I strongly feel that dying is contextual. I do not fear death in any sense which is meaningful, in terms of the part about personally being dead. I am afraid of certain consequences of my death; biggest by far is that my family would go without my support or protection.
In the matter of dying, there’s preferences: I’d rather die fighting than fleeing for example, unless fighting would be really stupid; it’s not fear exactly, but no one wants to be tortured to death. The fearful options are things like Alzheimer’s and assorted madnesses, wherein I lose the things that make me, me.
These last couple of examples introduce a ‘death is preferable’ category. There’s lots of conditions like this, which are mostly a matter of choosing between dying or suffering pointlessly and expensively and then dying anyway.
Speaking to your suppressed vs. resolved fear question: my prior is very strongly on suppressed. This shows up vividly at end-of-life events: I have observed families where someone was dying of cancer, was deeply ambivalent about getting medical treatment because of the discomfort, and then so averse to thinking about death that no arrangements were made for their passing. This left the whole family to only really begin the process once the sick person died, which was further obstructed by the aversion at least one other family member had to death. This resulted in what was already an emotionally fraught decision process being disorganized and traumatic well into the zone of grim comedy. From the other end of the same kind of event, consider the case of people demanding their loved ones receive treatment to the point of medical torture. These seem to me like cases where people are suppressing the fear so hard they would cause object-level harms to other people rather than confront it.
I strongly feel that dying is contextual. I do not fear death in any sense which is meaningful, in terms of the part about personally being dead. I am afraid of certain consequences of my death; biggest by far is that my family would go without my support or protection.
In the matter of dying, there’s preferences: I’d rather die fighting than fleeing for example, unless fighting would be really stupid; it’s not fear exactly, but no one wants to be tortured to death. The fearful options are things like Alzheimer’s and assorted madnesses, wherein I lose the things that make me, me.
These last couple of examples introduce a ‘death is preferable’ category. There’s lots of conditions like this, which are mostly a matter of choosing between dying or suffering pointlessly and expensively and then dying anyway.
Speaking to your suppressed vs. resolved fear question: my prior is very strongly on suppressed. This shows up vividly at end-of-life events: I have observed families where someone was dying of cancer, was deeply ambivalent about getting medical treatment because of the discomfort, and then so averse to thinking about death that no arrangements were made for their passing. This left the whole family to only really begin the process once the sick person died, which was further obstructed by the aversion at least one other family member had to death. This resulted in what was already an emotionally fraught decision process being disorganized and traumatic well into the zone of grim comedy. From the other end of the same kind of event, consider the case of people demanding their loved ones receive treatment to the point of medical torture. These seem to me like cases where people are suppressing the fear so hard they would cause object-level harms to other people rather than confront it.