My Old Friend: Denial

For baby boomers like me, our parents and other relatives of the older generation, serve to remind us of the frailties of this mortal shell. Even though there are many reminders proffered by contemporaries dying in their fifties of heart disease and cancer, it is still possible for most of us to plow ahead through busy schedules, denying the inevitability of our own demise.

I remember sitting in a training for hospice volunteers 20 years ago and listening to the speaker talk about denial. She observed that denial of our own death was necessary to get on with the business of life. I realized that if I weren’t willing to suspend the awareness of my own mortality, I would never again sit in a 2000-pound lump of steel and go hurtling down the freeway at 65 miles per hour. In fact I use denial very effectively.