If you have a fear of death because of a life altering experience, you may recognize that one of the greatest remedies is a burning desire for achievement, perhaps because of the time you feel you have lost while you were fighting for the life you now have. If your life altering experience was not death defying, but maybe was the loss of your job, or an important relationship, or a drastic change in your income, you may also have a fear of intense loss, or dying because for the first time in your life you’ve seen how quickly things can change. Those of us in this group have an incredible desire to achieve and make up for lost time. Those of us in this group may also have an incredible desire to help others who have been through such loss. We have this intensity to achieve or to be busy because someone who is so busy, doesn’t have the time to think about dying or loss, they don’t have the time to think about how short life can be; we find the present too exciting to think about the future. It would be great to expel completely this fear that illness or tragedy is not apart of life…a part I personally know all too well, and have come to know all too early, but I can’t. I have tried to think “been there, done that” and think “I’m now better prepared for the future”, but I know after battling different illnesses and different sad circumstances, that they are not two that are the same, so like a war…you can’t be exactly prepare for what you will face. I can’t rid myself of the fear. Who out there, knows no matter what you’ve been through, really can? The best thing is to live every day as positively and openly, and with as much hope and accomplishment as you can muster, because that’s what life is about-a bit of fear is just one of those ingredients of life.
This is what fear has donated. Without my fear having warned me in the past that something was wrong with me…that I wasn’t supposed to be feeling the way I was feeling, I wouldn’t have gone to a doctor in the first place. Fear has signaled me strangely almost telepathically about things that I needed to worry about in my life.
If we have apprehension about a future event, fear tells us to prepare, to get ready. Fear says “You’re about to encounter something new and different, do whatever you can to prepare yourself. Fear also motivates and drives us. The fear of failure, of rejection, or a fear of loss will often drive us to do whatever it takes to overcome those negativities, like the fear of dying. We’ll tap into or explore options or resources or approaches we haven’t tried in the past. The fear of rejection often drives us to go out of our way to add value to a relationship. It causes us to make that extra effort to succeed. Fear is there to drive us in the direction of whatever it is that we really want.
And finally, without fear we would not develop the courage to go through what we’ve been through. Courage can’t exist and can’t be experienced or expressed without the presence of fear. So, fear is part of life and so is dying. That’s life.