Irvin Yalom’s book, Staring at the Sun, is a profound and accessible psychological exploration of death anxiety and how to navigate the world as a living person, knowing that you will die at some point in the guaranteed future. Just as the text of the book takes readers on a journey from agitation to peacefulness, the evolution of the book’s subtitle over the years reflects a parallel journey. The first edition had the stark subtitle “Overcoming the terror of death”, which softened later to “overcoming the dread of death”, and finally evolved into the most recent subtitle, “being at peace with your own mortality.” What a change!
I read this book in the spring of 2016, shortly after my maternal grandmother and last living grandparent passed away. Before this, I had been organizing my life through the “life design” concept popular with personal coaches, with the idea that each of us has the power to identify a central focus of joy for our lives and pursue it. There’s nothing wrong with that. After reading Staring at the Sun, though, I had a gentle realization that the far-away “north star” I was chasing, that ultimate unknowable thing at the center of my passion, was really my own inevitable death.
Don’t get me wrong– it’s not like I had “base jump Mt. Everest without an oxygen tank” on my vision board or reckless abandon in my dream journaling. It’s just that there always seemed to be a deeper pull behind the board, another layer I had yet to reveal. Staring at the Sun helped me understand that, in aiming to “seize the day” and “suck the marrow out of life”, I was fighting against the unconscious fear that I will cease to exist and that my life’s work will wash away like footprints on a beach.
It sounds sad at first, but there’s a deep peace that comes with acknowledging the inevitable temporariness of my own individual life. Instead of feeling limiting, it actually frees me up to prioritize what’s meaningful.
In one section of the book, Dr. Yalom discusses his interviews with octogenarians who are either deeply unhappy or peacefully satisfied with their lives. From these interviews, he distills several commonalities among the satisfied group, and from this infers what might make a meaningful life.
The one that sticks out most clearly to me is that the people in the satisfied group could point clearly to their ripples of impact in the world. For some, this was in their children and grandchildren; for others, lasting work in the form of writing or art or a bridge they laid cement for. It’s not about banner parades and major accomplishments, public recognition of individual greatness, or the number of publications on a CV. According to Yalom,
“Rippling, as I use it, refers instead to leaving behind something from your life experience; some trait; some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtute, comfort that passes on to others, known or unknown.”
Despite its intimidating subject matter, the book is very readable, thanks to Yalom’s deep desire to be understandable and his frequent inclusion of real stories from and dialogues with patients over the span of his career.
Publisher’s description of the 2020 edition: “Each person fears death in their own way. Despite turning to the comforts of children, or wealth, or belief in a higher power, death anxiety is never completely subdued: it is always there, lurking in the hidden ravines of our minds. In this book, master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom faces his own fear of death and examines its role in many patients’ fears, stresses and depression. With characteristic wisdom and illuminating case histories, he shows how confronting and coping with death allows us to live in a richer, more compassionate way.”