How I got over my fear of death… by talking to a dead person

(And what you can learn from my experience)

Atlantios

Like most people, death is a concept that used to cause me a lot of confusion. It was such a big, complex and anxiety filled reality that was just hard to make sense of.

I remember my first experience with death when I was 3 years. I had a friend at daycare who disappeared for a while. Then one day, I walked into my little classroom and her parents were there.

I asked them where she was and they sweetly bent down to my level, eye to eye, to explain that she had “gone to heaven”. I didn’t exactly know what heaven was, but I knew from the pain in her parent’s energy that we weren’t going to be seeing my friend again.

Death never quite made sense to me. The unknown of the presumed after life was just too big for little, old me. The very thought of losing one of my parents gave me a sickening chill in my heart.

Because I had been indoctrinated as Christian, the fear of hell was another added level of mental stress. I wondered if my imperfections and attitude would land me in burning fires.

The summer before my freshman year of high school, a neighborhood friend was shot to death right down the street from me. It sent a shock through our neighborhood. His older brother was a…