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Go out of this world as you entered it. The same passage that you made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world.
Stephen Greenblatt finds these words of Lucretius a therapeutic mediation on the fear of death (2011, p. 248). To spend one's life anxious about death is to deprive oneself of the fullness of life and its enjoyment. But if someone is afraid of dying, as was my patient, newly confronted with a life-threatening illness, how do you overcome such fear?
My patient had been diagnosed with a cancer, a prognosis that statistically limited her life to two more years at best. “It's just a statistic,” she would say in her characteristic manner, trying to counter her depressive proclivities with an artificial brightness. Then she would weep. “I don't want to die. I'm too young. It's not fair.” She was sixty years old—a very youthful, energetic, productive sixty-year-old. At the height of her profession, she had just embarked on another creative endeavor.
I had known my patient for more than thirty years. She had sought analysis in her twenties while a graduate student, unsure about her future vocational direction. Her six-year analysis revealed a woman who had had to rely on herself to make her way in the world, emotionally and professionally. While financially well provided for, her mother's self-preoccupation and need for admiration left my patient feeling essentially unseen. She organized her self-esteem around her own achievements and ability for mastery. Her analysis enabled her to face and grieve some of