Being Sixty-Seven and Afraid of Death

I've been a lawyer for thirty-five years — good at logic, uncomfortable with ambiguity, skilled at managing my emotional responses. The prospect of death has been a steady background terror for most of my adult life.

I enrolled in the trial after reading about the Johns Hopkins cancer study. I don't have cancer. But the trial was for healthy older adults with death anxiety, and I qualified.

The session: I was on a reclining couch with eyeshades. The guides were quiet presences in chairs nearby. For the first two hours I experienced mostly visual phenomena — complex, beautiful, occasionally unsettling. Then there was something I don't know how to describe accurately.

I was not afraid.

I was somewhere that the question of fear about death couldn't be asked because the premise of the question — that there is a self continuous enough to be threatened — felt uncertain. Not absent, but uncertain in a way that was not terrifying but liberating.

I spent what felt like a long time in that place. When I came back, I cried — not from grief but from something that felt like relief.

The fear is not gone. I want to be honest about that. But it has a different quality now — less of a presence and more of an occasional weather. I know that the thing I was afraid of is not what I thought it was.