---
title: Death
date: 2026-04-17
description: Panic-buying immortality since 1988.
tags: [existential]
image: /assets/img/death.jpg
---

Ever since I was six years old, I've been scared of dying.

I'm not talking about the "scared to die" that most people will occasionally
admit to before getting on with their day. I mean the kind of scared that
cripples you on a daily basis and stops you from sleeping. The kind that triggers
daily panic attacks if you don't work very hard to sidestep them, because let's
be honest, this is a fear you can't escape.

There's actually a clinical term for this: [Thanatophobia]. Derived from the
Greek _thanatos_ (death) and _phobos_ (fear), it describes a profound and often
debilitating anxiety about the process of dying or the concept of non-existence.

It's perfectly natural to feel uneasy about the "great unknown", but
thanatophobia goes beyond typical concern. It becomes a clinical anxiety disorder
when it starts to interfere with your daily life.

## The night my brain broke

Very early on. Unfortunately.

I remember the moment vividly, and I often wonder: if certain things had
happened slightly differently that night, would I have ended up as damaged as I
did?

I was lying in bed, just thinking to myself, as kids often do at bedtime. (I
know this because my two kids are never more verbal about what's rolling around
inside their heads than the exact moment I try to close the bedroom door so I
can finally get a glass of wine and relax after what was likely a very long day.)

Whatever I'd been thinking about (I'm pretty certain it involved how cool
Heaven would be and all the things I could do "up there"), the thoughts stopped.
And I said to myself: _"but... what if there IS NO God?"_

The thought just sat there, rolling around my head, while my mind scrambled for
anything in my experience or knowledge bank that could save me from the panic
that was rising.

Once you start thinking "what if God doesn't exist?", the next obvious question
is: "what happens when you die?" As a child, I equated death with God. Any time
you talk about death around children, you're usually talking in terms of God and
Jesus (in the Western world at least). Death wasn't associated with anything
else. So take God out of that equation and there's not much left to hold it all
together, not at that age anyway.

Once the panic took hold (and let's not kid ourselves, it was going to take
hold, and it was not going to let go), I started crying and screaming because my
little brain had begun to unravel at the horror of oblivion. Not that I knew
what the concept was at the time. It would be many years before I'd learn the
word for it, or for _nothingness_.

I ran out of my bedroom in absolute hysterics just as my mum had started coming
up the stairs to put my older sister to bed. I started babbling "I'm gonna die.
I'm gonna die" over and over. Now, understandably (and I only really came to
appreciate this once I had kids of my own and experienced the daily nightmare of
getting two young children to bed), she was on the cusp of wrapping up a very
long day of looking after two kids all by herself. My dad worked away from home
for months at a time, so there wasn't much of a male role model in sight. Having
to deal with me getting out of bed and screaming something incomprehensible was
not something she was going to suffer any nonsense for.

So what did she do? She hustled me back into bed. She didn't listen. She didn't
try to understand why I was upset. She just wanted me out of the way so she
could get my sister down and _finally_ have a well-deserved rest. As a parent of
two, I fully understand this now. But for many years I resented her for it,
because of the damage that night ultimately caused.

I should be clear: I've never spoken to my mum about this incident, nor about
how crippled I am by my fear of death. It's something I never really spoke to
anyone about until I explained it all to my wife, many years later. I think
we'd been together 13+ years before I first told her why I was having a panic
attack at bedtime, something I'd hidden from her as best I could. But on that
occasion it just had me defeated, and I think I was tired of keeping the secret
and not being able to release the weight from my shoulders.

## Every. Single. Night.

Every night (and I do mean quite literally, every night) I would have panic
attacks about dying. My mum had shooed me away the first time, which meant this
wasn't a topic up for discussion. So I had to deal with it myself.

This was the early 80s. I didn't have access to anything as futuristic as "the
internet" to find out what this meant, or to discover that other people felt it
too. I was alone. Stranded on an island of anxiety with no escape.

It wasn't until my late teens that I learnt to use breathing and meditation.
I'd found some old Buddhist books in the local library, very dense reading for
a teenager with ADHD, but I stuck with them because they felt important and
might finally be the answer I was ~~looking~~hoping for. I stumbled across a
copy of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead", a sacred text originally dating back to
the 8th century, and its talk of The Bardo was fascinating to me.

Through that I discovered Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of
analytical psychology. Jung had written extensively about his own [near-death
experience][jung-nde] and how he correlated the process of dying with his branch
of psychology. He didn't create the concept of the "ego" (that honour went to
his mentor Sigmund Freud), but he interpreted it as something that needed to
die. Or more precisely, the ego had to be _dissolved_, giving way to what he
called "the Self", in order for a person to step beyond their physical being and
accept that they were part of a wider net of consciousness (hello [Alex
Grey][alex-grey]). Jung believed that what religions call "God" is actually a
psychological reality experienced as the Self.

Part of Jung's work involved studying dreams and how they might offer insight
into the unconscious mind. This led me down the path of [Lucid
Dreaming][lucid-dreaming]. I was interested because I hated going to sleep, and
as we know, that started very young. I'd wake up in the morning with no
recollection of falling asleep and no memory of having dreamt, so I equated
being asleep with being dead. A dreamless sleep _was_ death. I didn't know it
had happened, and that was just too real. Too scary.

The path to lucid dreaming was a fun journey: setting alarms to wake myself up
at different times during the night to see if I could catch myself mid-dream,
writing some of them down so I didn't forget (and wow, I had some weird dreams).
The idea was that my body could get used to being woken up, and my brain would
start to "wake up" while I was still dreaming, and thus begins the ability to
lucid dream, to be aware you're dreaming and to control it. But ultimately this
was a journey of self-gratification, as I clearly just wanted to do naughty
things in my dreams.

## "Have you tried talking to someone?"

Honestly, I saw no point. Either way, nothing could be done about it. I felt so
confident that death was, and is, the end, that talking to a psychiatrist would
just be a waste of money and time. What were they going to tell me? "Oh it's ok,
we all get scared of dying; it's very natural." I _know_ it's natural. Doesn't
mean I have to like it.

I also, selflessly, didn't want to fuck up anyone else. There's an old proverb:

> _"Ignorance is bliss"_\
> -- Thomas Gray (Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College)

This is demonstrated rather well in [The Matrix][the-matrix], in the scene where
a disgruntled crew member, Cypher, meets secretly with Agent Smith to negotiate
his betrayal of the story's hero. While savouring a digital steak, Cypher
explicitly acknowledges that the meat is an illusion (electrical signals sent to
his brain), yet he chooses to embrace the simulation anyway. "Ignorance is
bliss." He agrees to hand over critical information in exchange for being
reinserted into the Matrix with his memories erased. His character is a warning
of the "Blue Pill" philosophy: the idea that a comfortable, high-status lie is
preferable to the cold, exhausting reality of the truth.

For me, if I talked about this with others, their _ignorance_ (happily going
about their day without thinking about death) would be disrupted by me revealing
some dark secret, and they'd spend the rest of their days worrying about when
they would die. I just didn't want to do that to anyone. And to make it worse,
you can't _know_ if someone is ignorant without first talking to them about it,
which is exactly how you start their mind thinking about the subject you're
trying not to bring up.

Somewhat tangentially similar are the following lyrics from the Meshuggah album
[Catch 33]. The album is a single song divided up into 13 separate movements:

> _"The struggle to free myself of restraints, becomes my very shackles"._\
> -- Disenchantment

![Meshuggah - Catch 33](/assets/img/meshuggah-catch33.jpg)

The album explores the paradoxes of existence, the ego, and the "Catch-22" of
the human condition. The title is a play on Catch-22 (a situation where you
can't win because of contradictory rules). The album suggests that the "self" or
the "ego" is a trap. The more you try to understand yourself, the more you
realize "you" don't really exist as a separate entity. The struggle to be free
from your mental chains actually becomes the chain itself.

That's how I felt about Death. My constant struggle to somehow escape it, had
shackled me to it. I was forced to face it.

The track "In Death - Is Life" is followed by "In Death - Is Death." It suggests
that life and death are just two sides of the same coin, and the "Truth" is
found in the middle of that conflict. A lot of the songs describe a "shattering"
of the personality, where the individual "self" is destroyed and then integrated
into a universal, chaotic whole.

When I first heard this album and read the lyrics, I almost started to believe
there was _something_ greater than myself to be experienced. Not a "God", but a
universal truth. That somehow we are "all one". It didn't stick for long (I'm a
cynic at heart) and Meshuggah are much more nihilistic than spiritual:

> _"My ignorance cast in the mold of all things absolute.\
> I sustain forever my gaze. A stare fixed on the distant oblivion.\
> Resting in the inverted state of being dead, non-sensory matter."_\
> -- Re-Inanimate

I'll be honest, I'm trying _really_ hard not to quote this entire album right
now. So many of the lyrics (along with the music itself, the sheer intensity of
it) make me feel not just "alive" but genuinely _seen_ and _heard_:

> _"Treacherous this deceit to make no choice matter.\
> To have and yet lose yourself, until finally all reasons why are forgotten.\
> To live through ones own shadow. Mute and blinded, is to really see.\
> Eclipse the golden mirror and the reflection is set free."_\
> -- Mind's Mirrors

OK, last one, I promise:

> _"I float through physical thoughts.\
> I stare down the abyss of organic dreams.\
> All bets off, I plunge - Only to find that self is shed."_\
> -- Shed

Ironically, in most Eastern traditions you're expected to accept death from a
very young age _because_ the sooner you start thinking about it, and worrying
about it, the more prepared you'll be on your deathbed. I've struggled to accept
this. I flip-flop between thinking it's the right way and disagreeing entirely.
I couldn't imagine being ignorant my entire life and then on my deathbed
suddenly going "wait, oh no, shit, I'm going to die! What if there is no God?!",
having all those emotions and feelings I had at six years old suddenly appear
in that final moment. Maybe it was better I've been tormented for all these
years, because at least I'm more ready for that moment when it comes.

To be clear: **I'm not ready. I will never truly be ready.** But I stand a
better chance of dealing with it this way than the other way around. It sucks
either way, doesn't it.

## Darkness in Music

Music has been my support structure for probably 90% of the time I've been
alive. I listen every day, across a _very_ eclectic range of genres. But I also
listen to a lot of challenging stuff: improvisational, avant-garde, heavy, dark.
My two favourite bands are [Sunn O)))][sunn] (see also my post on
[Drone](/posts/drone/)) and [SUMAC].

My friends and family never could quite understand why I had such an interest in
dark music. To be honest, I never really understood it either. But I'd always
felt like I had a darkness inside me, an anger I was bottling up and afraid to
let loose, because if I did I'd lose control of my body and mind and _become_
someone else. This demon, this nightmare that would go on a killing spree and
wouldn't stop.

If you want a visual for what that feels like, look up [The Red Dragon], a
painting from the 1800s by William Blake. I came to know of it through the 1981
novel "[Red Dragon][red-dragon-novel]" by Thomas Harris (the first in the
Hannibal Lecter saga). The serial killer in that story, "The Tooth Fairy",
believes the painting is transforming him into something beyond human.

I remember the first time I listened to "I Am Colossus" by [Meshuggah]. Much
like that character, I could literally feel my body morphing into something as
the song played. I started calling it "my Red Dragon song". That's when I
realised the power music had over me, and that in a lot of ways it had protected
me from doing bad things over the years. This is why a lot of metalheads are
some of the kindest, most patient, and accepting people on the planet: they
satisfy the darkness within them and express it through music rather than
violence.

My family and friends just hear noise. When you play them something like
[Sunn O)))][sunn], something _devoid_ of melody or structure, they probably question
whether I'm "right in the head".

I've come to realise that I gravitate towards chaotic sounds because they drown
out the chaos already going on inside me. My monkey mind is so chatty and
paranoid and scared that I need something _louder_ than it is. That's why music
helps me deal with my panic and fear. It's a way for the ego, all that noise
inside my head, to be swallowed up.

## Still here, still scared

So where am I today? Basically the same place I was at six years old: scared,
and constantly trying to find ways not to lose my mind to panic on a nightly
basis. I have kids, so I try to put my focus into them and to appreciate every
moment I'm conscious, whether that means walking along the seafront and feeling
the sun on my face, or getting caught in the pouring rain and feeling the wind
blowing through me and the water running over my skin. Either way, I'm alive,
and I'm grateful I get another day. Because let's face it, one day I might go to
sleep and never wake up.

And in some way, that's probably a blessing in disguise.

[alex-grey]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Grey
[catch 33]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_Thirtythree
[jung-nde]: https://excellencereporter.com/2025/05/16/carl-jung-and-the-mystery-of-life-after-death-a-glimpse-beyond-the-veil/
[lucid-dreaming]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream
[meshuggah]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshuggah
[red-dragon-novel]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_(novel)
[sumac]: https://sumac.bandcamp.com/
[sunn]: https://sunn.bandcamp.com/
[thanatophobia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_anxiety
[the red dragon]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Red_Dragon_paintings
[the-matrix]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix