Caring as a source of death anxiety in palliative care

For many nurses in general and community nurses in particular, the advent of caring for dying patients may serve as a constant reminder of how fragile their own lives are, increasing their worries about death and dying. Such death anxiety may be experienced each time they care for someone who is dying. Caring for dying patients brings death to the forefront of their minds and, by extension, ‘builds’ on their existential anxiety. Because its source is patients' death, this experience is termed death anxiety. The point is that community nurses and other palliative care professionals may experience an extra level of death anxiety from being exposed to dying episodes more often than any other health professional.

Great thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Soren Kierkegaard have argued that we move from our natural day-to-day living without thinking of our existence to being more mindful and aware of life and our need to exist, and hence we make all attempts to preserve life. While thinking of our existence more consciously can be useful, it also means, we inevitably bring death to forefront of our thought processes, which, in itself, may increase death anxiety (Nyatanga and Nyatanga, 2011). This increase may explain the continued presence of death taboos particularly in Western societies, as we attempt to block death from our everyday consciousness (Langford, 2002). The irony, which also makes death anxiety difficult to manage, is that death is the only certainty in life, and yet it remains one of the most potent causes of anxiety. Admittedly, not discussing death does not help us escape its inevitability. Therefore, our minds are perpetually disturbed by this elusive phenomenon in the form of death anxiety, with a potential negative effect on how we care for the dying.