Death Anxiety in the College Years

Remembrance & Mourning

“You’re too young to be thinking about death.”

It sounds reasonable. College is supposed to be about beginnings: new independence, new relationships, new ideas, new possibilities, and the gradual construction of an adult life. Death belongs somewhere much farther down the road.

Except, of course, it doesn’t.

College students (and all emerging adults whether in college or not) lose grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, classmates, partners, and pets. They encounter sudden deaths through accidents, illness, suicide, and overdose. Some arrive at college already carrying losses they have barely begun to understand. And all of this happens during a period when their own identities are still taking shape.

Learning how to grieve in young adulthood is part of growing up.

Research on emerging adulthood generally places the period between adolescence and established adulthood in the late teens through the twenties. It is a time of tremendous possibility, but also instability, uncertainty, and identity exploration. For college students in particular, familiar structures may be falling away at the same time they are expected to build new ones. Home changes. Friendships change. Family relationships change. Beliefs are questioned. Career plans emerge and collapse. Relationships begin and end. The person someone imagined becoming at eighteen may look very different by twenty-two.

In that sense, the college years are already full of small endings.

When Mortality Becomes Personal

Many college students are also what grief researchers have called “first-time grievers”: young adults encountering a significant death without much previous experience of bereavement or any clear idea of what grief is supposed to look like. The loss occurs alongside the ordinary demands of emerging adulthood: classes, work, finances, relationships, independence, and the ongoing task of figuring out who they are becoming.

A death can therefore do more than cause grief. It can destabilize a world that was already under construction.

There is a difference between knowing that people die and discovering that your people die.

There is also a difference between knowing intellectually that you will die someday and suddenly realizing that mortality includes you.

That realization can produce death anxiety, but death anxiety is not simply “being afraid of death.” Researchers measure fears surrounding the dying process, premature death, the unknown, what happens to the body, and the prospect of nonexistence itself. Different people fear different pieces of death.

For an emerging adult, another question may be tangled into all of them: I have barely become someone. How can that someone cease to exist?

Building a Self While Discovering It Will Die

This is one reason death anxiety during the college years deserves particular attention.

Emerging adulthood is, in many ways, a prolonged threshold. Anthropologists have long used the concept of liminality to describe the uncertain middle period of a transition: the old identity has been left behind, but the new one has not yet been fully established. The transition into adulthood fits remarkably well into this framework.

The child-self is gradually relinquished while the adult-self remains unfinished. A young person is learning not only practical independence but also what they believe, whom they love, where they belong, what kind of work matters to them, and what kind of person they hope to become.

Then mortality enters the conversation.

Leaving behind imagined versions of yourself is also a sort of death to be grieved.

Death anxiety does not occur separately from those questions. It becomes entangled with them.

Who am I?

What am I going to do with my life?

What matters to me?

Will I matter to anyone else?

How much time do I have?

Human beings have developed remarkably elaborate ways of living with those questions. Terror Management Theory proposes that awareness of our inevitable death creates an existential problem: we are living creatures strongly motivated to survive who also possess the cognitive ability to understand that survival ultimately fails. Culture helps make that knowledge manageable by giving us systems of meaning, values, identities, communities, and ways of understanding our place in a larger world.

In other words, humans do not merely fear death.

We build meaning in response to it.

The Problem With “Don’t Think About It”

Unfortunately, one of the cultural tools we frequently hand young people is avoidance.

Don’t worry about that yet.

You have your whole life ahead of you.

Think positively.

Move on.

Get back to normal.

There is usually kindness behind these statements. But they do not give someone much to work with when death actually arrives.

Death education remains surprisingly limited in higher education, even in fields whose graduates will eventually work directly with dying and bereaved people. Research discussed in the Death Education Central project has found that structured college courses dealing with death and dying can reduce death anxiety and improve students’ preparedness for engaging with mortality.

That matters because talking about death does not summon death. It gives us language for something that was already there.

Death education cannot eliminate mortality, and it should not promise to eliminate fear. Some fear of death is entirely reasonable. Nor should the goal be to convince young adults that death is beautiful, desirable, or somehow nothing to worry about.

The goal is much simpler. We can learn to look at mortality without immediately looking away.

Remembering Is Part of Learning to Live With Death

This is where remembrance enters the story.

Human beings do not respond to death only by fearing it. We also remember.

We tell stories. We keep photographs. We cook someone's recipe. We visit graves. We light candles. We save voicemail messages and handwritten notes. We wear jewelry that belonged to someone. We repeat their jokes. We say their names. We gather on anniversaries. Across cultures and across history, people have created rituals that allow relationships with the dead to be acknowledged, expressed, and transformed.

Contemporary grief theory describes this through the concept of continuing bonds. Healthy grieving does not require severing our attachment to someone who has died. Relationships can continue in altered forms through memory, identity, ritual, storytelling, values, and the ways the deceased remain incorporated into the lives of the living. Continuing Bonds has become an important framework for understanding these ongoing relationships with the dead.

For an emerging adult, this can be particularly important because remembrance is not only about the past. It can become part of the construction of the future self.

What did this person teach me?

What part of them do I carry with me?

What stories about them will I keep telling?

How has knowing them shaped the person I am becoming?

How has losing them changed what I believe matters?

Grief disrupts identity. Remembrance can help weave the relationship back into it.

The person is dead. The relationship is changed. But neither fact requires us to pretend that the relationship never existed or that its influence has ended.

Learning to Remember

College is supposed to prepare young adults for life. We teach them how to interpret literature, solve equations, understand cells, analyze societies, write arguments, enter professions, and participate in civic life. We devote enormous energy to preparing them for what they might encounter in adulthood.

Loss is one of the few things we know they will encounter. Yet we often leave them to learn about it only after it happens.

Perhaps death education belongs more fully within education because learning how to live also means developing some capacity to face endings: the deaths of people we love, the loss of identities and imagined futures, and eventually the knowledge of our own mortality.

Remembrance cannot make death harmless. Mourning cannot erase death anxiety. Neither should be expected to.

But remembrance gives us one answer to mortality's insistence that everything disappears.

A life can end and still leave something behind: stories, relationships, gestures, knowledge, traditions, objects, values, memories, and changes made in other people.

For a young adult who is still asking, "Who am I becoming?", perhaps one of the most important discoveries is that none of us becomes ourselves entirely alone.

We are partly constructed from those who came before us, those who walk beside us, and even those we have lost.

Perhaps learning to live includes learning how to remember.

We walk with our ancestors.