Terror of Death in the Wake of September the 11th:

Is This the End of Death Denial?

Probing the Boundaries: Making Sense of Dying and Death Conference

Brussels
Thursday 14th November - Saturday 16th November 2002.

Kate Arthur
Doctoral Candidate

University of St. Michaels College

University of Toronto, Canada.
Revised Edition: October 15, 2002

Kate is pursuing a doctorate in theological ethics, her dissertation interest is dying and death in culture. She
chose to study theology, because of its pandisciplinary nature, permitting the study of the phenomenology,
epistemology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, ethics, metaphysics and spirituality of death.
Kate Arthur
Suite 2102, 50 Lombard Street.
Toronto ON M5C 2X4
Canada
416-367-4603
kate.arthur@utoronto.ca

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The literature of thanatology is full of the theme of fear of death. Scholars variously trace the
dread of death to the developed worlds alienation from nature, secularism, rationalism, cyber and/or
technological isolation, medicalization, social/economic/political structures and simple ignorance. Parallel to
the claim that fear of death is rampant, is the familiar theory that this fear is so overwhelming, to our
conscious selves, that we sublimate it. This creeping denial is responsible for our furtive, often contradictory,
approach to dying and death in the public realm. Within the wider society, death is exploited, demonized and
fictionalized yet rarely meaningfully scrutinized. I hope to show that, after the heartrending events of the 11th
of September 2001, death now occupies a prominent place in the public domain and any hope of rising above
our fear is through appeal to natural spiritual resources.
It is not only the sheer horror of the piercing aerial attacks that burns in the minds eye. It is also
the nightmare of the hot billowing cloud of death chasing us through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan
that haunts our memory. Deaths dust has caught up with each and every one of us. It is impossible for us to
deny or ignore this calculated, murderous terror. I now know that I am no longer safe from death; I am
mortal. In the center of American commerce, on that sparkling late summers morn, lifes illusion was
dissolved. Emily Dickinsons poetry is hauntingly prophetic.
This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
And Lads and Girls;
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls.
This passive place a Summers nimble mansion,
Where Bloom and Bees
Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,
Then ceased like these.
(Emily Dickinson, 1924, Part Five: The Single Hound LXXIV)
For me, the stunning coincidence of summer, mansion, and dust in this gentle poets words are
especially apt in this connection. The dead are dust, the dust of the now deceased adults, who once were
children laughing and sighing in the midst of natures round.
Death is Fearful as it Demolishes Me and my Possibilities
When it approaches too close, sudden death is monstrous and often terrifying. Perhaps fear of
death is, indeed, the universal fear (Becker, 1973; Kbler-Ross, 1969). For some people, fear is expressed as
the terror of acquiescence of control and loss of dignity associated with the dying process itself. Death dread
is sometimes articulated as a fear of a possibly premature or especially hideous death. (It is significant that

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most Americans say their preferred way to die, is in their advanced years, while asleep.) Most of us though, if
we think about it at all, will say any terror is largely attributable to the involuntary surrender to the unknown
and our own mutability, that death represents. I am horrified by the impossible question of the postmortem
enigma and my own inevitable decay. Here is the outrage of the capitulation of my destiny.
Not everyone dreads death as ultimate annihilation. But even if I am someone who trusts in some
form of postmortem hope, I may nevertheless fear extinction of my-self. Theologian Michael Simpson
expresses it this way: death marks the end of the possibility of creating ones destiny (Simpson, 1971,
pages 56-57) and Jean Paul Sartre said that dread of death is due to the fact that it prevents the individual
from realizing his possibilities (See Tomer, 1994). Here is the anticipation of an assault on everything that I
have been, all of my memories and all of my loves extinguished. It is the destruction of the project of my
living in the world. Older persons often report a lessening of their fear of death, possibly attributable to a
reduction of these concerns. Death anxiety seems to be inversely correlated to life satisfaction and the
perception of achievement in that life.
My Death is Inconceivable
In the rationalist and secular world of ideas that we inhabit, what can we possibly hope for after
we die? Humanist Thomas Clark (1994) says the hard-boiled materialist anticipates nothing but an utter
void of darkness and silence following death. Terror of death then is compounded by an inconceivable
permanent extinction of the self, an eternal nothingness. This is Swinburnes abyss of the eternal night
sucking us into an endless nullity of experience. Plato and Thomas Aquinas generally withheld speculation on
what happens to persons beyond the veil of death (See Pieper, 1968). This is due to deaths implicit mystery
and ineffability. In this life, we know death through proxy only, said commentator Elisabeth Bronfen (2000).
I am prohibited from experiencing and analyzing my actual death event. Death is the definitive in-itself
which cannot be experienced and it is beyond communication. Any experience of the moment after death is
evidently unverifiable by an observer of that death (Bronfen, 2000). Therefore, death is the most solitary and
private event of all human experience, and no scientific claim of the subjective experience of death is
possible. Death, and any knowledge of it, is truly the sole possession of the person who is actually doing the
dying, and in its very essence death is in every case mine, insofar as it is at all says Martin Heidegger
(1962, page 284). We are so habituated in Western culture to evaluate all phenomena through direct
experience and/or empirical observation. We cannot grasp our own deaths, said Heidegger.

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Death, Negated, Denied and Repressed
The futility of the familiar methodology leads me to conclude that my personal death is

inconceivable and unthinkable. (Although my death is not inconceivable to my companions, an issue with
which we will deal presently.) I therefore, must resort to negations, and negations only, about my own death
(Pieper, 1968, who cites Karl Jaspers). In short, absent proof of my death as my final end, I tend to dismiss or
deny it. This tendency contributes to the consensus that we unconsciously reject death as our true end.
Therefore, each one of us, observed Sigmund Freud, is unconsciously convinced of our immortality, and
conventional society typically denies death (Freud, 1918; see also Lifton, 1973). Elisabeth Kbler-Ross
famously took up Freuds theme of unconscious denial, upon which she premised her study, and the
development of her death awareness movement. Philosopher Jacques Choron also acknowledged this strange
although by now well established fact, that no on really believes in his own death (Choron, 1963, page
18). This is so despite our rational awareness of the inevitability of death.
Philosopher Jonathan Dollimore is correct that we only begin to understand the vital role of death
in Western culture when we accept death as profoundly, compellingly and irreducibly traumatic (2000,
page 126). If all we can hope for is to be laid down in deaths dust (Psalm 22); then it is no surprise that the
prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind, as anthropologist Ernest Becker said (page ix).
Philosopher William James named recognition of our mortality the worm at the core that threatens
pretensions to happiness (James, 1958, page 121). The theme of this trauma, this anxiety, this denial, plays
repeatedly throughout 20th Century death commentaries. The psychoanalytic school and many of its
philosophic successors agree that death is the basic source of all anxiety, the terror that haunts all human
activity, claimed Becker. All mortal pursuits are governed by consistent effort to overcome the fatality of
death. This denial refuses to acknowledge our true attitude, which is one of unconscious fear and dread. (But
as Becker said, it is only natural that we should repress this dread, to allow us to function normally [Becker,
1973].)
Of course, this is a variation on Freuds theme, dating from his essay at the start of The War-ToEnd-All-Wars, World War 1, (Freud, 1918). Freud said that the cultural and conventional forgetting of the
presence of death meant that death was dismissed, put aside and hushed up. Freud claimed this resulted in a
toxic effort to eliminate all death from life. Freuds later work linked all anxiety and neurosis to the terrors of
nature and the painful riddle of death (Becker, 1973). Geoffrey Gorer, in the 1950s, developed the theme that

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death was so obscene and disgusting that it was unmentionable in polite company (Gorer, 1965). It was
considered unhealthy and morbid to actually speak of death. The art of embalmers, the sanitized funeral
industry, and the disdain of lurid mourning proved societal denial of the horror of the reality of death (Becker,
1973, Aris, 1974; and Mitford, 1998).
I earlier tried to show how denial is a transparent strategy, an exercise of the intellect. Denial is a
human response to the outrage of such a sinister and fearful force that cant be studied, categorized, analyzed
or understood by the enlightened mind. But this dismissal is not simply the discreet activity of an inquiring or
especially psychologically or philosophically inclined mind. Becker, Aris and others developed cogent
arguments that denial is a societal pathology. Deaths denial is, according to historian Phillipe Aris, a
symptom of industrialization and modernity. Denial (and accompanying erotic fascination, he argued)
developed in the 18th Century during the Enlightenment, along with the symbolic removal of death from the
realm of the living. The reversal of death was symbolized by the relocation of cemeteries to the outskirts of
town. Death became traumatic, shameful, forbidden and repressed. In our desperation to drive death from life
we marginalized it, made it worthy only of clandestine activity. As death was banished, relegated to tabooed
territory, the result was what commentator Herman Fiefel says, were profound contradictions in our thinking
(Feifel a, 1965).
The Best Revenge is Living Well
An example of such contradictory thinking is the public scorn of death represented by materialists
and nihilists. The abiding influence of nihilism is the commonly expressed opinion that death is all that there
is (Dollimore, 2000). We live in a pluralistic environment in which a shared vision of an afterlife cannot be
assumed. The question of meaning in a post-Christian, post-modern, post-Communist and digitally connected
globe often seems to be located in the living of life itself, nowhere else. Especially influential is a kind of
European thinking, which encourages a secular nihilist proposition in the face of the problem of the finality of
death. This defiant stance promotes human finitude as the sole source of meaning. The aim of this
philosophy, and certain psychological schools, is to learn how to die this death, my death, knowing that there
is nothing else after this death (Critchley, 2000). If God is dead and I have no postmortem hope, life in the
present moment is all that matters. The materialist will not allow the fact of death to poison her enjoyment of
life. Freud subscribed, in his own way, to this view and insisted that the aim of all of life is death. Here

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fulfillment is achieved by throwing myself into some temporal absolute or other, whether politics, sexual
fulfillment, mind altering substances, fame, material acquisition, or work.
So the existentialists, like the Stoics of the ancient world, responded to the fear of death and its
attendant unpleasant emotional affect by urging a constant mindfulness of death in life. By realizing the threat
of non-existence, Martin Heidegger said, we can attain a fuller understanding of our life, its meaning and free
ourselves from fear of death (See Tomer, 1994). This strategy defies death by saying we must refuse deaths
meaning and find meaning only in life. If Freud and Becker, and their successors are right, this secular
affirmation of life (whether or not in the presence of death) inevitably collapses into the ugly reappearance of
repressed unconscious death anxiety (Becker, 1973 and Neimeyer 1997-1998).
The Hideous Reality of Death Postponed
We inherited from the existentialists, a triumphant materialism and individualism. Aris (1974)
said the focus on the self and personal fulfillment through passionate attachment to the material world has
contributed to the resentment of death. In 1990 Susan Sontag expressed denial this way:
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor
with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is an obscene
mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can
only be denied. (page 55)
Ours is as much a world where death is publicly denied and relegated to the realm of private misery and dread
as ever. Nearly thirty years after Kbler-Rosss contribution, the death event is still a restrained, solitary and
middle-of-the-night affair. Most people say they would prefer to die at home surrounded by loved ones. Yet
tragically, the majority of North Americans still die in institutions, out of sight of life and the living. Western
culture idolizes youth and ghettoizes the old and decrepit. Where individual autonomy trumps all else, we
expect to have control over all choices in life, which also includes control over our own dying. We have
become so accustomed to think that death can be indefinitely postponed, we routinely expect the medical,
priestly class to perform miracles. Physical survival in end-of-life care is often fought for, at all costs
including further suffering. Aris is right, this has not helped to annihilate death, nor fear of death, it has only
served to underscore deaths savagery (1974). We are habituated to think that science will always bring us
back from the brink of destruction. The Human Genome Project, gene therapy, organ transplantation, nanotechnology, cloning and artificial hearts all promise hope of curing us of our mortality. In our frenzy of
material acquisition, anything that thwarts our individual expression of success is threatening. Death truncates
the dream of progress and so is disdained. Aris statement still holds: the most industrialized, urbanized, and

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technologically advanced areas of the Western world society has banished death Everything in town(s)
goes on as if nobody died any more (Aris, 1974, page 560).
In our private musings on death, as I said earlier, we cannot imagine our own demise. But in our
most intimate thoughts each one of us is aware of the distasteful notion that we are equally convinced that
other people die. Becker is right, that one of the meaner aspects of our natural human narcissism is that we
feel that practically everyone is expendable, except ourselves (1973). Luck is, as Aristotle says, when the guy
next to you gets hit with the arrow. When we read about deaths in the media, of people killed in far-off wars,
or holiday weekend highways, says Kbler-Ross, this only supports our unconscious belief in our own
immortality. On September 11, 2001 all that suddenly changed. Americas sense of security and way of life
was attacked, and so too was our perception of Americas way of death. If the suicide bombers knew that the
Twin Towers were vulnerable to such catastrophic destruction, they also knew that the veneer of Americas
denial of death could be dissolved into so much dust. As the months and years go by, the incomprehensible
and very public horror of that day have settled on each one of us. Death has come so close; we have no
choice, but to admit that we too, are vulnerable. Pervasive worldwide live coverage and the ensuing very
public mourning has compelled each one of us to witness and personally experience deep loss and grief.
Death is no longer banished, we cannot ignore, dismiss, or deny the fact of death. We are irretrievably,
though involuntarily, personally involved as witnesses to violent, and unforgiving death. We are survivors,
yet we are dust (Emily Dickinson, 1924, Part Five: The Single Hound CII). The terrorists cunning power
was partly due to the fact that they knew us better than we knew ourselves. They turned our Western death
phobia into a weapon of terror against us.
The denial of death: was first coined by Freud, in his 1915 essay Our Attitude Towards Death.
Six months into the First World War he wrote:
It is evident that war is bound to sweep away this conventional treatment
of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it.
People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of
thousands, in a single day. And death is no longer a chance event.
(1918, page 291)
After all the tragedies of the 20th Century what possesses me to claim that anything has, just now,
fundamentally changed? Is not the history of the past century, with some 111 million people killed in wars,
sufficient proof that we continue to deny death, at our own peril? Freuds uncanny words (above) collapse my
argument, you say. But is it not possible that Western society has sufficiently evolved, learned from the

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extremes of rationalism, and is now capable of transforming the bitterness of these painful events? Freuds
understanding of death denial was void of religious content. The first step to deliverance from this fear and
denial may be in the recognition of the extremes of dualism they represent. A radical attachment to the empty
promise of physical life, lacking a sense of sacredness, is what undermines the old approach.
For Freud, Marx and, many of their successors, spiritual comfort in the face of death was nothing
more than a neurotic support. Such childish illusions, said Freud, were employed as crutches to escape the
hard realities of life and death. Faith in immortality, he said, was mere compensation for the reality of death;
that is, the brutal truth that death signifies the total annihilation of the person. As this fact was
psychologically difficult to accept, Freud argued, people persisted in the illusion of some belief in an afterlife.
This defiance of our fears, that we really do expire, has no enduring value. What was missing was an
integrated sense of the transcendent in both life and death.
Transcendence of Life through Death
Death is the philosophers muse and most philosophical systems are shaped in accordance with
some kind of wisdom derived from death (Wyschogrod, 1985). Jonathan Dollimore describes this disturbing
paradox: death, which consigns everything to oblivion, is also what gives meaning to everything (2000
page 82). Classical philosophy, the arts, literature and film have consistently been rich resources of this kind
of knowledge of death within life. They convey the value of a spiritual appreciation of death in life.
Philosopher Edith Wyshograd beautifully develops this theme by relying upon the prose and poetry of Rainer
Maria Rilke. Rilke said that when we make death the enemy, we turn away from death and unknowingly then
turn away from life. This alienation from death means we are unable to see what Rilke calls the Open, or, at
risk of oversimplification, what I will call a sense of the sacred. As Wyshograd says (o)nly by taking death
into ourselves and no longer confronting it as the great negation can we affirm the whole (1985, page 7). She
also says (w)e cannot force affirmation by frontal assault, for then we only lock ourselves more firmly into
the opposite of The Open to the world... (1985, page 7). In other words, she believes that such
confrontation and denial of the brute finality of death leaves us with little but the material world and dissolves
any naturally given sense of the sacred. It should be obvious therefore, that what I am arguing for is
consideration of a unified vision of life and death intertwined and informing each other. Emily Dickinson was
surely acquainted with sacredness of life in the presence of death.

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DEATH is a dialogue between

The spirit and the dust.
Dissolve, says Death. The Spirit, Sir,
I have another trust.
Death doubts it, argues from the ground.
The Spirit turns away,
Just laying off, for evidence,
An overcoat of clay.
(Emily Dickinson, 1924, Part Four: Time and Eternity XXXI)
This insight from a simpler time in America is more than a quaint remnant of a pastoral sensibility
of the past. It is a truth that the people of our world must integrate into daily living. We can think of the dust
as the transient things of the world, and the Spirit is that part of us that trusts in the Eternal. For me, the
overcoat of clay is the memory of all departed souls. I recognize that many people are unwilling to recover
meaning from the horror of terror. But the eventual challenge is to find meaning in death, and plum our innate
spiritual resources to move from despair and fear into hope. We can retrieve a sense of living in the presence
of death that evokes ultimate meaning, mystery and wonder evoked by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Change, loss and mutability are present everywhere, in everything we do. Two pioneers in palliative care, Dr.
Derek Doyle and Dr. Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, speak of the increased spirituality among people who work with
the dying. By being ever mindful of death in life, we can discover or recover a sense mystery.
The great religions have urged contemplation of death in life as a means to spiritual wholeness.
Instead of being abolished from life, death is universally integral to religious observance. If the faithful
embrace death in life then they are more able to accept the exigencies of life, death and transcendence. Death
in life lends symbolic meaning to the conundrums of human existence. What man shall live and not see
death? says the Hebrew text Psalm 98:48. Dying yet we live, is the central message of the Christian Gospel of
St. Paul (2 Corinthians 6:9). The Buddhist Samyutta Nikaya says For the Born, there is no such thing as not
dying. The Muslim Holy Book The Koran counsels keeping death in perspective and the materialism of this
world in perspective: Every soul shall have a taste of death (al-Imran 3:185). Greeley and Hout (1999) say as
many as 80 percent of Americans believe in life after death. Equal numbers also claim to be religious.
Alvarado et. al. (1995) found that strong religious conviction accompanied by belief in an afterlife is
associated with decreased anxiety and depression related to death. Death does now occupy a prominent place
in the public domain. Annie Dilliard thinks that, on the brink of death, the dying pray not please but thank
you as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes she says, the people are crying thank

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you, thank you, all down from the air (Dilliard, page 270). This is not denial, but a deeply held sensibility of
religious consolation and gratitude for life lived in the presence of death.

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