The Last Fear

It always comes at the same hour.

Three in the morning. The house is quiet, and the thought arrives before you can stop it: one day this stops. The breathing, the noticing, the you of you. Almost everyone alive carries this fear. Almost no one says it out loud. We call it health anxiety and refresh the search results. We call it ambition and work another weekend. We call it nothing at all and pour a second drink. The fear of death is the great unspoken thing, the one we all carry and rarely set on the table between us.

The Last Fear sets it on the table. In eighteen unflinching, consoling essays, Robert Smith takes a long and steady look at death anxiety and the dread of dying, in the conviction that the fear shrinks not when we look away from death but when we finally turn and face it.

There is no false comfort here. No promise that you will live forever in some form, no insistence that death is beautiful, no clever argument meant to make the fear evaporate by lunchtime. There is something better: a way to stop bracing against a wave that has not yet come, and to begin, at last, to live the life you have while you still have it.

Drawing on Epicurus and the Stoics, Ernest Becker and Irvin Yalom, Atul Gawande and the quiet testimony of people at the end of their lives, this is a book for the 3 a.m. version of you. The one who lies awake doing the arithmetic.

Inside these pages:

• Why the dread feeds on avoidance, and how facing death directly is what finally calms it
• The hidden masks of death anxiety: hypochondria, overwork, perfectionism, and the hunger to leave a monument
• What people actually report at the end of their lives, and why it is almost never the terror the rest of us imagine
• How to untangle the several different fears braided inside "the fear of death" so each one can be answered
• How to talk about dying with the people you love, and the strange relief waiting on the other side of that conversation

If you have ever woken in the dark with your heart going and the cold thought already there, this book was written for you. You are not alone in the dark, and the dark is not the whole of it.