Death-- you ever feel scared of it?

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I'd have to say that for the most part, no I'm not afraid of death.

I've been shot at too many times to remember, stabbed, blown up a few times, had some guy hold a grenade to my head during an incident once, and strangled until my heart stopped. There are a few other times where I've come close to death, but they're not that interesting.

One particular time that I almost died really bothers me. I can't go into too much detail, but I was at work doing my thing (where death was a daily possibility) and the tables kind of turned; in order to stop me from being able to give out very sensitive information during a possible interrogation, I was locked in an office (more of a room sized safe) and was instantly aware that my colleagues fully realized that we were very close to being 'silenced' - something I had no idea would/could be done deliberately by our side up to that point in my career. That scared me, a lot; not the dying part, but the fact that it was going to be the people I would have done anything to defend that would do it. I just couldn't get my head around that issue.

All in all, death seems pretty peaceful to me. That's the way it seemed when my heart stopped anyway - I was out for a few minutes. In fact, when I was resuscitated, I fought the people who brought me back to life - I wanted to go back to wherever it was that I had just been.

Interesting thread.

I'm afraid of a painful death. That's about it though.

I'm not afraid of death because it's inevitable. Anything that you know you can't escape from doesn't scare me, because I don't see any point in it. I don't think about it much because I think I'll have plenty of time to think about it when it happens (or not).

I have patchy social skills, and sometimes I feel I perceive social dynamics very clearly, other times not so much. Okay, that said, the following is simply an idea on my part,

Do you think because it was such a huge deal your former colleagues foreclosed early, and didn't really try for better alternatives ? ?

I used to be starting as a teenager when I had the realization that the idea of an afterlife was nothing but wishful thinking. These days it rarely crosses my mind and when it does it rarely disturbs me.
The truth is a primal fear of death is the root of all fears, and it exists even in those who believe in an afterlife, it is just twisted into a different form. If someone truly didn't fear death then they would fear nothing.

It seems to me that whether or not to commit suicide should be a soldier’s personal decision. And then, if an eighteen or nineteen-year-old is defending a position with a weapon, how would an enemy know that this person has important information? And wouldn’t the really important thing to be able to do would be to destroy papers and computer disks/computer tape in rapid fashion?

Now, the part about ‘foreclosed early’. It does not sound like they treated it as a last resort, or that they really waited until the very last minute. Instead it seems, maybe precisely because it was such a big bad deal, that your former colleagues did not see a way out, such as finessing an order, so they kind of numbed themselves out, to perhaps 60% of their normal intellectual/emotional resources. They started early, didn’t look for better alternatives with energy, didn’t agonize about it like they should have, and perhaps because they could not. They feared if they even started to agonize, that would take them down another path.

The idea that if you don't fear death then you fear nothing else is attributing too much rationality to human beings. We are fundamentally irrational creatures.

I am certain I have no fear of death, having faced it on enough occasions to gauge my responses. For example, on occasions that I've been hospitalized for something serious (well, yeah, these days the hospital won't take you in or keep you unless it's life-threatening) that could kill me even with medical help if things went wrong. Like a time when I had gone septic. Sometimes of course I was too out of it to understand death at all. But when I was conscious and aware of things, my response to it was fundamentally quite calm. If translated into words, it would be something like "Okay. I could live or I could die. It's better to live, so I will do everything I can in order to live. But if I die? It's just my time. It's nothing to fear. In fact, wow, I don't even fear the wrong people getting hold of possessions I'd rather keep private to certain people. It's important to me, and yet, if I'm dead anyway, what does it matter? So I will try for life, but if death comes, I'm ready for it and not afraid in the least bit."

Realizing that death is fundamentally not a scary thing did change many things in my life. But it didn't change the fact that I get afraid, even phobic, about some other things. Because the brain just is not logical that way. Phobias don't sit there and reason out, "If I'm not afraid of death, why am I afraid of heights?" (I'm not afraid of heights, it's just an example.) Phobias just happen. And so does fear over other things. I'm afraid of starvation because of how it makes me feel, not because it would kill me. I'm afraid of accidentally doing things that harm others, or that are unethical in some way. I'm afraid of the future of humanity. That death is not scary does not get rid of these things.

Once I was scared to die. But I have been through a near death experience (which I survived, obviously) and I went through the Kuebler-Ross phases in double time. Having gone through the pangs of fear and having walked through The Valley of Death (so to speak) I am no longer frightened, panicked, or terrified by the prospect.

Do not mistake me. As long as I am in good health I have no wish to die any sooner than I have to.

ruveyn

When I was 8, I was so scared of death that I had meltdowns.