FEAR OF DEATH.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16987, 10 March 1923, Page 19 (Supplement)

FEAR OF DEATH.

COMMON BUT INCORRECT IDEAS. We have on record (says Dr F. A. Hampton in “ Discovery ”) the experience of many people who. from drowning asphyxiation, or other causes, have sunk into a state of unconsciousness that, had it lasted but a little longer, would have passed the limit of recoverability and ended in death. These ex- [ periences show a remarkable agreement in the absence of fear and even of discomfort ; in many cases there is a feeling of lightness and freedom, sometimes of travelling with great speed, sometimes of complete tranquillity that is almost pleasurable. We may quote in this connection the last words of William Hunter, the great anatomist: “If I had strength enough to hold a pen I would write down how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die.” In a similar way the certain expectation of death seems to contain little of the terror with which our imagination tends to endow it. Dostevski, the •Russian novelist, standing on the scaffold awaiting execution, and with no idea that he might be reprieved, calmly calculated exactly how many minutes he had to live and seemed to bo pre-occupied with an almost purely intellectual interest in the great amount of “ living” that could be done in a short space of 1-me. A man who marvellously escaped after falling off a tall .building seemed to have felt little duriTME bis descent except- a mild wonder at the length of time lie was taking to reac'h the ground. There is-, no reason to suppose that these experiences are exceptional except in that t'l.'O' were recorded, and we are entitled tfO assume that they represent the normal' sensations that accompany the final vanishii}J? consciousness and the typical att'itpde in the expectation of death. The fact that our conception of dy- | ing is derived from our observation of the process of death in others, rather than from ..the necessarily rare data I that we have spoken of above, probably accounts for some ideas that the commonly held, but are certainly incorrect, notably for the idea expressed in the phrase, “ the agony of death." The word “ agony ” seems to have come into the language from the New 1 Testament where the Greek word (literally meaning “ a struggle ”) is user! to describe the spiritual conflict of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane ; it came to lie employed (as it is now almost exclusively in French) to describe the yet of death, possibly because the spasmodic twitehings that are sometimes observed to occur at the point of death, though long after the loss of consciousness, were imagined to be the! physical result of the soul struggling to leave its habitation. It is but comparatively lately that the word acquired its present commonest meaning of great pain, thus colouring our conception of dying and not only in old wives' tales with an idea of pain and distress, that, as has already been remarked., reality does not substantiate.