Death and Authenticity

I discuss here an important thought that has been neglected in the literature emphasizing the significance of facing one's own death. Let me start with three beautiful excerpts from Søren Kierkegaard's journals and Papers:

… it seems to me that it would be better to reflect about death, lest existence should hold me in derision if I became so learned as to forget to understand what one time shall happen to me and happen to every man. One time- but what am I saying; suppose death were to be so sly as to come tomorrow! Already this uncertainty, if it is to be understood and held fast by an exister, and just because it is an uncertainty, must be involved in everything that is thought, … If death is always uncertain and I am mortal, this means that this uncertainty cannot possibly be understood merely in general, in case I am not just a man in general. (Kierkegaard, in Lowrie, 1938)

I may live for thirty years, or perhaps forty, or maybe just one day: Therefore I have resolved to use this day … in such a way that if not one day in my whole past life has been used well, this one by the help of God will be. (Kierkegaard, 1847)

The temporal and the earthly, which seek to hold me back, seem so important at the moment;-and when at the point of death one comes to review his life, then one will see that what held him back was so very insignificant…. One ought to be fearful of this inversion.

These excerpts express powerfully almost everything that has been written recently about the meaning of death. The term “inversion” at the end of the third excerpt refers clearly to the various attempts to ignore or deny death. Yalom (1980), basing himself partly on Becker (1973) and Rank (1958), elaborates the point that various, overwhelming difficulties in dealing successfully with “my death” lead, already quite early in childhood, to defensive maneuvers aiming for the denial of all aspects of “my finitude.” He believes that psychodynamic theories that explain anxiety as