#36 — Does the Fear of Death Go Away, or Do You Just Get Better at Living With It?

This week's caller is 79 years old and has a book about death coming out.

They have lost a husband. They have lost a mother. They have survived breast cancer. And somewhere inside all of that, they made a distinction that most people never get to: they are not afraid of dying. They are afraid of being dead. Of the nothing. Of the absence of a self that has opinions and a grandson they are not ready to stop watching grow up.

So they did what you do when a question won't leave you alone. They spent three years going down every rabbit hole they could find. Psychedelics. Panpsychism. Philosophy. The moment you realize that Ram Dass might actually be onto something. The strange comfort of remembering that there was nothing before you were born either, and that version of nothing never scared you at all.

This is a conversation between two people who have ended up in surprisingly similar places by very different roads. It is honest and a little funny and occasionally goes places neither of them expected. There is a moment where fear gets reframed as sadness, and it lands quietly but it lands.

It is also a conversation about what it means to sit with "I don't know.” Not as a failure, but as the most honest answer available.

Book recommendation: The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

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