This post explores how the meaning of death is distorted in Jehovah’s Witness teachings and culture, and three ways that rethinking everything we formerly believed about death can help us learn to be truly alive.

Reassessing JW beliefs about death

Many of us struggle to figure out what we want after leaving the Witnesses. Creating a meaningful life can seem like an impossible task and it is incredibly difficult to know where to start. While it may be a bit confronting, one simple way to get clarity on what is meaningful to you is to think about what you will care about most when you are about to die.

For former JWs, this first requires us to rethink everything we ever believed about death. For so long we were told that death doesn’t really matter all that much. Death is just something that will happen for a while until God does away with it in the new system. If we die before then, will be in God’s memory, and as long as we didn’t upset him too much while we were alive, he will bring us back so that we can prove all over again that we deserve to live forever.

We were even taught that death can be a good thing, either fast-tracking someone’s admission to Paradise, or giving someone who may not have been quite up to scratch a better chance of making it through to the other side (the Armageddon loophole). In Paradise all dead loved ones will return, and death will not happen anymore, at least to any who deserve to live.

Death is also used in JW culture as a recruitment tool. JW funerals focus more on the religion than the person who actually died, and they are used as an opportunity to try and recruit non-JW family members who may be attending. JWs are taught to swoop in on people they meet who have recently suffered a bereavement, with the aim of taking advantage of their vulnerability to persuade them to join.

If anyone does die permanently, which means that they are never to be resurrected (usually the result of ‘grieving the spirit’), that person is clearly evil and deserves ‘eternal death’ anyway. If that happens to you, it means you have failed completely in your efforts to please God, so you live in fear of this outcome, constantly worried that you are not doing enough. Failure will cost you your life.  

In the JW world, death is both minimised and exploited simultaneously. It is something we just need to put up with temporarily until it won’t happen anymore, but at the same time it used to advantage to both recruit new members and keep existing ones living in fear of not pleasing God. The religion hijacked the true meaning of death for it’s own ends, which ensured that we never stopped to think about what death really means.  

Let’s take a step back from all that and think about what we do know about death, without the JW distortions, and regardless of your beliefs now about what happens when you die. What do we know for sure?

We know that one day we will die. This life, the one you and I have now, with the people in it now, will end. We will not be here in this life, in this form, forever. Our families, pets, friends, and ourselves, will all pass away. Even if there is something more, it will not be like now. It will be very different.

Thinking about what this actually means is something we likely never did as JWs, so we are now going to cover three ways that rethinking death can help provide real clarity in our lives now.

Three ways death can help us learn how to live

1. Death helps you value life

The fact that life is not permanent or guaranteed helps us to value it even more, and nothing makes you realise this more clearly than losing someone you love, or having your own close shave with death. “I never felt more alive than the day I almost died”, is a sentiment expressed by many people who have had near death experiences. Realising the impermanence of our lives helps us value every moment we have, and to think carefully about how we want to spend it and with whom.

For JWs however, the only value their lives have is in their ability to serve God (aka the organisation). Absolutely no value whatsoever is placed on their lives this side of Armageddon. It is the default assumption that no one can be truly happy right now anyway, and life in this system is merely something to be endured, so the best thing you can do for yourself is to sacrifice everything now for rewards later. This is how things like meetings and field service somehow make their way to the top of our priority list, bumping off all the other things we would rather be doing with our limited and precious time. We then justify the time we spend doing this by reasoning such as, ‘Oh well, we will get to have everything we want later, in Paradise’.

We place no value on the lives that we have now, and so never stop to think of what really matters to us now, or what will have mattered to us in this life, when we are about to die. Our top priority is making it into the new world, so that then, we can live the life we want to live.

However, when you reframe death as being the end to your life (at least in its current form), and your life now is a once off, never to be repeated, you start to see things a bit differently. You don’t want to waste time doing things that have no value to you. You don’t want to waste it with people you don’t really care about. You want to try and be a better person, you want to be with those you love, and you want to make even a small difference for the better in this world, because you know you won’t be here forever. Your life and your time feels so precious, so you want to make the most of it.

Take some time to think about the impermanence of your life and what that really means to you in the absence of all the JW distortions. Then, when you are ready, give some thought to how you really want to spend your precious time here. If you struggle to work out what is truly important to you (understandable given we were never allowed to work this out), the ‘deathbed test’ can help you clarify your priorities.   

2. Death clarifies your priorities

After years of being told what is important but never having a chance to work it out for yourself, you may struggle to know what is truly important to you, and what your priorities should be to create the life you want. The ‘deathbed test’ is a great method for cutting through all of this. It helps clarify what is most meaningful to you, which in-turn helps guide the decisions you make about your life.

The ‘deathbed test’ is where you imagine that your life is going to end very soon or imminently, and you think about what you will care about the most in those moments. If you want to give this a go, have a pen and paper handy, then take some time to really imagine yourself there. Think about where you might be, and who you want around you, then note down the thoughts and feelings that come. What is most important to you? Who is most important to you? How are you feeling? What are you feeling? What things recede into the background? This exercise can bring about some unexpected results, where things you once thought were a top priority suddenly become totally unimportant, and vice versa.   

Your answers will show you what you truly value, when everything has been stripped away and it is just you, looking back at your life. The aim of this exercise is to use the things you identify as most important to you to guide your life and decisions now. Think about how you want to feel when this time comes, and make any necessary changes to live in a way which is aligned with these values.

When I did the deathbed test there were so many thoughts racing around my mind that I needed to write it all down. It was several years ago now but without even re-reading my notes I can recall pretty much everything. In case it is helpful, here are a few of my observations from my own deathbed test:

• When everything else is stripped away, love and kindness are really all that matter
• The time I spend with my family, friends, and pets, suddenly became the most important thing.
• I value life experiences and personal integrity over status
• I want to feel like I have improved the lives of others in some small way
• I want to leave minimal impact on the world in terms of rubbish, pollution, and any harm to any living thing.
• Material things didn’t factor at all (not to minimise their value in improving our quality of life, just that this was not front of mind at that time)
• Making an organisation happy didn’t factor at all
• Making God (or a god) happy didn’t factor at all. If there is a god, they will love me and accept me for who I am and will understand my entire life anyway, so I don’t need to try and make them happy. All they are going to care about is that I lived my life the way that was best for me, and I did my best not to intentionally harm anything or anyone around me. 

Doing the deathbed test also forced me to imagine not being here one day, which in-turn helped me see that most things I stress about are not only temporary, but they are only important to me. If I didn’t worry about these things, nothing bad would happen. This has helped me keep the bigger picture in mind in my day-to-day life, which in turn helps me to let go of the smaller things which really don’t matter, and which, if anything, take me farther away from living how I want to live according to my deathbed test.   

After doing your test, what stood out as most important to you? Are there things you need to change so that when this time really comes, you can feel good about your life? Is there anything you can do now to avoid future deathbed regrets?

Change can be difficult, but don’t let fear of failure hold you back. Rethinking what we believe about death can also help us with fear of failure.

3. Death removes fear of failure

As JWs there were so many ways for us to fail and all of them resulted in death: Succumbing to Satan, not living up to God’s/the organisation’s standards, not getting to meetings and witnessing, daring to speak to someone the organisation deemed worthy of shunning, the list goes on. The ultimate failure, however, was displeasing God so much that we either died at Armageddon, or didn’t deserve a resurrection if we happened to die beforehand. ‘Eternal death’ as the JWs call it, which is usually the result of ‘grieving the spirit’.

We were alive in the sense of, well, being physically alive, but we never learnt how to truly live. We lived in fear of failure, and failure meant death.

But now, ‘failure’ and ‘death’ don’t mean anything like what they meant when we were JWs.

Check out almost any dictionary definition of ‘failure’ and it usually says something like, ‘a lack of success’, or, very accurately, ‘an instance of not working properly’. It does not say ‘death’.

The meaning of death itself is also very different compared to what we thought as JWs. Death is not something to be downplayed, used to advantage, or simply tolerated until it won’t be an issue anymore, and death does not mean we have failed to live in a way which deserves life.

No matter what we do or how we live, we will die. But it is precisely this impermanence, death being such a contrast with life, which helps us value the time we have and prioritise how we want to spend it and with whom. Losing someone close to us will cause the greatest pain we will ever experience, but to really feel this pain and loss for what it is, without the JW distortions and regardless of what you believe happens afterwards, allows us to really appreciate what it means to have truly loved and been loved in return. It allows us to appreciate what it means to be alive.

Death does not mean failure, and failure does not mean death. When you are no longer a JW, the only failure worth mentioning is a failure to live life the way you want to because you still think that to fail will result in death. This is not true. All it will result in is a failure to truly live. Death will happen anyway.

When you have nothing to lose, ‘failure’ simply equals ‘not trying’, and now that you are a Witness no more, you get to choose what you try at, or whether to try at all. It is totally your choice. If you have a go and fail, at least you tried. If you don’t try, likely nothing bad will happen, you will just stay where you are now. You just need to make sure you are ok with that and won’t kick yourself later for not trying when you had the chance. 

Is there anything you would like to do that you haven’t tried yet? Did anything come up in your ‘deathbed test’ which will need you to make a few changes? Whatever you do, don’t let fear of failure hold you back. Just like everyone else alive today, you won’t be here one day, so what the hell, just give it a go. The only thing you will lose is the effort it takes to try.

All the best with your post-JW reassessment of death fellow newly minted mortals. I hope it brings you clarity on how you want to live.

Until next time,

Renee