Two years ago, when travelling in the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, I visited the Labrang Monastery, a large monastery for Tibetan Buddhism. There, as I stood looking over the colorful roofs and dark green mountains, I noticed large birds circling the top of one mountain—a sky burial site for Tibetan villagers and Buddhists. Contrasting greatly with the cremation process I had heard of their treatment of the deceased body was unique and certainly embodied spiritual meanings. So why are there various burial traditions? Why do people care about what happens to their bodies after death if they won’t even know what is to happen after they die? This essay believes that we care what happens to our body after death because the physical body carries our cognition, and the action of caring reduces death terror and existential anxiety.

The Role of the Body: Embodiment and Continuation of Cognition and Self

The concept of “caring” symbolizes a mental process, a feeling generated by the mind. Conversely, the body is the executor of the mind, its physical carrier. So, to answer this question, this essay will first examine the relationship between the body and human cognition.

The traditional theory of dualism puts forth that the body is merely a vessel for our thoughts and thus is divided from the mind. However, studies of neuroscience and biology have demonstrated that the body is closely linked to cognition and is central to the existence of our thoughts and feelings. Our knowledge and experiences largely depend on our physical form, making the body an important component of self-awareness. The Embodied Cognition theory states that there are at least two levels of bodily involvement in cognition: one that requires it directly, and another, through neural simulations, that requires it indirectly. The mind is grounded in the body, and cognitive skills are produced by the interplay between neural and non-neural processes (Foglia &Wilson, 2013). As Foglia and Wilson (2013) stated, “the body intrinsically constrains, regulates, and shapes the nature of mental activity” (p. 1).

Because our body is the carrier of our cognition, our sense of self-continuity—the belief that we remain essentially the same self across the past, present, and future (Sedikides et al., 2023)—is maintained by the physical body throughout our lives. When death befalls us, however, our cognition disappears as neurons stop firing signals, and feelings and perceptions no longer exist; yet, the body remains. Strictly following this biology reality, we should have no sense of self after death, and consequently, self-continuity should stop. However, whenever we imagine our own death, we inevitably picture how our bodies will be treated and how those around us will react, effectively maintaining a psychological sense of self that survives death. This produces an apparent paradox: our sense of self-continuity does not seem to vanish with death, even though we already acknowledge the simultaneous disappearance of cognition. This paradox is only possible because the body is so tightly bound to identity while during life that this cognitive link carries over into how we conceptualize ourselves after death. We subconsciously believe that our body inherits the dignity and self-respect we once attach to our living self. From this embodied-cognition view, mistreating the body after death means mistreating the mind it once housed, which is something the mind will not accept while still alive. The body therefore stops being merely the biological foundation of our cognition, memories, and experience; instead, it transforms into a representation—a monument standing for the existence of our cognition and our life, and ourselves. We care about what happens to our bodies after death, then, for the same reason we care about ourselves while alive: the body represents the self.

Managing Fear of Death

Evolution has made humans possess intellectual capacities that other animals lack. While these cognitive abilities have made us more adaptive to the environment, they also gave our ancestors the ability to understand through mental simulation that death is inevitable and could arrive at any time, for any number of reasons. As Pyszczynski et al. (2015) explain, the juxtaposition of this understanding with the “strong desire for life,” which arose from adaptations that enabled “surviving long enough to reproduce and care for offspring” created the potential for existential terror. This essay argues that we care about what happens to our bodies after death precisely to overcome this terror of death. Pyszczynski et al. (2015) propose Terror Management Theory, holding that humans manage this terror through connecting to a cultural worldview, which decides how we dispose of our bodies in practice, translating our abstract fear into concrete action.

In the imagination of our death mentioned above, we are in fact carrying out a mental simulation, defined as the process of imagining or rehearsing events, actions, or outcomes in one’s mind (NeuroLaunch, 2025). During this simulation, alongside picturing a “self” undergoing death, another process occurs: the emergence of the fear of death. Simulating death means simulating decomposition and stiffening. Since the body, as established above, is our representation of the self, imagining its decay means imagining the destruction of that representation, which poses a direct threat to our belief in self-continuity. To manage the anxiety this produces, we arrange funerals and methods of disposal that we believe preserve or honor the body, because doing so lets us preserve our sense that the self continues even after death.

A cultural worldview is a powerful psychological solution to our fear of death, which is also tightly linked to how we imagine our death. A cultural worldview is a humanly constructed, shared understanding of reality that gives life meaning, order, and permanence, and sets standards by which people measure their value. While mortality awareness triggers terror, this cultural worldview provides a sense of order, meaning, and stability (Ispas, 2025). The cultural worldview also offers two forms of immortality, aligning with the self-continuity theory mentioned earlier: literal immortality, which is the continuation of existence after physical death, often related to religious concepts such as the afterlife, and symbolic immortality, which manifests through contributions to something greater than ourselves (Ispas, 2025). As Solomon et al. (2015) explain, such cultural beliefs in immortality help manage the “potential terror that arises from the awareness of our inevitable physical death” (p.13). Caring about what happens to our bodies after death, and planning their disposal, is one way we translate these abstract beliefs into concrete action: we project our values onto the physical body, making it a representation of a sense of order and meaning even after death and easing our fear of the inevitability. Burial customs around the world illustrate this mechanism in practice. In Hindu culture, cremation embodies the soul’s journey towards reincarnation; in Islamic traditions, earth burial honors the belief that humans were created from the earth, and sky burials emphasize the impermanence of life and the importance of going back to nature (“Burial Customs Around the World,” 2025). Through these disposal practices, the deceased is granted a larger meaning, or access to the afterlife. Examining how this defense mechanism plays out in practice reveals a further reason we care for our dead body: choosing a traditional or religious method of disposal is also a way of connecting with a religious or ethnic community. Facing death alongside that community allows people to draw strength from it, further reducing their fear.

Overcoming Existential Anxiety: Confronting the Inevitable and Bestowing Meaning Upon Death

While the fear of death is a common phenomenon among humans, this essay believes that it is essential to differentiate between death terror and death anxiety. The former is evoked by specific events and leads to intense emotional reactions, whereas the latter is a constant undercurrent related to core human values and personal beliefs (Lei, 2022). In the case of death, it is a challenge to the common belief that “each person’s life is unique and meaningful,” as our significance as individuals lies in our identity, life choices, personal relationships, and achievements, all of which seem to become insignificant in the face of death, which equally reduces everyone to nonbeing. This concept of death anxiety largely overlaps with existential anxiety, a cornerstone of existential psychology. This is a branch of psychology that focuses on individual experience, freedom, and authenticity, emphasizing the importance of personal choice and responsibility in shaping one’s existence, and suggesting that meaning derives from experiences rather than abstract systems (“Existential psychology,” n.d.). This approach focuses on the awareness of the inevitability of one’s own death as the key generator of anxiety, which, as Tillich (1952) explains, is “the existential awareness of nonbeing” (p. 35). The central point of this anxiety is not just mortality itself, but the loss of meaning as a result of mortality, as the question Becker raises in his renowned work The Denial of Death, “If we come from nothing and return to nothing, how can we avoid even now a sense of nothingness?” This essay proposes that the third reason for caring about what happens to our bodies after death is to overcome this existential anxiety.

The existential approach to managing this anxiety involves a direct confrontation with the possibility of death, rather than avoidance, since repressed anxiety does not disappear but resurfaces as despair once we sense the impossibility of existence. By accepting the inevitability of death and mortality, we bring anxiety to the surface and face life directly, without avoidance (Van Deurzen, 2012, p. 48). As Irvin D. Yalom (2008) states, “the awareness of death can serve as a revealing experience” (p. 30), motivating one to consider life course changes and find a personal meaning in life and death.

One way of confronting death directly is by thinking about what should happen to our bodies afterward. For Yalom (2008), the inevitability of death can be perceived as a factor that undermines meaning in life. But to humans, life, with all its unique experiences and emotions, is meant to be meaningful, making the deprivation imposed by death unacceptable. When we think about what we want done with our bodies after death, we do two things at once: we embrace the fact that our lives will one day end, and we bestow personal meaning upon death itself, countering its threat to the meaning of our lives.

This is most visible in cases where individuals choose, of their own accord, a form of body disposal that reflects their personal values rather than an inherited religious or cultural tradition. Some people choose green or natural burial, in which the body is allowed to decompose without embalming or a casket, sometimes becoming compost for new growth, because they want their death to express a personal commitment to the natural world and the cycle of life. Today, some people also choose to sign contracts for donating organs after death, or even their whole body to medical schools, a decision typically motivated by s strong personal wish to extend the lives of others and contribute to medical research. In each case, each choice lets a person translate their own understanding of what made their life meaningful into a concrete act concerning their body, bestowing meaning upon death itself, thus combating existential anxiety.

Conclusion

We care what happens to our body after death because the body embodies our cognition and carries our sense of self-continuity; thus, caring for it after death is an extension of the respect we hold for ourselves while alive. In addition, caring about the fate of our bodies allows us to overcome the fear of death and reduce our existential anxiety, enabling us to translate abstract beliefs into concrete actions. Only by confronting death itself, and by reckoning with what will become of our bodies, can we learn to live fully and attend to each moment.

Reference

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