Recently, I was visiting with an 88-year-old friend who told me that he had another 18 months to live, at most. But, he was not upset at all. He said.”the nature of this disease is that I could drop dead at any moment, and that’s OK.” He has no fear of death — just a quiet, almost friendly, acceptance of the inevitable.
She was a born-again Christian, and he is loosely Catholic. So, religion doesn’t explain their emotional calmness in the face of death. Maybe, it is just the final stage of dying described by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her hallmark 1969 book, On Death and Dying, which she called acceptance.
I think they were closet existentialists, even if they didn’t know it. They were never terrified of death, not just when they faced it. They were not fatalistic. They just didn’t see the point in being afraid.