If there is one topic that everyone avoids and no one smiles about, it’s death. We invent all sorts of euphemisms like perish, pass away, close one's eyes; pay the debt to nature, take one's last sleep; turn to dust, go to one's long account and even expire to avoid calling the spade what it really is. That how much shrouded in fear death is. Even most authors, poets and film-makers give it an aura of gloom, mystery and doom.

Plato mused how we actually fear death when we do not really know it very well and maybe not at all. However it is this fear of the unknown that somehow makes death so sinister, no one knows what is beyond even if stories from ‘near-death experiences’ may give us a vague idea. Existential psychoanalyst Irvin Yalom believes that the dread of death forms early in life before the development of conceptual formulation. Yalom insists that our avoidance to accept death as a natural end to our life misdirects our search of happiness. If we had to accept that “we might very well not be here tomorrow”, we would appreciate our reality more especially our relationships with those closest to us and the little things that characterise our daily existence. German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger also asserts that our fear of death stems from the way we view life as a personal belonging, something to possess and to use for as long as possible. In his opinion, there is a force that brings us into life, holds us there and then drops us out again, back into something we know nothing about. Thus, seen in this way, life and death are simply two forms of existence and that death does not signify the end of an existence but simply the passing on to a different one.

There could be several existential reasons why people fear death. They fear that they will miss out on yet unachieved goals, they have concerns over those who will survive them and depending on their spiritual tendencies they fear the judgment that might lay waiting for them in the beyond. Most of us create various beliefs or comforts in an attempt to overcome these fears. Some people derive comfort in believing in being reunited with loved ones in heaven; others have children as a sort of immortality project while others attempt to become famous or influential thus leaving behind new ideas and concepts.

In his Nobel winning prize novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann wrote: “A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own”. In fact, much of the emotions surrounding death stem from the survivors' struggle to deal with and accept a loved one’s loss and the conscious decision to let that person go.

A pioneer in methods of support and counselling of grief and grieving associated with death and dying was Swiss doctor Elisabeth Kübler Ross. One of the central themes in her work among the dying and the bereaved is her five stage model of grief, namely denial, anger, bargaining depression and acceptance which denotes that detachment would have finally taken place. Ironically this stage of acceptance is usually reached by the dying individual at a much earlier stage than his loved ones. It is normal for the bereaved to go through the different stages in different time frames depending on his personality and the other life experiences he might be going through at the time or went through in the past. In a study Yalom did of bereavement, he actually found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another.

Despite these philosophical and psychoanalytic notions, the fear of death is itself a reality which like death itself must be accepted for what it is. Like all other things, death can be seen as a blessing or a curse depending on the perspective we give it, whether as the end to our existence or simply as a different form of existence. Could this be another way to counteract it? Who knows?