Do You Need Faith to Be Free from Fear of Death?

Angel wings in my backyard.

Source: Caroline Leavitt

When I was 5, I learned that things die, and I immediately began to panic, and then, because I was a budding writer, I figured out a wonderful story about what I thought was true. You go to Heaven after death, I somehow knew, and for every good thing you did, you get to build a house with special bricks, some of them gold. And if you’ve been really, really, really good, well those bricks become diamonds or rubies (whatever your gem preference.)

I couldn’t wait to tell my mother this amazing discovery. My mother snorted when she heard this. Hands on her hips, she shook her head. “When you die, the worms get you,” she said, and I stood there, my mouth open, in shock.

“But what about God?” I said and my mother shook her head. “An imaginary man in the sky,” she said.

That night, I didn’t sleep because I was terrified. I didn’t want to be nothing, I didn’t want there to be nothing, and I didn’t want the people I loved to be nothing, either. How could people just vanish or be eaten by worms? How could my own mother believe this? The answer, of course, was in her own family. My mother had been one of eaight kids growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family. Her father was a famous rabbi. She had believed in God and the afterlife then because she loved her father. She loved the sense of community, the certainty that all was right with the world. And then when she was 20, her beloved father died, and she stopped believing in anything. How could there be a God, she reasoned, when he took her father from her?

There was no real faith in my family as I grew up, no religion. When I read the Bible, my personal opinion was that the stories rankled me. I couldn’t believe that God could be so cruel, so unreliable, that modern day atrocities could be explained away as our free will that God couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. Plus, religion, to my mind, was responsible for so much damage and prejudice in the world. Plus, who wanted to go to Hell? In my teens, I flirted with Eastern mysticism until my boyfriend informed me that he believed that religion was just there to help people afraid of dying. “It’s not true,” he assured me. “None of it is.” I began to be terrified all the time, worrying about when I would die, how I would die, and why I had to die. “Would you feel better if everyone died at the same time?” a therapist asked me, when death thoughts were robbing my sleep. “Sometimes fear of death is just fear of being alone,” she insisted.

But I wasn’t so sure.

I wanted to know. Just about none of my friends believed in anything happening after death. My husband didn’t. Neither did my son. But I needed to.

And so, of course, I turned to science. I began to read books about quantum physics, where everything is strange and weird. Quantum scientists say there’s no such thing as time, that it is a manmade construct, and time will one day go backward and then stop. And then what? No one really knows yet. Other scientists talk about parallel universes, multiverses.

Other scientists say that reality is what we perceive. That since nothing really touches anything else (It’s true! Look it up if you don’t believe me!), nothing really exists as the whole we think it is.

There are all sorts of scientific studies now, on Near Death Experiences, on what reality might really be. There are people who say they’ve seen ghosts or angels or spirits, and it gives their life a framework. Years ago, after my fiancé died, I spent thousands of dollars going to mediums and psychics, knowing that all I wanted was comfort, knowing that most of the people I saw were truly fraudulent. But there was one woman who told me something she could not have known, a message she said, from my fiancé, that my formerly loving, almost-mother-in-law would do a dramatic about-face and sue me in three weeks for taking my fiancé’s belongings. And then, impossibly—she did. If that’s possible, is some sort of life after death? Some sort of connection?

I like to think so. But what I do know is that worrying about death and the unknowable can wring out all the joy in life.

In the end, what does it matter? For me, stopping the anxiety means stopping worrying about all the people and experiences I will lose in death, and instead, focusing on having them right now. And so I calm my busy brain. I tell my loved ones that if there is something after death, I’ll come and visit them. I’ll give a signal. I read more and more quantum physics and my new favorite story is by a hospice nurse who left her job because not only did all her patients before death see welcoming dead loved ones, but she began seeing them, too. We cannot know what is going to happen. In the meantime, we can appreciate the now. I listen to music. I write, and sometimes when it is going well, it feels as if I’ve entered that parallel world I dearly hope is out there. I love my husband, our son, my friends as hard as I can. I try to be in the here and now and appreciate every bit of wonder there is in life, moment by precious moment.