Q:

Is willful ignorance about one's own mortality escapism?

I don't mean if someone is dying of cancer and they refuse treatment or something -- I'm saying if a healthy person who is unhappy obsessing over his own inevitable death one day chooses to ignore this in order to relax and be happy, is this escapism? Is it a petty, cowardly act? Should one obsess over it, meditate on it and try and somehow find peace with it, or just live their life - and is doing the latter escapism? Is pushing it out of one's mind some kind of desperate coping mechanism, where meditating on it until you find peace with it is the only way to confront this issue bravely, or is the opposite true?
Addendum
I acknowledge my post has some interesting word usage, such as petty or cowardly, so I'll provide some context. This was made clear to me from the following words of one of the users:

My point was: why do you feel this that "finding peace" with your upcoming demise is a requirement? Who/what put that requirement on you? And why do you feel that postponing this process is "cowardly"? Who/what told you it is "cowardly" to not resolve your angsts right away? Note: you shall not give the answer to those two questions to me. You need to give those answers to yourself. And after that, the follow-up question becomes: do you really care about that this who/what thinks these things?

I am told to give these answers to myself, but I feel that this might provide some context, as I've said.
I feel that this "finding peace" is a requirement because it would enable me to not obsess and feel unhappy about my own inevitable demise one day.
I put that requirement on myself because I believe it is an 'antidote' of sorts to not worry about this sort of thing.
I don't feel, but worry that postponing this process is "cowardly" as I'm wondering if others agree or disagree that it escapes the reality of our demise by not thinking about it -- hiding from the thought of it and unable to bear the hard truth. 
Basically, I'd like to allow myself to learn how to not dwell on it, but I don't want to be escapist -- unable to handle the truth of reality so I retreat into ignorance of the fact of my own demise. So I'd like to know if this is not dwelling on it thing is justified or not so as I can think of myself as not cowardly.

A:

Actually the whole business of living other than the animalic part, is denying death. 
So the idealism you are seeking by not denying death is itself a denial of death. 

[I]

The human animal is the only animal that knows it is going to die. (Sartre)

As a result we fear death but not necessarily consciously:

If this fear [of death] were as constantly conscious, we should be unable to
  function normally. It must be properly repressed to keep us living
  with any modicum of comfort. We know very well that to repress means
  more than to put away and to forget that which was put away and the
  place where we put it. It means also to maintain a constant
  psychological effort to keep the lid on and inwardly never relax our
  watchfulness. (Zilboorg)

The only way to constantly repress this fear, is self-esteem:

Self-esteem provides a buffer against death-related anxiety.

The fact that religion is part of our nature makes salvation a universal desire:

Every society thus is a "religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet
  “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are
  scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to
  disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from
  their lives. As we shall see further on, it was Otto Rank who showed
  psychologically this religious nature of all human cultural creation;
  and more recently the idea was revived by Norman O. Brown in his Life
  Against Death and by Robert Jay Lifton in his Revolutionary
  Immortality. (The denial of death, Ernest Becker)

Self-esteem is the umbrella for all the concrete forms of religion:

One's ego-ideal is his religion. The self-esteem is the
  self-estimation of how much is the self-image consistent with the
  ego-ideal. A higher self-esteem means a higher chance of salvation, thus less fear of death.

Now that you know that all the business of non-animalic living is due to the universal urge for the death denying factor self-esteem, you should live from the perspective of inevitability of this dreadful fact: 

Either have sufficient self-esteem or suffer from the fear of death or
  its endless manifestations.

Manifestations of death anxiety:

For behind the sense of insecurity in the face of danger, behind the
  sense of discouragement and depression, there always lurks the basic
  fear of death, a fear which undergoes most complex elaborations and
  manifests itself in many indirect ways. No one is free of the
  fear of death. The anxiety neuroses, the various phobic states,
  even a considerable number of depressive suicidal states and many
  schizophrenias amply demonstrate the ever-present fear of death which
  becomes woven into the major conflicts of the given psychopathological
  conditions. We may take for granted that the fear of death is
  always present in our mental functioning.(Zilboorg)

[II]
Your urge for idealism is really an urge for self-esteem, but the problem is that constant confrontation of one with his own death results in ultimate despair, therefore by chasing this idealism, you are choosing despair as a source self-esteem. 
It's okay to deny death since you can never completely become aware of it, because no matter what, there will be some self-esteem left, even in depression: 

The torture of depressive psychosis: to remain steeped in one's
  failure and yet to justify it, to continue to draw a sense of
  worth-whileness out of it. (The denial of death, Ernest Becker)

Do not add to the guilt (the existential guilt) which is already inevitably there . Seek pleasure and high self-esteem. It's okay to escape: even the last one to tell you that which is Albert Camus, made worth out of his condition of being special because of realizing the truth of our existence and he did not choose to despair. he chose pleasure and had several girl friends at the same time.

[III] How to obtain "Self-esteem" ?
The features of genuine sources of self-esteem:

(A) Does not involve self-accusation as in depression.
(B) Does not involve self-inflation as in narcissism, where the self is a balloon with no real concretization for the self-esteem origin that can be approved by others. This is doomed to failure and the subject will swing back
  to/from despair.

The genuine origin of self-esteem must be concrete and objective so that it can be approved by others and therefore reflected from them:

If I were asked for the single most striking insight into human nature
  and the human condition, it would be this; that no person is strong
  enough to support the meaning of his or her life unaided by something
  and/or someone outside himself or herself. (Angel in armor, Ernest Becker)

Whatever your own version of meaning of life (your origin of self-esteem) should be testified and shared by others.
Update:
What i mean by others is not necessarily the whole culture, but a sub-culture or even part of that would work.
This brings us to the Epicureans, which in addition to emphasizing the importance pleasure as a way to mask existential dread, they also emphasized friendship. Having a group of friends that share your answer for meaning of life (even if the answer is nil), will boost your self-esteem.

A:

Interesting question; I've been pondering/researching the topic of escapism recently.
To answer your first question, willful ignorance can certainly be a form of escapism, in the broad sense of the term - keeping in mind that "escapism" is rather loosely defined. If escapism has a more precise philosophical definition that I'm not aware of, then you can ignore my post. ;)
The question of whether willful ignorance of one's mortality is a cowardly act is a gray area. Willful ignorance can certainly be a cowardly act; in fact, it could probably be considered an illegal act in certain circumstances.
However, if we focus exclusively on willful ignorance of our mortality, then it's more of a gray area. If pondering one's mortality induces depression, then does willfully blocking the thought out of your mind make you a coward, or is it just a common sense antidote to depression?
We might therefore say that the question of whether willful ignorance of one's mortality qualifies as cowardice depends on the reason one chooses to ignore it. However, this reasoning might just lead us in circles.
One could also argue that pondering one's mortality is ultimately useless. All we know for certain is that we're going to die. What happens after our lives end and the very definition of life and death are questions people have been pondering for thousands of years.
In this spirit, we could argue that willful ignorance of mortality is no more cowardly than willful ignorance of quantum physics. Why waste your life pondering something you may not have the aptitude to understand?
Looking at it from yet another perspective, I like this quote...

Music and art and culture is escapism, and escapism sometimes is
  healthy for people to get away from reality. The problem is when they
  stay there.

In this spirit, we might argue for some balance, taking time to occasionally ponder our mortality without becoming obsessed with it.
In summary, I would argue that willfully ignoring one's mortality can qualify as a form of escapism - though it could also qualify as other things. Similarly, it can be considered cowardly, but it could also be a practical or even courageous act.
Unfortunately, I haven't had time to ponder a set of guidelines that help us know whether a specific act of willful ignorance (regarding our mortality) is cowardly or not. If any philosophers have tackled this subject, I'm all ears. However, I have a hunch it largely boils down to opinion.
P.S. In my cursory research, I approached escapism from a psychological perspective, and it didn't appear a lot of research has been devoted to it. I wasn't aware that philosophers had much to say about it, which is ironic when some have speculated that philosophy itself is escapist...
Is Philosophy Inherently Escapist?

A:

This question takes it for granted that fear of death is a logical necessary thing. However, there is nothing that is more clearly a product of evolution than fear of death. There is no deep truth about the fact that lack of fear of death is not selected for in nature. It is hard to defend the worth of meditating and/or obsessing about something that has an obvious evolutionary reason (because make no mistake you are not obsessing about death you are obsessing about your fear of it).

