112 – Dealing With Death - a podcast by Alf Herigstad

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DEALING WITH DEATH…
Thank you for sharing my journey, thank you for joining me on my personal path of being a better man today than I was yesterday. I’m just like you;  I’m a guy who wants to improve, to be a little better man each day.  I’ve been on this path of improvement for awhile, and this podcast gives me an opportunity to share my experiences and insights with you.  It allows me to pass along the things I have learned and the observations I have made. 
It is not required that you agree with everything I say either…even if you don’t agree, you may still be prompted to formulate your own ideas about things, and decide how you want to live, what kind of man you want to be…and thats the really important part.It should come as no surprise, that things that happen in my life right now will have some influence on the content of this show.  That is the case with this episode.
Over the weekend I got the news that My Uncle passed away.  He was my Mother’s baby brother.  He was perhaps the toughest man I ever knew, A brilliant mechanic, a loving father, husband and brother.  He also had his faults as we all do, but his laughter will be missed.  So right now my entire family is dealing with this fact.  I want to be very clear that I’m not telling you this for sympathy or anything, I don’t need your condolences.  It did however cause me to ponder the many ways in which people, men specifically, deal with death.I handle death differently than most people I know.  Many people, especially in our western culture really try to avoid the topic of death at all costs…they consider it a morbid, taboo topic.  As though it is something inherently bad.  That makes it difficult to have conversations about death in general, and I think that’s unfortunate.
I never really understood this myself.  People seem to focus only on the finality of death, on their own loss.  They act as though every single death is a tragedy. While I see death as merely another aspect of life, an inevitability that we all must deal with at one time or another.  To me its a completely natural thing that happens, just like being born.Every single person we know, every body…will be dead one day, including you and me.  We can’t avoid it.  When I watch an old movie I think about the fact that every single person on the screen is dead now.  Every winter the leaves on the trees die, every creature that walks, swims or crawls will die and be replaced by the next generation…it really is, a part of life.  So doesn’t it make sense to prepare ourselves to handle it in the best way that we can?I personally had a problem with death when I was a kid.  Around 7 or 8 I had a few elderly relatives die and I went to some funerals.  When I was 8 my beloved dog Lady died tragically.  I overheard from adults that before me there was was a child born in my family who was still born, an older sister I never got to know.  All of these things crashed down on my little brain, and In trying to understand and process it, I went a little crazy.
In trying to understand death, I became obsessed with it, and incredibly fearful of it.  Every night when I went to bed I truly believed I was going to die during the night.  I stopped telling my parents goodnight when I went to bed and instead would tell them a heartfelt goodbye, as though I would never see them again.It affected my behavior.  I was afraid to go to sleep each night.  And when I woke up each morning I was so relieved and joyful that I had been granted one more day to live. 
My parents eventually noticed that something weird was going on with me.  One day my dad took me aside and had a talk with me about death.  I don’t remember what he told me…but I remember that whatever it was fixed my problem, I wasn’t afraid of death anymore.  I was free once again to live my life as a normal child.Whatever magic words my father imparted to me that day, even...

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