The Fear of Death and Death Anxiety — An Existential Perspective

« Que philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir. »

« To philosophise is to learn how to die. » — Michel de Montaigne.

Most people don't talk about their fear of death.

They hide it in the background of ordinary days, in the sudden jolt that comes at 3am, in the avoidance of certain conversations, certain films, certain thoughts that go "too far". It surfaces in health anxiety, in intrusive thoughts, in the discomfort that settles in when someone close to us dies and we catch ourselves thinking: one day, that will be me.

We were born to die. Every one of us. This is not a morbid thought. It is a simple truth.

The fear of death is one of the most universal human experiences there is. And yet it remains one of the least spoken about, as though naming it might somehow invite it closer or sooner.

The fear of death, what psychologists call death anxiety, is something most of us hold in silence and rarely examine directly.

This post is an invitation to look at it a little more directly, without taboo. Not to resolve it. Not to make it disappear. But to understand what it might be holding, and what it might, surprisingly, have to offer.

Why we fear death

The fear of death is not one dimensional thing. It tends to arrive in layers and depth.

There is the fear and avoidance of the process: of pain, of loss of control, of dependence.

There is the fear of what comes after, or more precisely, of nothing coming after: the idea that one day we will simply cease to exist, and the mind, try as it might, cannot quite grasp what that means.

There is the fear of leaving people behind, of being forgotten, of a life that feels unfinished or unlived. Not enough time.

And there is sometimes a more diffuse existential dread: a sense of the fragility of everything, including ourselves, that makes ordinary life feel suddenly so precarious and vulnerable and sometimes even meaningless. Why? What for? All of this for what reason?

The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger called this Angst: a particular kind of anxiety that arises not from any specific threat, but from the awareness of our own finitude. For Heidegger, this anxiety, uncomfortable as it is, is not pathological. Existence simply calls us back to ourselves. This is time to live. Now.

Albert Camus, writing from a different tradition but a similar place, described the confrontation with mortality as the beginning of the only real philosophical question: How do we live, knowing that we will die?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are, important ones.

The avoidance and its cost

Most of us spend a significant amount of energy not thinking about death.

We stay busy. We fill the silence. We consume. We focus on the next task, the next goal, the next distraction.

The psychologist Ernest Becker, in his landmark work The Denial of Death, argued that much of human culture, our achievements, our legacies, our religions, our relationships, is shaped, at least in part, by our attempt to transcend or deny our own mortality.

There is nothing wrong with this. Avoidance has its uses. We cannot live in a constant state of existential confrontation.

But avoidance has a cost too. When we cannot think about death, we often cannot think clearly about life: about what we actually want, what actually matters, how we actually want to spend the time we have. The fear, unexamined, can narrow our world.

What Yalom taught me about death anxiety

The psychotherapist Irvin Yalom has written more beautifully about death anxiety than almost anyone I know. In Staring at the Sun, he describes the terror of oblivion, the particular dread of non-existence, and the ways it can surface across a lifetime, often disguised as something else entirely.

But Yalom also offers something rare: genuine hope, from looking at it directly.

He writes about what he calls awakening experiences: moments, often triggered by loss, illness, or a brush with death, when the ordinary veil of distraction is lifted and we suddenly see our lives with unusual clarity. These moments are often incredibly painful. They are also, he suggests, among the most important we will ever have.

The awareness of death, faced rather than avoided, can wake us up to life and its meaning.

Montaigne and the art of dying well

Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French philosopher, spent much of his life thinking about death, not morbidly, but with a kind of warm curiosity.

For Montaigne, learning to think about death was not a preparation for dying. It was a preparation for living. To hold the reality of our finitude, he believed, was one of the great tasks of a human life.

« Si vous ne savez pas mourir, ne vous inquiétez pas : la nature vous instruira sur-le-champ, pleinement et suffisamment. » "If you don't know how to die, don't worry, nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and sufficiently."

In other words: stop rehearsing your death. Nature will handle that part. The question Montaigne is really asking is: What are you doing with the life you have right now?

There is something freeing in this. Death does not require our preparation or our permission. What we do have some say over is how we live in its presence.

What the fear might be asking

In my work with people navigating grief, serious illness, and existential questions, I have come to believe that the fear of death is rarely only about death.

Beneath it, there is often something else, a question, or several:

Have I lived the life I actually wanted? Have I been true to myself? Have I loved well? Did I live up to my values? Is there still time?

The fear, in this light, is not the enemy. It is a messenger. It is asking us to pay attention, to the life we are living, to the things we keep postponing, to the people and experiences and moments that actually matter.

Yalom describes this as the gift that death gives us, not despite its finitude, but because of it.

A life without limits would have no urgency. It is precisely because our time is bounded that it can become so precious.

Living alongside the fear

I am not suggesting that the fear of death should simply dissolve once we understand it philosophically. For some people, death anxiety is genuinely debilitating, it intrudes on daily life, triggers panic, shapes decisions in ways that can feel limiting and exhausting. That kind of fear deserves proper support, not just reflection.

But for many of us, what is needed is not the elimination of the fear, but a different relationship with it. One in which we can hold the awareness of our finitude without being paralysed by it. One in which death sits at the edge of life, not as a threat to be outrun, but as a horizon that gives the landscape its depth.

Camus wrote that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Sisyphus, in Greek mythology, was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down, again and again, and forever. It is a strange and difficult image. But what Camus meant is this: even in the face of the absurd, even knowing the limits of our existence, we can choose full engagement, full presence and full aliveness. We can be alive, even knowing what we know.

Especially knowing what we know.

A closing thought

The American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 36, at the height of a brilliant career. Rather than turning away, he turned toward it, writing with extraordinary clarity about mortality, meaning, and what it means to truly live. He died in 2015, leaving behind the sublime When Breath Becomes Air.

He wrote: "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything."

Nothing: because the world continued.

Everything: because he finally saw it clearly, what had always mattered, stripped of distraction, pretence, and the assumption that there was always more time.

This, perhaps, is the gift that the fear of death carries within it. Not an answer. Not a resolution. But seeing what makes the ordinary suddenly luminous, and the time we have suddenly precious.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung observed that when death appears in our dreams, it is rarely a prediction. More often, it is an invitation, a symbol of transformation, of something in us that needs to end so that something new can begin. The psyche, Jung suggested, knows what the conscious mind avoids. When death makes itself known, in dreams, in anxiety, in sudden flashes of awareness, it may be asking us to pay attention. Not to dying, but to living differently.

If the fear of death has been visiting you, in the moments of solitude, in the middle of the night, in the wake of a loss, I want you to know that you are not alone in it. It is one of the most human things there is.

And sometimes, the bravest thing we can do is not to push it away, but to sit with it for a moment, explore it and listen to what it has to say.

Sandrine Lonchampt is a grief counsellor and psychotherapist at Colibri Counselling & Psychotherapy, offering online sessions across Australia, in English and French.

If this resonated with you, I offer a free 25-minute consultation. Book a Free Consultation.

The Fear of Death and Death Anxiety — An existential perspective.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Camus, A. (1942). Le mythe de Sisyphe. Gallimard.

Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit [Being and time]. Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday.

Kalanithi, P. (2016). When breath becomes air. Random House.

Montaigne, M. de. (1580). Essais. Simon Millanges.

Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.