto other subjects in life.

Susan, a middle-aged accountant, channeled covert death anxiety into extreme distress when her son was arrested for drug possession. While it is, of course, expected that a mother will be upset in that situation, Susan’s response was extreme. Her health and personal hygiene deteriorated. She was incapacitated by emotion, constantly weeping and unable to go to work. Awake and asleep, she couldn’t shake catastrophic visions of her son’s death in prison.

Her son’s drug problem wasn’t a surprise. He was a recovering addict at the time of his arrest and had several relapses that Susan had previously been able to deal with. So, what was different this time?

Working with her therapist, Susan began to unpack how her son had become over-central to her identity and self-worth. Like many parents, she’d relied on her son as a sort of immortality project – her vehicle for symbolic self-extension through future generations. With Susan approaching a milestone birthday, her son’s plight triggered her to confront her mortality. She was experiencing it as a threat to her own life.

When Susan sought out therapy, she wanted help to deal with her feelings for her son. But what she really needed to address was her feelings about her own life. Over the coming months, she focused on readjusting her priorities. Instead of spending her time setting up a hypothetical future through which she could persist, she worked on building a fulfilling life in the present. She started to live for herself.

So, death anxiety can look very different to different people. It can be an extreme reaction to natural signs of aging, a fixation on white hair or age spots, for example. Maybe it manifests as career or retirement panic. Even something like hoarding behaviors can be an attempt to exert control over the physical world, trying to avoid natural transitions. Covert death anxiety can emerge through displacement, projecting existential angst onto mundane stresses.

Whether it’s specific or bubbling below the surface, anxiety around the end of your life is an important and often overlooked topic. You might feel helpless. But at some point in time, everyone has to face this particular fear. So how do you live, knowing that one day you’ll die? We’ll cover that next.