This text is a reflection on the boundary of life and on how the psyche relates to it. There is no consolation here and no ready-made answers. Rather, it is about openness to something we cannot truly prepare for. It may feel heavy.
On Preparing for Death — and the Limits of Preparation
Some changes in life we can prepare for. For others, we can at least try. Especially when the issue concerns not so much life as death.
In that context, the word preparation may sound harsh. Yet, sooner or later, we begin to understand — consciously or unconsciously — that something or someone will cease to be, forever.
For the argument I want to develop here, it does not matter whether this understanding appears as insight in this life, as a “memory” of something earlier, or as contact with an archetypal process. What matters is that within this life there emerges something that belongs uniquely to it: emotional experience and immediate lived perception.
This memory, this sense of “I,” and these experiences have no other reference point than what has occurred within them. There is no knowledge of what was before or what will be after. What confronts them is the unknown and the possibility of non-existence — something they resist and cannot accept.
How a Personal Myth of Death Is Formed
Fear pushes us to form a personal stance toward death. Faith often accompanies it. These forces may coexist or alternate. Their interaction shapes a personal myth of what lies beyond the boundary. The available materials are abundant — religions, philosophical systems, mystical traditions, esoteric teachings, and even scientific narratives.
One function of this myth is to give concrete form to what is unknown and cannot be fully grasped. To something that cannot be lived as direct experience, since no verified return to ordinary life after death has been recorded.
At the beginning of this text, I wrote that we may “try to prepare,” because on the one hand, we often have no conscious choice — we are compelled to confront the question. On the other hand, since death cannot be experienced in advance, we will always remain unprepared for it. The myth we build may turn out to be a reality that stands at a right angle to what a person actually undergoes near the end.
This does not make the myth false or useless. Constructing it is not wasted effort. It has value; at the very least, it can reduce anxiety about death during life, up to its edge.
Yet we know nothing about the maximum. A myth may accompany a person to the very boundary. Beyond that, we do not know whether anything within it corresponds to what happens on the other side. Perhaps the myth ends at the border. Perhaps it does not.
The Multilayered Experience at the Edge
Cognitive knowledge of death is accompanied by emotional knowledge. Or perhaps the order is reversed. It may be a question of the chicken and the egg. More important is that emotional knowledge is layered. It may be internally inconsistent — not forming a single, unified picture. The “I” can drift between these layers. A developed consciousness may sense several of them at once.
We construct a myth of death in certain layers of the psyche, but it does not reach all of them. What is closer to the myth may learn to relate to death calmly. Yet those layers are not the whole of us. There is something that does not “want” to be trained into such acceptance.
Need proof? Put your finger in a flame. The body, and the layers of psyche closely tied to it, will withdraw the hand immediately — without consulting the ego’s confidence in its myth, without reasoning about it at all.
Such a reaction is not limited to ordinary people. Jesus, knowing his fate and accepting it, sweated blood while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In some myths, death is seen as transformation. In others, there is nothing beyond the line. Each myth — whether of finitude or infinity — adds a sense of order and predictability. Yet it does not govern everything that unfolds at the boundary. A person may simultaneously feel alignment with their myth and experience forces that resist death — fear, despair, or depression.
Irvin Yalom: Myth and Immediate Experience at the Edge
Throughout his life, Irvin Yalom consistently shaped his relationship to death — in therapy, in his writings, and in his own reflections. It was a coherent and thoughtful position, a personal myth that allowed him to live and work without turning away from the fact that everything will one day end. To accept finitude.
But when death entered his life directly — through the loss of the wife he deeply loved and through the awareness of his own limited time — he found himself not only alongside the myth he had embraced.
Something emerged that did not fit into his prior organization of experience — the immediate encounter with inevitability. The sense that nothing more awaits, that what was best belongs to the past.
This tension seems central in A Matter of Death and Life.
The book may appear contradictory, inconsistent, even at times exhibitionistic — but only if one expects the text to unify everything into a single, coherent narrative of meaning.
From the perspective of immediate experience, everything stands at once outside the expected structure and exactly where it naturally belongs. To be at the edge is perhaps the most difficult human condition. One cannot fully prepare for it. At most, one can arrive there with a personal myth — and with the willingness to accept what does not fit within it.