Coping with mortality: An essay on self-mourning

Abstract

The idea of “self-mourning” can be extended to shed light on the existential challenge of coping with life in the shadow of death. Coming to terms with personal finiteness and mortality can be understood as a grieving process. Just as grieving the death of another is an extremely complex and multifaceted experience with emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual, and social impacts challenging the very integrity of the grieving person, so confrontation with and coming to terms with one's own finiteness (self-mourning in the extended sense proposed) has a similar range of impacts and poses a comparable challenge to personal integrity. Just as grieving persons coping with the death of another must work through the tasks of grieving, so persons coping with their own mortality must work through similar tasks. The extended concept of self-mourning illuminates the potentially lifelong struggle to cope with the finiteness, impermanence, uncertainty, and vulnerability that mortality entails. In conclusion, implications of these findings for death education are sketched.