The Fear of Death

This week in class we finished up the movie "Tuesdays with Morrie", and analyzed it in accordance to typical American values. One of them being our seemingly innate fear of death. Americans as a culture fear dying, and also fear the death of others. We fear losing our lives probably because we fear the unknown, we fear it because we have no knowledge of what happens to us after we die. Do we just cease to exist? Perhaps, and if so that is a scary thing. We also fear the death of others and mourn them when they pass because we feel that we have lost that person forever. This is a somewhat selfish thing, we fear that they will no longer be in our lives and this in a way connects to our cultures materialistic ways. We see that person as a thing, something we feel makes our lives better. For instance a man that loses his wife mourns her because he has lost her, he lost the person he loved enough that he vowed to be with forever. I lost my grandfather earlier this year and although I did not know him very well because I did not get the chance to spend time with him I saw how it affected my mother. She mourned him constantly and when see talked to me about it she said the hardest thing was the fact that she would never get to talk to him again. Death affects us all greatly, perhaps for the right reasons. The idea of death motivates us to slow down and spend more time with the people we love.