what do you think about death essay

5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

by Sarah Kliff

It is never easy to contemplate the end-of-life, whether its own our experience or that of a loved one.

This has made a recent swath of beautiful essays a surprise. In different publications over the past few weeks, I’ve stumbled upon writers who were contemplating final days. These are, no doubt, hard stories to read. I had to take breaks as I read about Paul Kalanithi’s experience facing metastatic lung cancer while parenting a toddler, and was devastated as I followed Liz Lopatto’s contemplations on how to give her ailing cat the best death possible. But I also learned so much from reading these essays, too, about what it means to have a good death versus a difficult end from those forced to grapple with the issue. These are four stories that have stood out to me recently, alongside one essay from a few years ago that sticks with me today.

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

As recently as last month, popular author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was in great health, even swimming a mile every day. Then, everything changed: the 81-year-old was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. In a beautiful op-ed , published in late February in the New York Times, he describes his state of mind and how he’ll face his final moments. What I liked about this essay is how Sacks describes how his world view shifts as he sees his time on earth getting shorter, and how he thinks about the value of his time.

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

Kalanthi began noticing symptoms — “weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough” — during his sixth year of residency as a neurologist at Stanford. A CT scan revealed metastatic lung cancer. Kalanthi writes about his daughter, Cady and how he “probably won’t live long enough for her to have a memory of me.” Much of his essay focuses on an interesting discussion of time, how it’s become a double-edged sword. Each day, he sees his daughter grow older, a joy. But every day is also one that brings him closer to his likely death from cancer.

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Becklund’s essay was published posthumonously after her death on February 8 of this year. One of the unique issues she grapples with is how to discuss her terminal diagnosis with others and the challenge of not becoming defined by a disease. “Who would ever sign another book contract with a dying woman?” she writes. “Or remember Laurie Becklund, valedictorian, Fulbright scholar, former Times staff writer who exposed the Salvadoran death squads and helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots? More important, and more honest, who would ever again look at me just as Laurie?”

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Dorothy Parker was Lopatto’s cat, a stray adopted from a local vet. And Dorothy Parker, known mostly as Dottie, died peacefully when she passed away earlier this month. Lopatto’s essay is, in part, about what she learned about end-of-life care for humans from her cat. But perhaps more than that, it’s also about the limitations of how much her experience caring for a pet can transfer to caring for another person.

Yes, Lopatto’s essay is about a cat rather than a human being. No, it does not make it any easier to read. She describes in searing detail about the experience of caring for another being at the end of life. “Dottie used to weigh almost 20 pounds; she now weighs six,” Lopatto writes. “My vet is right about Dottie being close to death, that it’s probably a matter of weeks rather than months.”

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

“Letting Go” is a beautiful, difficult true story of death. You know from the very first sentence — “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die” — that it is going to be tragic. This story has long been one of my favorite pieces of health care journalism because it grapples so starkly with the difficult realities of end-of-life care.

In the story, Monopoli is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a surprise for a non-smoking young woman. It’s a devastating death sentence: doctors know that lung cancer that advanced is terminal. Gawande knew this too — Monpoli was his patient. But actually discussing this fact with a young patient with a newborn baby seemed impossible.

"Having any sort of discussion where you begin to say, 'look you probably only have a few months to live. How do we make the best of that time without giving up on the options that you have?' That was a conversation I wasn't ready to have," Gawande recounts of the case in a new Frontline documentary .

What’s tragic about Monopoli’s case was, of course, her death at an early age, in her 30s. But the tragedy that Gawande hones in on — the type of tragedy we talk about much less — is how terribly Monopoli’s last days played out.

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Why is death bad?

Even without a hereafter, dying gets a bad rap. but why exactly is it no good – because of what happens, or what doesn’t.

by Eric Olson   + BIO

Most of us think it’s a bad thing to die. I certainly don’t want to die any time soon, and you probably don’t either. There are, of course, exceptions. Some people actively want to die. They might be unbearably lonely, or in chronic pain, or gradually sliding into senile dementia that will destroy their intellect without remainder. And there might be no prospect of improvement. They wake up every morning disappointed to find that they haven’t died in their sleep. In these cases, it might be better to die than to continue a life not worth living. But most of the time death is unwelcome, and we do all we can to avoid it.

Death is bad not only for those left behind. If I were to die today, my loved ones would be grief-stricken, my son would be orphaned, and my colleagues would have to mark my students’ exams. That would be terrible for them. But death would be terrible for me, too. Much as I care about my colleagues’ wellbeing, I have my own selfish reasons for staying alive. And this isn’t peculiar to me. When people die, we feel sorry for them, and not merely for ourselves at losing them – especially if death takes them when they’re young and full of promise. We consider it one of the worst things that can happen to someone.

This would be easy to understand if death were followed by a nasty time in the hereafter. It could be that death is not the end of us, but merely a transition from one sort of existence to another. We might somehow carry on in a conscious state after we die, in spite of the decay and dissolution that takes place in the grave. I might be doomed to eternal torment in hell. That would obviously be bad for me: it would make me worse off than I am now.

But what if there is no hereafter? What if death really is the end – we return to the dust from which we came and that’s it? Then death can’t make us worse off than we are now. Or at least not in the straightforward way that burning in hell could make us worse off. To be dead is not to exist at all, and there’s nothing unpleasant about that. No one minds being dead. The dead never complain, and not merely because their mouths have stopped working. They are simply no longer there to be unhappy.

W e might reasonably fear the process of dying – the decline in health, often painful and undignified, that ends in death. But it looks like a mistake to fear the nothingness that is death itself. When we are dead we shall be exactly as we were before we were conceived, and we know firsthand that that was all right. Being dead looks no worse than being in a dreamless sleep.

If death really is just annihilation, then, how could it be bad to die? It seems clear that it is bad, but why is it? One fascinating answer is that, actually, it isn’t bad. Our loathing of death is all a mistake. This appears to have been the view of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus:

So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former, it is not, and the latter are no more.

Our own death does not affect us while we’re alive. The expectation or fear of death can affect us, but not death itself. Nor does it affect us when we’re dead: nothing can affect us then. So death, Epicurus thought, is nothing to us. It can never be bad to die. Not because the benefits of death outweigh the harms, but because death is powerless to do us any harm at all.

It makes no difference what the circumstances are: even if my life is as good as life could be and set to continue so – supersaturated with success, satisfaction and love – it would not be in any way bad for me if it were all to end right now. The rational attitude is not fear of death or a desire to put it off for as long as possible, but complete indifference about the length of one’s life and the hour of one’s death. We might have a reason to continue living for the sake of others, but never for our own sake. The aversion to death is like the aversion to having a hotel room on the 13th floor: both are based on false beliefs about what can do us harm.

That would be quite a surprise. If it were true, it would be the most important discovery in the entire history of philosophy. Death is the thing most of us dread above all else. This attitude is nearly universal across all cultures and eras. Epicurus did not exaggerate in calling death the most terrifying of evils. What greater comfort could there be than learning that there is nothing to dread?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how Epicurus could be right about this. Think of the good things in life: pleasure, success, happiness, friendship and love, for instance. If such things aren’t good, nothing is. But we can’t have any of them if we’re dead. In order to have pleasure, happiness or love, we have to be alive. That makes it good to continue living: it’s good by making these good things possible. And in that case it’s a mistake to be indifferent about the length of our lives. It’s better not to die, because that’s the only way of getting good things such as success and happiness. Death is not nothing to us, but something we have a powerful reason to avoid, at least in most circumstances. That makes our aversion to death all too appropriate.

We can see this in another way by thinking about the unfortunate cases where death seems a blessing. If it could never be bad to die, then it could never be good either. If death puts us beyond harm’s reach, it must also put us beyond the reach of any benefit. To be dead is not to exist at all, and just as there is nothing nasty about not existing, there is equally nothing pleasant about it. No one enjoys being dead, or feels relieved at having been released from the burden of existence. The dead never complain, but they don’t rejoice either, and for the same reason: they no longer exist. If this means that death can’t harm us and we have no reason to avoid it, it must also mean that death can’t do us any good, and we can never have any reason to seek it. Faced with the choice between dying now and being brutally tortured for 10 years and then dying, we ought to be completely indifferent. That’s what it would mean for death to be nothing to us.

Even the most peaceful sleep can be bad by causing you to miss the party. Death can be bad by causing you to miss the rest of your life

If Epicurus were right, it would be no kindness to put a pet out of its misery when it’s in pain and can’t be made well again. There is vigorous debate about whether people with an agonising terminal illness should have the right to end their lives, and whether doctors should be allowed to help them do it. But according to Epicurus there would be no point in such a right, since it could never be better for any being to die, no matter what the circumstances. Not because the harms of death outweigh its benefits, but because it could not possibly have any benefit. Yet if we know anything about what’s good or bad, we know that it’s good to be spared pointless suffering. And since death can bring this about, there must be something good about death.

It can clearly be a good thing to die. But if it can be good, then it can be bad too. Epicurus was right that death isn’t bad in the way that pain is bad. There’s nothing unpleasant about being dead, just as there’s nothing uncomfortable about being unconscious. These things are not bad in themselves. Still, they can have bad consequences. It’s not good to nod off at the wrong time. Even the most peaceful sleep can be bad by causing you to miss the party. Death can be bad by causing you to miss the rest of your life.

More precisely, death, like sleep, can be good, bad, or a mixture of the two, depending on the circumstances. It’s good by sparing us from bad things, and bad by depriving us of good ones. In ordinary cases it will have consequences of both sorts. Like most things, death has both a good side and a bad one.

So death can be a bad thing, even if it’s the end of us and there is no afterlife. That raises our original question once more: what could make it bad?

S ince we know that death can be good by sparing us from bad things, it’s natural to think that it can be bad by depriving us of good ones. Dying today would make it impossible for me to see my son grow up, or spend time with those I love, or do any of the other things that would be good for me. It would deprive me of all sorts of pleasure and happiness. That would make it bad for me.

But if death is bad because of what it deprives us of, it will be hard to say how bad it is. What exactly does death deprive us of? It’s easy to suppose that if I were run over by a bus tomorrow, that would prevent me from seeing my son grow up. But it could be that if I managed to escape the bus, I would be hit by a fire engine only the day after. In that case, being killed by a bus tomorrow would deprive me of just one day’s worth of good things. It would not deprive me of the pleasure of seeing my son grow up, because I wasn’t going to have that anyway. That would make my death under the bus a bad thing, but not very bad.

Consider a famous example. Charlie Parker, the greatest of all jazz musicians, died of pneumonia, aged 34. It was a great tragedy, not just for those who loved his music, but also for him, who must have loved it more than anyone. But how great? How bad was it for him to die when he did? The answer seems to depend on what would have happened otherwise. And what would have happened otherwise? How long would he have lived? What would he have done with the extra time?

Death deprives us of many futures, good, bad, and middling

It might be that his poor health and reckless lifestyle would have finished him off soon afterwards, so that surviving his bout of pneumonia would have led to another fatal illness only a few months later. Then again, he could have had an epiphany and changed his ways. He might have given up the drinking habit that ruined his health, and gone on to make recordings even greater than the legendary sessions of the 1940s. He might have made his own unique contribution to the jazz innovations of the 1950s and ’60s, putting even Miles Davis and John Coltrane in the shade. Or he might have given up music altogether and found love and domestic contentment instead. There are many further possibilities. There are any number of ways in which Parker’s life might have continued had he not died in that New York hotel room in 1955. Some are no doubt more likely than others, but there doesn’t seem to be any one way in which his life would definitely have gone on.

It seems right to say that death deprives us of the future we would otherwise have had, and is bad or good according to the quality of that future: the better the future you would have had, the worse it is for you to die and miss it. But there doesn’t seem to be any one future that the dead would otherwise have had. Death deprives us of many futures, good, bad, and middling. So even if we know what sort of thing makes death in particular circumstances good or bad, it might not be possible to say exactly how good or bad it is.

This situation is not peculiar to death. It’s no different when we ask whether any other event in our lives would be good or bad for us. Would it be a good thing for me to move to Australia? That depends, it seems, on whether moving to Australia would make my life better or worse overall than the life I would have if I stayed put. But what sort of life would I have if I moved? It could be wonderful: I might find a new job, new friends and new pursuits far more satisfying than those I left behind. Or I could find it dull, lonely and beastly hot, so that I wished I had never moved. Or it might be somewhere in between: lovely in some ways and nasty in others, but not clearly better or worse, all in all, than the alternative.

For that matter, what would the rest of my life be like if I didn’t move to Australia? It might continue much as before. Or it might get dramatically better or worse in ways I can’t predict. I know what sort of thing would make it good or bad for me to move to Australia. But it looks impossible to say just how good or bad it would be.

This is not merely because we can’t see the future. Forty years from now I’ll know, more or less, what sort of life I actually had. But I’ll be little wiser about the life I would have had if I had chosen differently. There simply is no one future I would have if I moved to Australia. Not moving deprives me of many antipodean futures, good, bad, and middling. The same goes for other events in our lives, death included.

We know that it’s bad to die, in most cases at least. And we know what makes it bad: it’s bad because it deprives us of good things we would otherwise have had. Yet there is no saying exactly what good things those are. Even if we know the precise circumstances of someone’s death, it seems, we can never say just how bad it is.

Thinkers and theories

Rawls the redeemer

For John Rawls, liberalism was more than a political project: it is the best way to fashion a life that is worthy of happiness

Alexandre Lefebvre

Anthropology

Your body is an archive

If human knowledge can disappear so easily, why have so many cultural practices survived without written records?

Helena Miton

Seeing plants anew

The stunningly complex behaviour of plants has led to a new way of thinking about our world: plant philosophy

Stella Sandford

Sex and sexuality

Sexual sensation

What makes touch on some parts of the body erotic but not others? Cutting-edge biologists are arriving at new answers

David J Linden

Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation

Céline Henne

Human reproduction

When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue: how does language begin in the womb?

Darshana Narayanan

Essays About Death: Top 5 Examples and 9 Essay Prompts

Death includes mixed emotions and endless possibilities. If you are writing essays about death, see our examples and prompts in this article.

Over 50 million people die yearly from different causes worldwide. It’s a fact we must face when the time comes. Although the subject has plenty of dire connotations, many are still fascinated by death, enough so that literary pieces about it never cease. Every author has a reason why they want to talk about death. Most use it to put their grievances on paper to help them heal from losing a loved one. Some find writing and reading about death moving, transformative, or cathartic.

To help you write a compelling essay about death, we prepared five examples to spark your imagination:

1. Essay on Death Penalty by Aliva Manjari

2. coping with death essay by writer cameron, 3. long essay on death by prasanna, 4. because i could not stop for death argumentative essay by writer annie, 5. an unforgettable experience in my life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. life after death, 2. death rituals and ceremonies, 3. smoking: just for fun or a shortcut to the grave, 4. the end is near, 5. how do people grieve, 6. mental disorders and death, 7. are you afraid of death, 8. death and incurable diseases, 9. if i can pick how i die.

“The death penalty is no doubt unconstitutional if imposed arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably, discriminatorily, freakishly or wantonly, but if it is administered rationally, objectively and judiciously, it will enhance people’s confidence in criminal justice system.”

Manjari’s essay considers the death penalty as against the modern process of treating lawbreakers, where offenders have the chance to reform or defend themselves. Although the author is against the death penalty, she explains it’s not the right time to abolish it. Doing so will jeopardize social security. The essay also incorporates other relevant information, such as the countries that still have the death penalty and how they are gradually revising and looking for alternatives.

You might also be interested in our list of the best war books .

“How a person copes with grief is affected by the person’s cultural and religious background, coping skills, mental history, support systems, and the person’s social and financial status.”

Cameron defines coping and grief through sharing his personal experience. He remembers how their family and close friends went through various stages of coping when his Aunt Ann died during heart surgery. Later in his story, he mentions Ann’s last note, which she wrote before her surgery, in case something terrible happens. This note brought their family together again through shared tears and laughter. You can also check out these articles about cancer .

“Luckily or tragically, we are completely sentenced to death. But there is an interesting thing; we don’t have the knowledge of how the inevitable will strike to have a conversation.”

Prasanna states the obvious – all people die, but no one knows when. She also discusses the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Research also shows that when people die, the brain either shows a flashback of life or sees a ray of light.

Even if someone can predict the day of their death, it won’t change how the people who love them will react. Some will cry or be numb, but in the end, everyone will have to accept the inevitable. The essay ends with the philosophical belief that the soul never dies and is reborn in a new identity and body. You can also check out these elegy examples .

“People have busy lives, and don’t think of their own death, however, the speaker admits that she was willing to put aside her distractions and go with death. She seemed to find it pretty charming.”

The author focuses on how Emily Dickinson ’s “ Because I Could Not Stop for Death ” describes death. In the poem, the author portrays death as a gentle, handsome, and neat man who picks up a woman with a carriage to take her to the grave. The essay expounds on how Dickinson uses personification and imagery to illustrate death.

“The death of a loved one is one of the hardest things an individual can bring themselves to talk about; however, I will never forget that day in the chapter of my life, as while one story continued another’s ended.”

The essay delve’s into the author’s recollection of their grandmother’s passing. They recount the things engrained in their mind from that day –  their sister’s loud cries, the pounding and sinking of their heart, and the first time they saw their father cry. 

Looking for more? Check out these essays about losing a loved one .

9 Easy Writing Prompts on Essays About Death

Are you still struggling to choose a topic for your essay? Here are prompts you can use for your paper:

Your imagination is the limit when you pick this prompt for your essay. Because no one can confirm what happens to people after death, you can create an essay describing what kind of world exists after death. For instance, you can imagine yourself as a ghost that lingers on the Earth for a bit. Then, you can go to whichever place you desire and visit anyone you wish to say proper goodbyes to first before crossing to the afterlife.

Every country, religion, and culture has ways of honoring the dead. Choose a tribe, religion, or place, and discuss their death rituals and traditions regarding wakes and funerals. Include the reasons behind these activities. Conclude your essay with an opinion on these rituals and ceremonies but don’t forget to be respectful of everyone’s beliefs. 

Smoking is still one of the most prevalent bad habits since tobacco’s creation in 1531 . Discuss your thoughts on individuals who believe there’s nothing wrong with this habit and inadvertently pass secondhand smoke to others. Include how to avoid chain-smokers and if we should let people kill themselves through excessive smoking. Add statistics and research to support your claims.

Collate people’s comments when they find out their death is near. Do this through interviews, and let your respondents list down what they’ll do first after hearing the simulated news. Then, add their reactions to your essay.

There is no proper way of grieving. People grieve in their way. Briefly discuss death and grieving at the start of your essay. Then, narrate a personal experience you’ve had with grieving to make your essay more relatable. Or you can compare how different people grieve. To give you an idea, you can mention that your father’s way of grieving is drowning himself in work while your mom openly cries and talk about her memories of the loved one who just passed away. 

Explain how people suffering from mental illnesses view death. Then, measure it against how ordinary people see the end. Include research showing death rates caused by mental illnesses to prove your point. To make organizing information about the topic more manageable, you can also focus on one mental illness and relate it to death.

Check out our guide on  how to write essays about depression .

Sometimes, seriously ill people say they are no longer afraid of death. For others, losing a loved one is even more terrifying than death itself. Share what you think of death and include factors that affected your perception of it.

People with incurable diseases are often ready to face death. For this prompt, write about individuals who faced their terminal illnesses head-on and didn’t let it define how they lived their lives. You can also review literary pieces that show these brave souls’ struggle and triumph. A great series to watch is “ My Last Days .”

You might also be interested in these epitaph examples .

No one knows how they’ll leave this world, but if you have the chance to choose how you part with your loved ones, what will it be? Probe into this imagined situation. For example, you can write: “I want to die at an old age, surrounded by family and friends who love me. I hope it’ll be a peaceful death after I’ve done everything I wanted in life.”

To make your essay more intriguing, put unexpected events in it. Check out these plot twist ideas .

• Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections: 

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it. 

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them. 

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

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What the Stoics Understood About Death (And Can Teach Us)

David fideler on what awareness of mortality does to a life.

“Wherever I turn, I see signs of my old age,” Seneca wrote to Lucilius. Seneca had just arrived at his villa outside of Rome, where he was having a conversation with his property manager about the high cost of maintaining the disintegrating old building. But Seneca then explained, “My estate manager told me it was not his fault: he was doing everything possible, but the country home was old. And this villa was built under my supervision! What will my future look like if stonework of my own age is already crumbling?”

At that time, Seneca was in his late sixties, and he was starting to feel the aches and pains of old age. But he also found old age to be pleasurable. However, the older you get, the more challenging things become. Extreme old age, he said, is like a lasting illness you never recover from; and when the body really declines, it’s like a ship that starts springing leaks, one after another.

Where I currently live, in Sarajevo, I see extremely old people, who are quite close to death, on an almost daily basis. It seems that some of my neighbors—​thin, frail, and bent over, often walking with a cane at a snail’s pace over the old stone streets—​could drop over and expire at any moment. That said, seeing extremely elderly people out and about is an inspiring and heartfelt experience for me. First of all, it’s lovely to see people who have lived for so long, often against challenging odds, and it’s impossible to see them without feeling a great sense of tenderness for them. Second, they are a timely reminder of my own mortality. It’s also very different from what I remember seeing in the United States.

Unlike many other countries, the United States has accomplished a world-​class disappearing act when it comes to keeping older adults (and any other reminders of death) out of sight and out of mind. With its shiny glass and steel buildings, shopping malls, and spread-​out suburbs, the American landscape has been sterilized and artificially “cleaned up” in such a way that extremely old people are rarely seen on public display. But here in a historic European city with ancient stone buildings that go back centuries, and well-​established neighborhoods with cobblestone streets, extremely old people, hobbling along, are a happy part of daily life. They remind me that life is not without extreme struggle. And when people die, which can happen at any age, the local religious communities post death notices, with photos of the deceased, in local neighborhoods all over town. It’s another nice custom that reminds us of being mortal.

A Stoic wants to live well—​and living well means dying well, too. A Stoic lives well through having a good character, and death is the final test of it. While every death will be a bit different, the Roman Stoics believed that a good death would be characterized by mental tranquility, a lack of complaining, and gratitude for the life we’ve been given. In other words, as the final act of living, a good death is characterized by acceptance and gratitude. Also, having a real philosophy of life, and having worked on developing a sound character, allows a person to die without any feelings of regret.

Seneca frequently thought and wrote about death. Some of this must have been due to his poor health. Because he suffered from tuberculosis and asthma from a young age, he must have sensed the certainty and nearness of his own death throughout his entire life. In Letter 54 he describes, in graphic detail, a recent asthma attack that nearly killed him. But much earlier, probably in his twenties, he was so sick, and so near death, that he thought about ending his own life, to finally stop the suffering. He didn’t follow through on that, fortunately, out of love for his father. As he writes,

I often felt the urge to end my life, but the old age of my dear father held me back. For while I thought that I could die bravely, I knew he could not bear the loss bravely. And so I commanded myself to live. Sometimes it’s an act of courage just to keep living.

For a Stoic (and for other ancient philosophers, too), memento mori —​contemplating our inevitable death—​was an essential philosophical exercise, and one that comes with unexpected benefits. As an anticipation of future adversity, memento mori allows us to prepare for death, and helps remove our fears of death. It also encourages us to take our current lives more seriously, because we realize they’re limited. As I’ve discovered in a practical sense, reflecting on my own death—​and the inevitable death of those dear to me—​has had a totally unexpected and powerful benefit: feeling a more profound sense of gratitude for the time we still have together.

The Latin phrase memento mori literally means “remember that you have to die.” Over the centuries, scholars often would keep a symbolic memento mori image in their study, like a skull, as a reminder of their own mortality.

In the world of philosophy, the model of someone dying well, without an ounce of fear, was Socrates. Imprisoned on trumped-​up charges for corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates was detained for thirty days before facing his death sentence of drinking hemlock poison. At the time of his death in 399 BC, Socrates was around seventy years old. If he had wished, he could have very easily escaped prison, with his friends’ help, and then set up life elsewhere in Greece. But it would have gone against everything he believed in. Also, escaping would have permanently damaged his reputation. Since one of Socrates’s main goals was to improve society, that implied he should follow society’s laws, even if he had been treated unjustly.

This allowed Socrates thirty final days to meet with his friends and his students to continue their philosophical discussions. He had challenged the morality of those who called for his death with a very memorable line: “If you kill me,” he said, “you will not harm me so much as yourselves.”  This thought was much appreciated by the later Stoics, since, in their view, nothing can harm the character of a wise person. During his last meeting with his students, right before his death, Socrates discussed and questioned the possibility of an afterlife. He also said, memorably, that “philosophy is a preparation for death,” which was probably the real beginning of the memento mori tradition (at least for philosophers). When his final conversation was complete, Socrates drank the hemlock, and he peacefully passed away, surrounded by his students.

According to Seneca, the philosopher Epicurus said, “Rehearse for death,” which is a practice Seneca himself greatly encouraged. For Seneca and the other Roman Stoics, death was “the master fear,” and once someone learns how to overcome it, little else remains fearful either.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus told his students that when you kiss your child goodnight, you should remind yourself that your child could die tomorrow. While it is literally true that your child could die tomorrow, many modern readers recoil at the idea of even contemplating such a thought. However, that might be a measure of their reluctance to accept the inevitability of death, or a way of repressing the fact that death can arrive unexpectedly, at any moment. As someone who personally uses this practice, I can tell you that it’s perfectly harmless, once you get past any initial discomfort. The huge benefit it brings is the greater sense of gratitude you experience with your loved ones. When you perform this practice, you consciously realize that someday, which nobody can predict, will be your last time together—​so you experience much greater gratitude for the time you spend together now. As Seneca wisely recommended, let us greedily enjoy our friends and our loved ones now, while we still have them.

What is it like emotionally to contemplate your own death or the death of a close family member? I’ve been experimenting with this for some time now and can report only positive results. That’s because, when I think of the mortality of a loved one and the fact that all of our time together is by definition limited, it improves the quality of my life. It makes me feel a much deeper sense of appreciation for all the time we are together. If you don’t remember that your time is limited and finite, you are much more likely to take things for granted.

I most often remember death when I’m with my son, Benjamin, seven and a half as I write. That’s a delightful age because he’s very playful and now capable of having fun conversations. We’re also starting to talk about philosophical things.

Of course, it’s impossible for most children of his age to grasp the gravity or finality of death, because most of them have never had any firsthand experience of losing a loved one. Children live in a kind of psychological Golden Age, in which all their needs seem magically provided for. Since they live in a protected sphere, most haven’t yet been exposed to the more challenging aspects of life.

Because of that, I’ve been trying to teach Benjamin a little bit about death and the fact that daddy, mommy, and he will someday die. This effort is a bit of basic Stoic training for a kid, and I’m curious if it might be possible to increase his appreciation for the limited time we have together, even at such a young age? At the very least, I hope it will greatly reduce the level of shock he experiences when someone close to him does die, because he’ll be expecting it.

The other day, we were driving home after feasting on some fast food, and Benjamin spoke to me about God for the first time in his life. With a boyish sense of delight, he explained to me, “God has some amazing powers, like being able to see and hear everything. But his greatest superpower is that he’s invisible!”

I chuckled at his use of the word “superpower,” which made God sound like a superhero, just like Spider-​Man! But laughter aside, he had opened up the doorway to speak about some profound issues, so I brought up the topic of death.

“Benjamin,” I asked, “do you know that, someday, mommy, daddy, and you are going to die?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“I’m almost sixty,” I explained, “so I could live another twenty years.”

“I don’t think you’ll live quite that long,” he said. “But maybe something like that.” (Thank you, Benjamin! We’ll just have to see how things go.)

Then I asked, “Did you know that you could die at any time?”

He said, “I don’t think I’ll die anytime soon.”

“But,” I replied, “you could. This is not something in our control. You are young, so you could live for a very long time. But since we’re driving in a car, we could be in a car crash five minutes from now, and we could both be killed instantly. So even if you’re very, very young, you can die at any time. If you stay healthy, the chances that you’ll live a long life go up. But in the end, when we die is not under our control.”

Benjamin nodded and seemed to understand. And fortunately, we arrived home safely a few minutes later.

__________________________________

From Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living by David Fideler, published by W. W. Norton.

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April 1, 2015

12 min read

Thinking about Death Can Make Life Better

Contemplating our mortality can ease our angst and make our lives more meaningful

By Michael W. Wiederman

My father was just 32 years old when he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. Weeks later he was in the hospital, informed that he would not be leaving. Miraculously the leukemia went into remission, and he lived another five years. Even as a child, though, I could clearly see that the man who returned from the hospital was not the same one who had left home. Before, he had been concerned mostly with work and material success; now he embraced religion and family. Getting a second, tenuous chance at life was a profound experience that deeply changed his values and behavior.

We deflect it with humor, hedge against it with good works, shun reminders of our animal nature. Yet we all share the reality of mortality, and we know it, try as we might to throttle our thoughts about it. Indeed, this simultaneous knowing and recoiling from our knowledge is a tension that will run throughout our life. Yet despite the significance of the subject, for most of its history psychology has left the matter of how mortal thoughts affect us almost completely unexplored—terror incognita.

That neglect appears to be a thing of the past. In recent years researchers have begun to find that awareness of mortality affects our behavior in ways both overt and subtle and sometimes seems to pull us in opposite directions. Therapists who take an existential approach to counseling have found that confrontation with our mortality is worthwhile and beneficial. At the same time, a new discipline called Terror Management Theory (TMT) has spawned hundreds of studies showing that awareness of our mortality can lead to selfish, even hurtful behavior.

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More recently, this apparent disagreement among different disciplines, common enough in new fields of research, has given way to a deeper understanding of why our thoughts about mortality sometimes help us and sometimes do us harm. One essential determinant of how we handle the subject appears to be whether our life goals are material or idealistic. The effect of mortal thinking on behavior also seems to depend on whether death is at the top of our mind or hovering just beyond our consciousness. Still, the duality of helpful and harmful effects echoes one of life's central conundrums: we cannot deny that someday we will die, so how are we to keep this paralyzing truth from paralyzing us?

Facing Death Head-on In one of my favorite cartoons, by Eric Lewis, a man lying on his deathbed says to his attentive wife, “I should have bought more crap.” The dying man's regret is a tour de force of deflection and misdirection, the opposite of what we expect of a man looking back with rue. For most of us, a near-death experience or the death of someone we know prompts us to take stock of our life in a good way. This certainly was true for my father, and it is precisely the effect that existential therapists count on as they try to help their clients confront mortality and shift their life onto a more meaningful path. Typically the shift is from extrinsic values and goals, such as material success, toward intrinsic ones, such as matters of the soul or spirit.

Surveys validate the usefulness of the approach. In a study published in 2007 Emily L. B. Lykins, now at Eastern Kentucky University, and her colleagues questioned staff at a medical center in Northridge, Calif., two to three weeks after an earthquake in 1994 devastated the surrounding area, killing 57 and injuring thousands more. The staff were asked to rate the importance of 16 different goals both currently and as they were before the earthquake. The results indicated a shift in values toward intrinsic goals such as cultivating close relationships, doing creative work and developing as a person. Moreover, those respondents who had most strongly feared they were going to die in the earthquake were also most likely to indicate a shift from extrinsic to intrinsic goals.

The beneficial effect works the other way around, too. People who pursue intrinsic goals have more success in heading off anxiety associated with death than those who chase material things. In 2009 Alain Van Hiel and Maarten Vansteenkiste of Ghent University in Belgium published their survey of older adults (with an average age of 75). The elders who reported having fulfilled more of their intrinsic goals were the least anxious about death and most satisfied with their life. In contrast, respondents who reported the greatest attainment of extrinsic goals indicated the most despair and the least acceptance of death.

Intrinsic life goals and the creation of meaning appear to be central to coping with our mortality. In 2012 William S. Breitbart and several colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City published the results of an intervention with patients coping with advanced stages of cancer. The patients were randomly invited to participate in one of two groups that met once a week for eight weeks. The first group, which focused on social support, facilitated discussions about day-to-day concerns and ways to cope with them. The second group focused on the sources of meaning in life. At the end of the eight weeks and again at a two-month follow-up, members of the group focused on meaning in life showed substantial increases in their scores on measures of meaning, peace and faith, along with decreases in anxiety and desire for death. The members of the group focused on social support showed no statistically significant changes.

Taming Terror These surveys suggest that people who have an abrupt encounter with mortality tend to seek meaning in life, and those who pursue meaning in life can handle mortality more easily. People also seem to use systems of meaning to block awareness of their mortality, clinging to aspects of their life that provide connection with social structures.

How this protective shield might work is the focus of the burgeoning field of Terror Management Theory. Based on the writings of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in the 1960s and 1970s and the more recent work of psychologists Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona, Tom Pyszczynski of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College, TMT proposes that we humans maintain a shared culture because social roles and consequences for behavior keep us busy and so insulate us from the existential terror of our impermanence.

Interesting as such propositions are, they leave unanswered the question of whether our thoughts of mortality are what spur us to defend our culture and bolster our self-esteem or whether we just do what we do because it feels right. Psychologists needed a new approach to tease out how our mortal thoughts influence us.

Death in the Laboratory Imagine you are staying with a friend who lives on the 20th floor of an old apartment building. It's the middle of the night. You are awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of screams and the choking smell of smoke. You run to the door and reach for the handle. You pull back in pain as the intense heat of the knob burns your skin. You grab a blanket from the bed for protection and manage to open the door. Almost immediately, a huge wall of flame and smoke roars into the room. It is getting very hard to breathe, and the heat from the flames is almost unbearable. You try calling out for help, but you can't find the air to form the words. With your heart pounding, it suddenly hits you that you are moments from dying. Out of breath and weak, you shut your eyes and wait for the end.

Fun thought exercise, yes? It is drawn from a 2003 study by Philip J. Cozzolino, now at the University of Essex in England, and his colleagues. Contemplating scenarios like it is how volunteers in some of the hundreds of TMT studies conducted during the past two decades were primed (and terrified) before they were put through their paces by researchers trying to see how reflection about death can affect human behavior.

Most TMT research focuses on the so-called mortality salience hypothesis: if investment in our culture and self-esteem serves to fend off our sense of mortality, then stimulating our awareness of mortality should increase investment in our culture and self-esteem. Researchers can arouse mortality salience in a variety of ways, but in most studies, participants are asked to write essays in which they imagine either death or some other kind of pain.

One group might be asked to visualize a scenario akin to the one above and to describe both what would happen to them physically as they died and the feelings kindled in them by thinking about their death. The control group might be asked to imagine and describe a less terminally uncomfortable event, such as an episode of dental pain or an experience of social exclusion. Then the researchers attempt to assess how the two groups differ in their self-esteem and their willingness to invest in their culture.

What researchers learned was that when thoughts of death reverberate too loudly, they can drown out subtle but important changes in our behavior. When we are made to concentrate on our mortality, we tend to defend against anxiety by direct means, primarily denial, rationalization and a focus on the positive aspects of our life, boosting our sense of well-being by converting death into an abstraction that lies in the far future. Thus, if scientists measure investment in worldview or self-esteem immediately after increases in awareness of mortality (as with the group writing about death by fire), usually they see no apparent effects. The relations appear only when respondents are distracted after their awareness is heightened.

In a typical study, after completing the death essay (or the control essay), participants perform a filler task having nothing to do with death so that any unconscious defenses against mortality awareness have a chance to emerge. Only then comes a measurement of the participants' investment in their culture or self-esteem. Within this framework, researchers began to see that our mortality affects us in ways we do not even realize, especially in how it can transform our goals.

Religiosity and Creatureliness Because religion is such an important aspect of our worldview (not least whether we are pro or con), it makes an especially useful starting point for researchers. Religious teachings tend to explain what happens to believers and nonbelievers after death, so defending one's religious beliefs in the face of mortality is particularly common. Yet a series of studies reported in 2006 by psychologists Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia and Ian G. Hansen of York College showed that thoughts of death did more than make people with religious dispositions think of eternity at the right hand of God.

In the first of their studies, college students randomly assigned to write the standard death essay rated themselves about 30 percent higher on measures of religiosity and belief in God than did students assigned to write the control essay. What the experiment did not reveal was whether thoughts of death simply reminded people of their religious belief or prodded them to bolster their religiosity as a defense against mortality. To investigate this possibility, the second study randomly exposed college students to one of three versions of a brief story about a boy's visit to a hospital. All versions started and ended the same, but the middle passages differed. In the control version, the boy watched an emergency drill carried out by adults, in the religious version the boy observed a man praying in the hospital chapel, and in the death version the boy had an accident and died.

One of the distraction tasks in the experiment called for students to read a report of a study illustrating apparent effects of Christian prayer by strangers on the reproductive rates of women attending a fertility clinic. As part of their assessments of the study, participants were asked to rate their belief in God or in a higher power. The ratings by students in the control condition and religious condition did not differ, but both were significantly lower than the ratings by those in the death condition. It seems that mortality salience uniquely motivates people to bolster their religious beliefs.

Besides giving us a context for spirituality, culture also helps to protect us from thoughts of mortality through norms and customs that let us forget we are animals, which we know are mortal and die for capricious reasons. For example, elimination of bodily waste is taboo and performed in private, and our clothing and grooming typically help us avoid the smell and look of wild creatures. Our dining manners and rituals keep us from “eating like an animal,” a charge that is clearly an insult.

TMT proposes that experiences that remind us of our animal nature will arouse awareness of our mortality, thus causing us to avoid them, especially if mortality salience is already heightened. How we might feel about seeing a woman breast-feeding her infant, for instance, seems to be influenced by whether we have been made aware of our mortality beforehand.

In 2007 Cathy Cox, now at Texas Christian University, and her colleagues published their research on this question. In their first study, college students rated their reaction to a written scenario in which a woman breast-feeds in a fancy restaurant, provoking a negative reaction from the restaurant staff. Volunteers who had been primed with the death essay rated the woman 40 percent more harshly than did the students primed by the dental pain essay.

Cox and her colleagues followed up by bringing breast-feeding into the lab, although no actual breast-feeding occurred. The researchers told college student participants that the study involved formation of impressions of another person before completing a task with that person. The subjects were advised that the other participant was a young woman who could not find child care and had to bring her infant along with her; she had arrived early and was feeding the child in the other room.

The students were randomly told either that the mother was breast-feeding or bottle-feeding and then were randomly assigned either to the standard death essay or to the dental pain essay. After filling out a questionnaire about hobbies and interests, the students were presented with what they believed was a like questionnaire that had been completed by the young mother in the other room. In reality, there was no such person, and all students were shown the same fictitious profile. They were then asked to rate their impressions of this other student with whom they would soon be working.

When rating the likability of this mystery woman, students who had written about dental pain returned similar ratings whether the woman was described as bottle-feeding or breast-feeding. Yet those primed with the death essay rated the young mother as less likable when she was said to be breast-feeding. Last, the participants were told it was time to perform the joint task with the young mother. They were taken to an empty room containing only two folding chairs leaning against the wall and were asked to set up the chairs, facing each other, in preparation for the task. The researchers were looking to see how closely the students placed the chairs. The distances between the two chairs were very similar in all but one condition: the students placed the chairs about 20 percent farther apart when they had been primed with the death essay and told that their partner had been breast-feeding.

It appears that when primed to think about our own mortality, we tend to disparage and distance ourselves from reminders that we humans are animals. Other researchers have demonstrated this phenomenon with people's reactions to the elderly, disabled individuals and sexual activity. In an article published in 2000 the originators of TMT (Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon) described research they conducted with their colleague Jamie Goldenberg, now at the University of South Florida. College students who underwent the standard method for inducing mortality salience rated the physical aspects of sex as less appealing compared with students who had not been so primed. The same researchers later found that students primed to focus on the romantic meaning of sex experienced fewer thoughts about death than did those primed to focus on the physical aspects of sex.

Handling Death So what does all this tell us about how we might manage our fear of mortality? If brushes with death help people worry less about it and devote more energy to the things that give deeper meaning to life, then focused thinking about death might help the rest of us.

We already expose ourselves to death without knowing why. We watch slasher films, read violent novels and news accounts of tragic deaths, and share sick jokes about death and corpses. Such diversions might appeal to us because vicarious experiences of death can satisfy curiosity and address our anxiety in a way that keeps our own mortality at a safe remove. In fact, by choosing exposure to death we exert a degree of control. Death becomes something that prompts a laugh, a groan or a thrill rather than terror. Culturally constructed scenarios of death may serve as a safety valve for venting anxiety.

Repeated exposure to death and dying in naturalistic settings also appears to lower discomfort around the topic. In 2008 Susan Bluck and her colleagues at the University of Florida published a study of hospice volunteers. Scores on a measure of death anxiety were lower for more experienced volunteers than for novices. Also, the best predictor of the level of their anxiety about death was not the length of time that the volunteers had served but the number of deaths that they had attended. Ironically, by prolonging human lives and removing our loved ones from their natural habitats when they are dying, medical technology has insulated us from experiences with death; greater anxiety about mortality may be a side effect.

One brief period of thinking about our mortality would probably do little good. Yet repeated contemplation of our eventual death could both lessen the anxiety about it and help keep us focused on the aspects of life that matter most.

Without such focused contemplation, thinking about the end of life is as likely to take us to the darkness as to the light. In a survey of nearly 1,000 students who took her Sociology of Death and Dying course at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette from 1985 to 2004, Sarah Brabant asked her students how often they thought about death. The most common responses were “occasionally” (58 percent) and “frequently” (20 percent). She also asked how the students felt when they thought of their own mortality. The two most common responses were “fearful” and “pleasure in being alive,” each at 29 percent.

Within these few statistics lies the human condition. We cannot escape awareness of our mortality, and that awareness has the power to elicit fear or appreciation. Fortunately, the choice is ours.

Montaigne on Death and the Art of Living

By maria popova.

In one of his 107 such exploratory essays, titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne turns to mortality — the subject of one of this year’s best psychology and philosophy books — and points to the understanding of death as a prerequisite for the understanding of life, for the very art of living .

Montaigne examines our conflicted relationship with dying:

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. […] The end of our race is death; ’tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail: ‘Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,’ [‘Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards’ — Lucretius, iv. 474] ’tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it. The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ … provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. … I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ’tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age. … How many several ways has death to surprise us?

Rather than indulging the fear of death, Montaigne calls for dissipating it by facing it head-on, with awareness and attention — an approach common in Eastern spirituality:

[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests: ‘Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.’ ‘Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected, will be the more welcome.’ — [Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.] Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, ‘Let him make that request to himself.’ — [ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40. ] In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age.

One of Montaigne’s most timeless and timeliest points strikes at the heart of our present productivity-culture, reminding us that the whole of life is contained in our inner life , not in the checklist of our accomplishments:

We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self: — ‘Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo Multa?’ [‘Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?’ — Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]

He presages the “real artists ship” mantra Steve Job made famous five centuries later:

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action: ‘Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.’ [‘When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.’ — Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.] I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.

The essence of his argument is the idea that learning to die is essential for learning to live:

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. […] Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other.

With a philosophical lens fringing on quantum physics, Montaigne reminds us of the fundamental bias of the arrow of time as we experience it:

Not only the argument of reason invites us to it — for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? — but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? … What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. … Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

He returns — poignantly, poetically — to the meaning of life :

All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

Half a millennium before Carl Sagan, Montaigne channels the sentiment at the heart of Pale Blue Dot :

Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity.

He paints death as the ultimate equalizer:

Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved?

The heart of Montaigne’s case falls somewhere between John Cage’s Zen philosophy and the canine state of being-in-the-moment :

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.

He concludes with an admonition about the solipsistic superficiality of death’s ritualization:

I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays is now in the public domain and is available as a free download in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg .

Public domain illustrations via Flickr Commons

— Published December 12, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/12/12/montaigne-on-death-and-the-art-of-living/ —

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Why We Fear Death and How to Overcome It

You might be surprised by the factors that influence our attitudes toward death..

Posted September 2, 2020 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

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Death—what isn’t there to be afraid of? It’s the ultimate end! But while some people dread death, others accept it as inevitable. So why do some people fear it more than others?

It turns out that the way we think about death can affect how we think and act in daily life. For example, a 2016 study found that fear of death could amplify our desire for revenge and political violence. Palestinian, Israeli, and South Korean participants were prompted to think about personal pain or death, and then asked about their opinions about how specific political conflicts should be resolved. Those who were reminded of death were more likely to support military action than those who only thought about pain.

Fearing death also makes it harder for us to process grief . A recent study found that those who were afraid of death were more likely to have prolonged symptoms of grief after losing a loved one compared to those who had accepted death. For healthcare workers who care for dying patients, their own fear of death may get in the way of effectively communicating with patients and their families.

There are some things that may subtly, or not so subtly, affect how much we fear death.

1. Older people tend to fear death less. You might think this would be the opposite, but this pattern has been found time and time again in research studies. We tend to assume that the older someone is, the closer they seemingly are to death, and therefore the more afraid of it they should be. But interestingly, older age is associated with more acceptance of death .

This could be because older people have experienced more of life, so they have less fear of missing out. Or it might be because they have more experience with witnessing and handling the death of others.

2. Religious belief increases our fear (but it’s complicated). Here’s another counterintuitive one. You may think that religious belief, which usually includes confidence in an afterlife or a greater meaning to life, would make people feel better about the finality of death. But studies have found that those with stronger religiosity , regardless of culture or religion, have a stronger fear of death.

But it’s worth noting that there are also studies that show the opposite.

Some studies have found that, at least among Westerners, those who fear death most are moderately religious . Both non-believers and very religious people feared death less .

Perhaps being moderately religious puts people in the “existential sweet spot” for being afraid of death—they’re not as relaxed as non-believers, but they also don’t hold the same strong convictions about the afterlife that very religious people do. It’s also possible that the egg comes before the chicken—people who particularly fear death seek out religion as a coping mechanism, but they don’t end up being very religious.

3. Experience with danger. Your interactions with danger may also change your fear of death. Though some experiences make you fear death less, too much might increase your fear.

Here’s an example: In a very cool study, researchers recruited beginner, intermediate, and expert skydivers to share their feelings about death. Not surprisingly, beginner skydivers, with only an average of 1 jump under their belt, were scared of death. Intermediate skydivers, with an average of 90 jumps, were a lot less scared. But—and this is the interesting part—expert skydivers, who had jumped over 700 times, were more scared of death than intermediate skydivers.

This shows that simply risking death more doesn’t decrease your fear of it. There may be a learning curve, where getting some experience makes you feel less anxious (maybe because you gain a greater sense of control), but getting a lot of experience makes you more aware that you can’t cheat death after all.

4. Physical health. This one is less surprising: People with better physical health tend to fear death less. Researchers have found that those with better physical health tend to feel like there is more meaning in life. They also tend to have better mental health. These are the factors that make them fear death less . In a way, this can be encouraging even for those who cannot control their physical health. They may still be able to find meaning in life and work on their mental health to decrease their existential dread.

5. Attachment style. Attachment styles refer to ways we think about and behave in close relationships. These are shaped early in life so by the time we’re adults, we’re usually pretty settled into ours. Securely attached people tend to be confiding, dependable, and supportive partners. Insecurely attached people can be overly anxious and controlling, or distant and standoffish, or a mix of both.

When it comes to how they feel about death, people with secure attachment styles fear death less than people with insecure attachment styles. This is interesting because it shows that there’s a relationship and intimacy aspect to the way we think about death.

What can you do to become less afraid of death?

All of this research showing that fear of death may be fluid depending on our beliefs and experiences begs the question: What can we do to fear death less?

Some things that affect your fear of death, like your age, can’t be controlled. And most of us probably can’t (or won’t) go skydiving 90 times. But researchers have found some other things we may be able to do:

1. Help the next generation. The term “generativity” refers to a concern for younger people and a desire to nurture and guide them. When older people have a greater sense of generativity, they tend to also look back on their life without regret or anguish. This, understandably, leads to having less fear of death.

Even if you don’t have children or grandchildren, you can feed your generativity by mentoring younger people in a career or in life. You can volunteer with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, or tutor a neighborhood kid, or mentor someone in your career field.

2. Don’t avoid the topic. We try to avoid things, like death, that make us uncomfortable, but avoidance can make those things loom even larger in our minds.

An interesting study with funeral directors found that those who had directed more funerals feared death less. Among physicians, more years of experience, and more exposure to death, also led to less fear of death. But even if you’re not a funeral director or healthcare worker, you can still familiarize yourself with death by reading about it or volunteering with organizations that take care of those with terminal illnesses.

3. Have a (simulated) out-of-body or near-death experience. Here’s a fascinating one. Multiple research studies have found that having an out-of-body experience or near-death experience makes people less afraid of death. In the case of near-death experiences , it might be that the things we confront are less scary to us.

In the case of out-of-body experiences , it might give us the sense that we live on even when we are separated from our bodies. While you shouldn’t seek a near-death experience (we don’t want it to end up being not-so-near), you could try out a virtual reality program that simulates an out-of-body experience.

4. Cultivate your meaning in life. Now, this is the tip I think is the most important and impactful.

We know that reminding people of their own mortality tends to make them fear death. But if someone feels a strong sense of having meaning in life, this reminder doesn’t bother them .

Cultivating meaning in life is no simple task, but you can start by identifying your values, which are big-picture driving forces that guide how you move through life. Whether it be creativity , success, or serenity, brainstorm the values that are most important to you and govern your life with these ideas in mind.

Mark Twain said, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

This is very wise ! Based on the research, I think it would be more precise to replace “lives fully” with “lives meaningfully.” But for some people, perhaps these are the same. No matter what your meaningful life looks like, start to develop it now, and you’ll be too busy feeling fulfilled to be afraid of death.

A version of this post titled How to Master Your Fear of Death was originally posted on Quick and Dirty Tips.

Jade Wu, Ph.D., is a clinical health psychologist and host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast. She specializes in helping those with sleep problems and anxiety disorders.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, writing a college essay about death.

I'm considering writing my college essay about the death of a loved one, but I'm worried it might be too personal or too sad of a topic. What do you guys think? Should I go for it or find a different topic?

I understand your concern about writing an essay on such a personal and emotional topic. The key to deciding whether to write about the death of a loved one is to consider how this experience has significantly shaped you, your perspective, or your personal growth. If it has had a meaningful impact on your life, then it might be an appropriate topic to share with admissions officers.

When writing about a sensitive topic like death, it's essential to strike a balance between telling your story and avoiding melodrama. Focus on demonstrating how this experience has helped you grow and develop, perhaps in terms of empathy, resilience, or a new understanding of yourself and others. Colleges are looking to admit students who demonstrate personal growth and the ability to overcome challenges.

Remember to convey your unique perspective and voice in your essay. This topic is already quite personal, so focus on how it connects to your identity, passions, motivations, and goals. If you can identify a meaningful connection between this experience and your aspirations as a college student, you'll have a strong essay topic.

Lastly, consider seeking feedback from a trusted teacher, family member, or friend to ensure that your essay strikes the right balance between being heartfelt and constructive. It can be helpful to get an outside perspective when writing about emotional experiences.

In summary, it is possible to write about the death of a loved one in a college essay if you can effectively convey personal growth, maintain a balanced tone, and demonstrate a meaningful connection to your identity and aspirations.

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| The Art of Living for Students of Life

15 Deep Insights about Death to Understand the Meaning of Life & Live Fully Alive

By Kyle Kowalski · 5 Comments

Death is very real in my life right now.

We said goodbye to a family member.

Kitty (yes, Kitty the dog—on the left of the photo) made it to 19 years old. My wife had her since Kitty was 8 weeks old (~7,000 days). And, she’s been a part of my life for the last 11 years (~4,000 days).

Kitty was a constant—we’d often joke that she would live forever. Even though the signs of old age first started appearing a couple years ago, it all still feels very sudden. It seems like we spent more time planning for death than thinking about what life would be like after death moving forward. The house is quiet. Energy is different.

All ends bring new beginnings and opportunities to reflect on life. I’m taking this time to really contemplate death—and therefore life.

While I don’t think it’s possible to fully mentally and emotionally prepare for a loss—the experience is so much deeper than any preparation could prepare you for—I felt called to organize my notes on death for the first time and see if there are themes / insights to help us live now.

Here’s what I discovered about death and the meaning of life.

15 Deep Insights about Death to Understand the Meaning of Life (& 75+ Death Quotes)

1. NATURAL — Death is a natural part of life’s cycle of development.

“ There is a certain limit to the appropriate length of any time in this world. Just as the fruits and vegetables are limited by the seasons of the year, everything should have its beginning, its life, and its ending, after which it should pass away. Wise people willingly submit to this order. ” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

• “ Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.” — Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
• “ Death is one step in a continuous development. ” — Theodore Parker
• “ If life is good, then death which is the necessary part of life, is good as well. ” — Leo Tolstoy
• “ The more deeply you understand life, the less you grieve over the destruction caused by death. ” — Leo Tolstoy

2. WHOLENESS — The paradox is that death makes life whole.

“In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of ‘hidden wholeness.’ ” — Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

• “ Death is not the opposite of life.  Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.” — Eckhart Tolle
• “ It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death. ” — Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul
• “ To decompose is to be recomposed. That’s what nature does. Nature through whom all things happen as they should, and have happened forever in just the same way, and will continue to, one way or another, endlessly.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• “ What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. ” — Richard Bach

3. SURRENDER & ACCEPTANCE — Surrender to nature, and accept that you just won’t get around to some things.

“Never postpone a good deed which you can do now, because death does not choose whether you have or haven’t done the things you should have done . Death waits for nobody and nothing. It has neither enemies, nor friends.” —Indian Wisdom

• “ All of us are going to go to our deathbeds with some very important parts of us still unexplored. ” — Alain de Botton
• “ If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up.” — Lao Tzu ( Tao Te Ching , Stephen Mitchell Version)
• “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve. ” — Lao Tzu ( Tao Te Ching , Stephen Mitchell Version)
• “ Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. ” — Lao Tzu ( Tao Te Ching , Stephen Mitchell Version)

4. JUST VISITING — You are just a visitor on Earth.

“Who brought me into this world? According to whose command do I find myself at this exact place, during this particular time? Life is the remembrance of a very short day we spent visiting this world. ” — Blaise Pascal

• “ Remember, you do not live in the world, you only pass through it. ” — Leo Tolstoy
• “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. ” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Regardless of your philosophical beliefs, the fact remains that you were born and you are going to die.  During the time in between, you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience. ” — Michael Singer

5. LENGTH — A certain amount of life has already passed, and you don’t know how much longer you will get.

“This is our big mistake: to think we look forward to death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death. ” — Seneca

• “Any day is a good day for a midlife crisis. After all, you never know when it will be the middle of your life .” — Anonymous
• “ If I die in two seconds, I’m still alive in this one. ” — Ryan Holiday
• “ One day and again, who knows when, all will be over. You won’t be able to change a sentence of the story of your life.” — Gordon Marino, The Existentialist’s Survival Guide
• “ How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!” — Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
• “ Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five. ” — Attributed to Benjamin Franklin
• “Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that  there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return .” — Marcus Aurelius

6. DEPTH — Due to the unknown length of life, your best bet is to live deeply and fully.

“ What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is most important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does. Only then does your life become fulfilled.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “ Life is long if you know how to use it. ” — Seneca
• “ If you are living every experience fully, then death doesn’t take anything from you.  There’s nothing to take because you’re already fulfilled.  That’s why the wise being is always ready to die.  It doesn’t make any difference when death comes because their experience is already whole and complete.” — Michael Singer
• “Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly .” — Seneca
• “You’ve lived as a citizen in a great city. Five years or a hundred—what’s the difference? The laws make no distinction. And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by Nature, who first invited you in—why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor: ‘But I’ve only gotten through three acts . . . !’ Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you. ” — Marcus Aurelius

7. PURPOSE — Living deeply and fully could simply be called living purposefully.

“Your life may be cut short at any time; therefore, your life should have a deep purpose, a significance that will not depend on whether it is short or long .” — Leo Tolstoy

• “It is bad not to have something for which you are ready to die .” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Everyone has a gift to share with the world, something that both lights you on fire internally and serves the world externally, and this thing— this calling—should be something you pursue until your final breath .” — James Clear
• “ (The Being-Values or B-Values ) are worth living for and dying for.  Contemplating them or fusing with them gives the greatest joy that a human being is capable of.” — Abraham Maslow
• “ No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for. ” — Martin Luther King Jr.

8. KNOW THYSELF — Have awareness of your essence and know yourself.

#1 Regret of the Dying: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” — Bronnie Ware

• “Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ and find that there is no death. ” — Eckhart Tolle
• “ Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. ” — Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
• “It shouldn’t take death to challenge you to live at your highest level. Why wait until everything is taken from you before you learn to dig down deep inside yourself to reach your highest potential?  A wise person affirms, ‘If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while I’m alive.  I’m going to stop bothering the people I love. I’m going to live life from the deepest part of my being.'” — Michael Singer

9. ART OF LIVING — Awaken the art of living to understand the art of dying (and vice versa).

“ The art of living is based on rhythm — on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death . By acceptance of  all  aspects of life , good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life,’  metamorphosis .” — Henry Miller

• “ One learns the art of dying by learning the art of living : how to become master of the present moment.” — S. N. Goenka
• “We should get ready for death, because it will come, sooner or later. The best thing to do is to live a good life. If you live a good life, you should not be afraid of death.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “ Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly .” — Marcus Aurelius
• “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived . I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life , to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…” — Henry David Thoreau

10. TODAY — A single day is a fractal version of a full lifetime.

“The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work. ” — Lao Tzu ( Tao Te Ching , Stephen Mitchell Version)

• “When you have doubts about what to do, just imagine that you might die at the end of that same day , and then all your doubts will disappear , and you will see clearly what your conscience tells you, and what is your true personal wish.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “ One day is equal to every day. ” — Heraclitus
• “ How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. ” — Annie Dillard
• “Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life .” — Seneca
• “ Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” — Mahatma Gandhi

11. UNBUSYNESS — Busyness is one of the biggest distractions from living.

“ No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course.  It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favour. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome?  You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that. ” — Seneca

• “ He who hurries has one foot in the grave. ” — Moroccan saying
• “ I worry that I’ll face my death and realize that my life got lost in this frantic flotsam of daily stuff. ” — Brigid Schulte
• “When will we find time to do what we love? When things calm down, when the visitors leave and the trips we have planned are finished … and this busy project is wrapped up and the kids are grown up and we’re retired? Maybe when we’re dead there will be more time. ” — Leo Babauta
• “ Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down. ” — Anonymous
• “It’s hard to think about the fact that we’re going to die; it’s unpleasant, so we constantly seek ways to distract ourselves from the awareness of our own mortality . Speed, with the sensory rush it gives, is one strategy for distraction.” — Mark Kingwell
• “ It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return.” — Seneca

12. PRESENCE — Life only ever exists in the present moment.

“The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing.  The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose. ” — Marcus Aurelius

• “ At any time each of the moments of which life consists is dying … that moment will never recur . And yet is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives? It certainly is, and hence my imperative:  Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. ” — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
• “If you’re reconciled with death or even if you are pretty well assured that you will have a good death, a dignified one, then every single moment of every single day is transformed because the pervasive undercurrent—the fear of death—is removed . . . . I am living an end-life where everything ought to be an end in itself, where I shouldn’t waste any time preparing for the future, or occupying myself with means to later ends.” — Abraham Maslow
• “Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately. ” — Seneca

13. FINAL REVELATIONS — Know that some things won’t be revealed until the verge of death.

“ Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what they were really looking for, their Being, had actually always already been there, but had been largely obscured by their identification with things, which ultimately means identification with their mind.” — Eckhart Tolle

• “ In our final moments we all realize that relationships are what life is all about. Wisdom is learning that truth sooner rather than later. Don’t wait until you’re on your deathbed to figure out that nothing matters more.” — Rick Warren,  The Purpose Driven Life
• “Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And  doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief? ” — Viktor Frankl
• “When there is nothing to identify with anymore, who are you? When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter. You realize your essential identity as formless, as an all­-pervasive Presence, of Being prior to all forms, all identifications. You realize your true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with. That’s the peace of God.  The ultimate truth of who you are is not in I am this or I am that, but I Am. ” — Eckhart Tolle

14. BEYOND DEATH — Contemplate what may happen after death.

“ The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything—and yet death does not have the final word.  By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge.” — Parker Palmer

• “ The recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself , that which is beyond death. Jesus called it ‘eternal life.’ ” — Eckhart Tolle
• “The more spiritual a life a person leads, the less he is afraid of death. For a spiritual person death means setting the spirit free from the body. Such a person knows that the things with which he lives cannot be destroyed.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “ To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. ” — J.K. Rowling
• “ Death is a liberation of the soul from the material personality in which it existed in this world.” — Leo Tolstoy

15. OVERCOMING FEAR — It is possible to truly overcome the fear of death while you are alive.

“ Learn to live as though you are facing death at all times, and you’ll become bolder and more open.  If you live life fully, you won’t have any last wishes. You will have lived them every moment. Only then will you have fully experienced life and released the part of you that is afraid of living. There is no reason to be afraid of life. And  the fear will fade once you understand that the only thing there is to get from life is the growth that comes from experiencing it.   Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship.  Everything else you’re doing is just focusing on a tiny subset of life in the attempt to give life some meaning.  What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it.  It isn’t any particular event; it’s the willingness to experience life’s events.” — Michael Singer

• “ You should live your life so that you are not afraid of death, and at the same time do not wish to die. ” — Leo Tolstoy
• “ The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” — Attributed to Mark Twain
• “ People living deeply have no fear of death. ” — Anaïs Nin “ The level of fear you feel about death is the level of your understanding of life. ” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important . Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” — Steve Jobs
• “Modern research suggests that the  transcendent state of consciousness is related to positive mental health —including positive changes in family life, reduced fear of death , better health, and a greater sense of purpose—as well as a motivation for increased altruism and prosocial behaviors.” — Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend
• “ Less afraid of death as they get closer to it … From the perspective of a young person, such a statement may signal that somebody is not mentally stable, but for the person who has transcended this (life-death) duality, it may sound like wisdom .” — Gerotranscendence

What was most impactful for you? Have any other favorite insights or quotes on death?

Please let me know in the comments.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Write Your Own Eulogy — Then Live Up To It
• Learning to Live before you Die: “On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca (Essay Summary)
• How to Live a Good Life according to “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius (Book Summary)
• A Handbook for Living: “Enchiridion” by Epictetus (Book Summary)
• 25+ Art of Living Quotes to Inspire the Ultimate “Work” of our Lives

About Kyle Kowalski

👋 Hi, I'm Kyle―the human behind Sloww . I'm an ex-marketing executive turned self-education entrepreneur after an existential crisis in 2015. In one sentence: my purpose is synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development . But, I’m not a professor, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, mystic, or guru. I’m an interconnector across all those humans and many more—an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator" (in other words, it's just me over here, asking questions, crossing disciplines, and making connections). To keep it simple, you can just call me a "synthesizer." Sloww shares the art of living with students of life . Read my story.

Sloww participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you purchase a book through an Amazon link, Sloww earns a small percentage at no additional cost to you. This helps fund the costs to support the site and the ad-free experience.

Reader Interactions

July 12, 2020 at 1:40 PM

Very sorry about the loss of your “kitty”

July 12, 2020 at 5:42 PM

My deepest condolences. It’s heartbreaking when a beloved canine family member dies. May your heart be comforted.

August 4, 2020 at 11:49 PM

Appreciate the support, Jeff!

Thank you, Emily!

February 23, 2023 at 1:14 PM

Michael Keller (Victoria BC) and I are teaching an extended form of the Integral Life Boat experience. This is an amazing and precious resource to deepen our own perspectives. I love your phenomenal capacity to distill knowledge and support it with relevant quotes

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What Good Is Thinking About Death?

We're all going to die and we all know it. This can be both a burden and a blessing.

In the heart of every parent lives the tightly coiled nightmare that his child will die. It might spring at logical times—when a toddler runs into the street, say—or it might sneak up in quieter moments. The fear is a helpful evolutionary motivation for parents to protect their children, but it's haunting nonetheless.

The ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus advised parents to indulge that fear. “What harm is it, just when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?” he wrote in his Discourses.

Some might say Epictetus was an asshole. William Irvine thinks he was on to something.

“The Stoics had the insight that the prospect of death can actually make our lives much happier than they would otherwise be,” he says. “You’re supposed to allow yourself to have a flickering thought that someday you’re going to die, and someday the people you love are going to die. I’ve tried it, and it’s incredibly powerful. Well, I am a 21st-century practicing Stoic.”

He’s a little late to the party. Stoicism as a school of philosophy rose to prominence in the 3rd century B.C. in Greece, then migrated to the Roman Empire, and hung around there through the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 A.D. “That Stoicism has seen better days is obvious,” Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University, writes in his book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy . He stumbled across the philosophy when researching a book on Zen Buddhism—“I thought I wanted to be a Zen Buddhist,” he says, “but Stoicism just had a much more rational approach.”

Though the word “stoic” in modern parlance is associated with a lack of feeling, in his book, Irvine argues that the philosophy offers a recipe for happiness, in part by thinking about bad things that might happen to you. The big one, obviously, is death—both yours and that of people you love.

“We can do it on a daily basis, simply by imagining how things can be worse than they are,” he says. “Then when they aren’t that way, isn’t that just wonderful? Isn’t it simply wonderful that I get another day to get this right?”

For Irvine and the Stoics, thoughts of death inspire gratitude. For many others, thinking about The End inspires fear or anxiety. In fact, the latter may be the natural human condition.

“We are different from other animals in that we are uniquely aware of our own mortality,” says Ken Vail, an assistant professor of psychology at Cleveland State University. “Certainly other animals recognize they can die—if a cheetah chases an impala, or chases us, both us and the impala are going to run away. We recognize that as an immediate threat of mortality. But the impala doesn’t sit in the safety of its office aware of the fact that it will eventually die. And we do.”

This is the price we pay for the nice things consciousness has given us—self-reflection, art, engineering, long-term planning, cooking our food and adding spices to it instead of just chomping raw meat straight off the bones of another animal, etc. We’re all going to die and we all know it.

But we’re not always actively thinking about it. When people are reminded of death, they employ a variety of strategies to cope—not all of which are as well-adjusted as Stoic gratitude. That many kinds of human behavior stem from a fear of death is the basis of one of the most prominent theories in modern social psychology—terror-management theory.

Terror-management theory exists because one day, some 30-odd years ago, Sheldon Solomon was perusing the library at Skidmore College, where he’s a professor of psychology, and he happened to pick up The Birth and Death of Meaning , by Ernest Becker. “This is nothing to be proud of, but the cover is white with green splotches on it, and I was like ‘Ooh, what an interesting color,’” Solomon says. “Then I liked that it was a short book with big print. Again, nothing to be proud of, but true. And that’s why I reached for it.”

Once he opened the book, though, Solomon was taken by its central question—Why do people do what they do?—and how it was presented, without “turgid academic jargon,” he says. Becker offered an answer to that question: People do a lot of the things that they do to quell their fear of death. So Solomon and two of his friends from grad school, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, set out to test that idea empirically.

The only antidote to death is immortality. And so, terror-management theory holds, when faced with the idea of death, people turn to things they believe will give them immortality, literal or otherwise. The hope of true immortality can be found in religion’s promises of heaven or reincarnation, or in some of science’s more dubious life-extension promises (Just freeze your dead body! They’ll wake it up later!).

More often though, it’s the hope of symbolic immortality that calms the frightened rabbits of death-fearing hearts—the idea that people are a part of something that will last longer than they do. Their culture, their country, their family, their work. When thinking of death, people cling more intensely to the institutions they're a part of, and the worldviews they hold.

What that actually means in terms of behavior, is trickier. The research shows that what people do when they’re feeling aware of their mortality depends on the person, the situation she’s in, and whether she’s focusing on death or it’s just in the back of her mind. (The TMT literature, which details a wide range of effects, is now fairly substantial. A 2010 metareview found 238 TMT studies, and this page on the University of Missouri website lists nearly 600, though it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012).

When death is in the front of your mind—when you pass by a cemetery, when someone you know is sick (or when, in a lab, a researcher has just asked you about it)—the tendency, according to TMT, is to want to push those thoughts away. You might suppress the thoughts, distract yourself with something else, or comfort yourself with the idea that your death is a long way away, and anyway, you’re definitely going to go to the gym tomorrow.

A couple of studies have shown that conscious thoughts of death do increase health intentions, for exercise and medical screenings, though whether people actually follow through on those intentions is unclear. Promising yourself you’ll eat better may just be a strategy to get death off your mind.

When death is on people’s conscious minds, “they can wield logic to deal with it,” Vail says. “This would be similar to your mom saying, ‘Put on your seatbelt, you don’t want to die.’ So you think about that and recognize, yes, she’s right, you don’t want to bite it on the way to the grocery store, so you put on your seatbelt.”

According to Solomon, even young children use versions of these same strategies. His new book, written with Greenberg and Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life , cites the story of 5-year-old Richard, from a series of interviews the psychologist Sylvia Anthony conducted in the 60s and 70s:

“He swam up and down in his bath [and] he played with the possibility of never dying: ‘I don’t want to be dead, ever; I don’t want to die.’ … After his mother told 5-year-old Richard that he wouldn’t die for a long time, the little boy smiled and said, ‘That’s all right. I’ve been worried, and now I can get happy.’ Then he said he would like to dream about ‘going shopping and buying things.’”

Classic distraction move, Richard. Though at times, our own coping mechanisms may not be much more sophisticated. “Americans are arguably the best in the world at burying existential anxieties under a mound of French fries and a trip to Walmart to save a nickel on a lemon and a flamethrower,” Solomon says.

But shopping excursions can only distract you so much. Even once you stop actively thinking about it, death is still prominent in your nonconscious mind. “One metaphor is the file drawer,” Vail says. “You pull out a file and read it, then you get distracted, now you’re thinking about dinner. You put [the file] back in the drawer, you pull out dinner, now you’re looking at dinner, but whatever you were thinking about previously is now on the top of the file. It’s the closest thing to your conscious awareness.”

This is when, the research shows, people's attitudes and behaviors are most affected—when you’ve recently been reminded of death, but it’s moved to the back of your mind.

Unfortunately, a lot of what death brings out when it's sitting at the top of the file drawer is not humanity’s most sterling qualities. If people feel motivated to uphold their own cultures and worldviews in the face of death, it stands to reason that they might be less friendly toward other worldviews and the people who hold them.

The very first terror-management study involved “22 municipal-court judges in Tucson, Arizona,” according to The Worm at the Core . The judges were tasked with setting bail for alleged prostitutes, but first they were asked to take a survey. Some of them just answered personality questions, but some were also asked two questions about death: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.” The standard bail at the time was $50, set by judges who didn’t take the survey. The ones who did take the survey set the bail an average of nine times higher.

“The results showed that the judges who thought about their own mortality reacted by trying to do the right thing as prescribed by their culture,” the book reads. “Accordingly, they upheld the law more vigorously than their colleagues who were not reminded of death.”

But, Solomon says, the researchers later repeated that study with students, and found that only those who thought prostitution was “morally reprehensible” opted to set a harsher bail. The logic goes that those students wanted to uphold their values, and punish transgressors. Since then, more studies have shown this tendency: When mortality's on their minds, people prefer others in their (cultural/racial/national/religious) group to those outside it. This dynamic has manifested in silly ways—in one study liberals were more likely to make conservatives eat a gross hot sauce after a death reminder and vice versa—and in more serious ones—reminders of mortality have been shown to make people more likely to stereotype others.

While wanting to promote your own worldviews can mean putting others' down, that isn't the only way people seek to feel like part of something greater than themselves—searching for that symbolic immortality. Looming mortality can also lead people to help others, donate to charity, and want to invest in caring families and relationships. (And studies have backed up that people do these things when reminded of death.)

These reactions have also been observed outside the lab, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when death was likely top of mind for many Americans for quite a while. Comparisons of survey answers before and two months after 9/11 found increases in kindness, love, hope, spirituality, gratitude, leadership, and teamwork, which persisted (though to a slightly lesser degree) 10 months after the attacks. But Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski point out in their book that there was also a lot of fear and derogation by Americans of the “other” after 9/11, specifically Muslim and Arab others.

“It’s not the case that awareness of mortality and the ensuing terror-management process is an inherently negative one that causes prejudice and closed-mindedness and hostility but instead it appears to be simply rather a neutral process,” Vail says. “It’s one that motivates people to indiscriminately uphold and defend their cultural worldviews.”

How you manage your terror, then, depends on what’s already important to you—and that’s what you’ll turn to when confronted with mortality. In one study, empathetic people were more likely to forgive transgressions after a death reminder; in another, fundamentalist religious people were more compassionate after thinking of their own mortality—but only when compassionate values were framed in a religious context, such as excerpts from the Bible or Koran.

Terror-management theory contends that there’s something different about our fear of death, compared to other fears. Every other threat is survivable, after all. And in research, thinking about death has produced just as strong of an effect whether the alternative was something neutral, or another threat like rejection or pain. So a fear of death is not just like a fear of rejection, except more.

Except Steven Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, doesn’t think death is necessarily such a unique threat. In 2006, he and fellow researchers Travis Proulx and Kathleen Vohs developed the Meaning Maintenance Model, which says yes, thinking about death can inspire these attitudes and behaviors, but for a different reason. Death, according to their theory, is a threat to the way we understand the world, similar to uncertainty, being rejected by a friend, or even—Heine’s example—finding a red queen of spades in a deck of cards. All these things interrupt what Heine calls “meaning frameworks—understandings of how the world works. When we think about the fact that we’re going to die, it calls all of those assumptions into question. All these things I’m trying to do, I won’t be able to succeed, my relationships will be severed, the way I think I fit into the world, ultimately I no longer will. This is bothersome.”

But perhaps not more bothersome than other threats to meaning. Heine says Meaning Maintenance Model studies have found that thinking about death does not have a noticeably larger effect on people's attitudes and behaviors than, say, watching a surreal movie. A metareview of TMT studies also notes that the effects of thinking about death are less significant when compared with thinking about something else that threatens someone's sense of meaning.

Thoughts of death still lead people to uphold their worldviews according to this theory, but it’s because, when faced with an idea as confounding as one's own mortality, people turn to the other things in their lives that still make sense to them. While the two theories have a lot in common, Heine says MMM can explain one thing that TMT cannot: suicide.

“TMT would argue that while we want to have a sense of meaning as a way of keeping away thoughts of death, one of the key motivators of suicide is feeling that your life isn’t very meaningful, wanting death when you feel like you don’t have sufficient meaning in your life," he says.

The thing that makes death different, Heine says, is that it’s not solvable. With other meaning threats, you can try to fix the problem, or adjust your worldview to accommodate the new information. “The fact that we’re going to die is a problem that we can never fully resolve throughout our lives,” he says.

But maybe that’s for the best.

“I know we’re supposed to be super afraid of death. But it’s good, isn’t it?” asks Laura King, curator’s professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “If life never ended, think about it, right? Isn’t that like every vampire story or sci-fi movie? If you live too long, after a while, you just lose it. Life no longer has any meaning, because it’s commonplace.”

King did a study in 2009 that offers an alternative, economical perspective on death and meaning. She showed that after reminders of death, people valued life more highly—and conversely, reading a passage that placed a high monetary value on the human body increased people’s number of death thoughts. This is the scarcity principle, plain and simple—the less you have of something, the more you value it.

But “most of us don’t live like we’re aware that life is a finite commodity,” King says. She describes an exercise she has her students do, in which they write down their life goals, and then write what they’d do if they only had three weeks to live. “Then you say, ‘Why aren’t you doing those things?’ They say, ‘Get real, hello, we have a future to plan for.’”

“Live every day as though it’s your last” is nice but profoundly unhelpful advice, when you know that today is probably not your last day. I’m not sure what I’d do if I was going to die tomorrow—round up all my loved ones and fly them to Paris? Or maybe just throw them a really nice dinner party, the kind where everyone ends up sprawled out on couches, overstuffed and warm from the wine.

Either way, I can’t do that today. I have to go to work.

“Everybody always says life is too short,” King says, “but it’s really long. It’s really, really long.”

Once people’s days truly are numbered, their priorities do seem to shift. According to research done on socioemotional selectivity theory , older people are more present-oriented than younger people, and are more selective in who they spend time with, sticking mostly with family and old, close friends. Other studies have shown them to also be more forgiving , and to care more for others , and less about enhancing themselves.

This all fits in well with Irvine’s Stoic philosophy. Rather than pulling curtains over the darkness on the other side of the window, you stare straight into it, so when you turn away you’re thankful for the light.

Irvine gives the mundane example of buying a lawn mower. “As I’m doing it, I have the realization that this is conceivably the last lawn mower I will ever buy,” he says. “I don’t like mowing the lawn, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve only got X number of times it’s going to happen. Some day, this moment, right now, is going to count as the good old days."

Unfortunately, Western culture isn’t exactly death-friendly. Death is kept largely out of sight, out of mind, the details left to hospitals and funeral parlors. Though most Americans say they want to die at home, few actually do—only about 25 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . Most other people die in hospitals, nursing homes, or other facilities.

This is why, in 2011, the mortician Caitlin Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death, a self-described “group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death-phobic culture for inevitable mortality.” She’s also written a book about working in a crematory, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes , and hosts the “Ask a Mortician” webseries.

“Death doesn't go away just because we hide it,” Doughty wrote to me in an email. “Hiding life's truths doesn't mean they disappear. It means they are forced into darker parts of our consciousness … Death is the most natural thing in the world, and treating it as deviant isn't doing our culture any favors … We don't control nature. We aren't higher-ranking than nature.”

This is terror management writ large, a culture that pushes death away as best it can. Even though, ultimately, it can’t.

More people are coming around to Doughty’s way of thinking. “ Death salons ” and “ death cafes ,” where people gather to talk about their mortality have sprung up across the U.S., and many doctors, like the Being Mortal author Atul Gawande, are working to advance the conversation around end-of-life care, getting patients involved in planning for their deaths.

But the research shows the effects of thinking about death aren't all grace and gratitude —so would bringing death out into the open ultimately help or hurt humanity?

“At first, thinking about death regularly made me move up and down and way up and way down the emotional spectrum,” Doughty writes. “But over time thinking about death moves you closer to magnanimity. You realize that you will have to give your body, your atoms and molecules, back to the universe when you're done with them.”

She also points out that TMT studies are isolated instances, and don't look at what happens when people think about death regularly, over time.

Maybe the key, then, is being deliberate. Not letting thoughts of death sneak up on you, but actively engaging with them, even if it’s hard. In one 2010 study , people who were more mindful were less defensive of their worldviews after being reminded of death, suggesting that “mindfulness can potentially disrupt some of these kinds of processes that go into terror management,” says Vail, the Cleveland State University psychologist.

Solomon, too, is hopeful. “I like to think there comes a moment where sustained efforts to come to terms with death pay off.” Vail suggests that freeing oneself from the psychological reactions to death might get rid of the good effects along with the bad, but Solomon’s willing to take the trade. “If you look at the problems that currently befall humanity—we can’t get along with each other, we’re pissing on the environment, [there’s] rampant economic instability by virtue of mindless conspicuous consumption—they’re all malignant manifestations of death anxiety running amok.”

It’s probably not possible to erase all fear of death—animals have a drive to survive, and we are animals, even with all that consciousness. Even if being mindful about death means getting rid of the good along with the bad consequences of death anxiety, people can be generous and love each other without being scared into it.

"Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him," E.M. Forster once wrote . I don't know if there's really any salvation, but if we accept death, maybe we can just live.

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We asked Big Thinkers: “Is there life after death?” Here’s what they said.

• Death is inevitable. Given how universal, absolute, and terrifying death is, it’s no wonder humans have been talking and writing about it for millennia.
• Here we explore how several Big Think guests think about the question of life after death.
• Their answers range from existentialist to Einsteinian to a potential future that sounds like science fiction.

You will die. No matter how powerful you are, how hard you pray, or how sophisticated nanotechnology becomes, you will die. The vast majority of people can see their death approaching. We have a lot of time to think about it. Yet, death remains a great mystery — the veil behind which no one can peek.

Given how terrifying and unknown death is, it’s no wonder we talk about it a lot. It’s not too ridiculous to suppose that almost all the world’s religions are, to some degree, a response to death. Most of our philosophies are, too. In 2020, Big Think interviewed some big names in academia . They gave us their answers to the “What happens after we die?” question.

Here, we explore some of their responses.

Existential uncertainty

Bertrand Russell, an atheist, was once asked what he would say if, when he died, he came face to face with God. Russell replied, “[I would say] ‘Sir, why did you not give me better evidence?’”

If you’re coming at religion from a scientist’s mindset, there’s not much to say. There’s really no evidence either way. We have neither verifiable testimony nor falsifiable claims. When you’re entirely stuck on a physical plane, you cannot say much about the metaphysical one. As Sam Harris says, “I don’t know what happens after the physical brain dies…I don’t think anyone does know.”

The only fact we do know is that we will die. And it’s this fact that, for Bill Nye, is so important. Because we do not know what happens after death, and because we’re faced with the possibility it might be nothing, we turn to life with a kind of vital energy. Death’s approach gives impetus to our mortal existence. As Nye puts it, “It’s what makes us go. And it’s what makes you try to accomplish things … All of [our decisions] are driven by the limited length of life we have.”

For Nye, Rob Bell, and Michael Shermer, life after death is a mystery, but with that comes an existential rush to get things done. It lets you appreciate the time you have more.

Time is a landscape

Astronomer Michelle Thaller uses Einstein to give us a screenplay that’s just waiting for Christopher Nolan. For Thaller, you are already dead. At least, you’re dead from a certain point of view. As she puts it, “Einstein believed that you, right now, had been dead for trillions of years; that you haven’t been born yet; that everything that’s happened to you, if you could get the right perspective on the universe, you could see all at once.”

Although it’s old news to anyone inside physics departments, time isn’t linear. It’s not even a thing, really. Time is all about your location and the speed of light. If you alter those two variables, you can look at the past and see the future. Einstein believed that space-time was a substance created at the Big Bang, and every point along that continuum is just as real as the “present.” You, reading this, happen to exist on one point on that surface. But that’s no more real than any other.

So, from one point of view, you’re already dead. You haven’t been born. Or you have to relive this minute over and over and over again like some Nietzschean nightmare.

Life is not biology

The third category is either techno-optimism or techno-dystopia, depending on your preferences. This idea might sound like science fiction: Imagine uploading yourself to the immortal cloud (and hoping no unfortunate intern accidentally unplugs the power supply).

For theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, in the near future, “Everything known about you can be digitized.” Your memories, your personality, your quirks, and your entire neural network can be uploaded or saved somewhere forever. Your body will age, your organs will stop working, and your body will break down. But in this new digital afterlife, you can talk with your descendants. You can live digitally.

There are a lot of problems with this. There are just as many unknowns as death itself. We still don’t know what consciousness is, let alone if we can reproduce it. What’s more, as the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty knew, our bodies are not fleshy tools to dispose of at will. Our existence is embodied. Our entire being exists only in a physical body. It’s hard to imagine what Kaku’s immortality would look like. As Bill Nye asks, “Do you want to be stuck in an Apple product the rest of your life, or do you want to be stuck in a Microsoft product? It’s a tough call.”

I’m not sure it’s that tough, Bill. I’ll take Thaller’s version of Groundhog Day , I think.

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5 reasons thinking about death will make your life better.

There's a narrative in our culture that we find clarity when we face death. We come closer to our values and consider what's truly important to us. This narrative is evident in an article I read about the top 5 regrets of the dying . It was written by a palliative nurse who published a book of the same title a couple years ago — you might remember it.

But why can't we make space for these epiphanies before becoming palliative? Why didn't these folks consider these important questions earlier? Why do we ignore the reality that our human life is impermanent, only to have regrets when it's ending?

Well, because death s a scary topic. In fact, if you're reading this article, bravo. That takes courage. We live in a death-denying culture , where we don't like to talk or think about death. It makes us feel uneasy. We don't even like the word "die." We say things like "pass" or "expire," and get uncomfortable around others who are grieving .

But what if, by ignoring our mortality, we're doing ourselves a giant disservice? What if mindfully thinking about our own inevitable death — our finite existence, our impermanence — were healthy for living a good life? Well, it is. Here's why:

1. Thinking about death motivates us.

Imagine if you knew you were immortal. You'd live for eternity. All the time in the world. Would you feel desired to experience, accomplish, and connect? Knowing that there really is always tomorrow, we might not feel the same desire to "do it while [we're] young" or work toward a health or career goal. Knowing our time here is finite motivates us to truly live our lives.

2. Thinking about death reminds us to not sweat the small stuff.

Thinking of the precarious nature of life lends us some perspective. When we're reminded of our mortality, we're not so concerned about that spat with our spouse, our love handles, or a cracked iPhone screen. The "little things" stay little.

3. Thinking about death helps us appreciate the present and be mindful.

If today were the last day of your life, you might react differently to rush-hour traffic or your "boring" job. You might find yourself savoring (or at least not hating) moments that were previously uncomfortable. Next time you find yourself reacting to a difficult feeling, think about how it might be different if you were just told you had two months, weeks, or days left to live.

4. Thinking about death helps us negotiate our death anxiety and feel more prepared for our exit from this earth.

Anxiety arises when we think about dying. But the more we think about something, the less frightening it becomes. There are many different beliefs about what happens when we stop breathing. Consider yours. Whether you believe in an afterlife, eternal sleep, reincarnation, nothingness, no self and thus no death, or something else, just let those thoughts enter into your awareness.

Whatever you believe, notice your experience thinking about those beliefs — at times it might be hot and panicked, and at other times it might be calmer and less powerful. Be kind to yourself. These feelings and thoughts will come and go.

5. Thinking about death allows us to remember what's really important to us and live intentionally.

Remembering that this one life is finite helps us find meaning and be attentive and intentional with our actions. Rather than the perfect selfie or the perfect salary, you might think about spending time with the people who matter to you, doing things that make you happy, and leaving your mark on society. Thinking about death brings us closer to our values, and helps us think about what "the point" is; ask yourself what you value, what you stand for, what you want to be remembered for, and what you believe is your purpose. Then start moving in that direction.

So, if you're feeling courageous, make some space for thinking about death. Notice what comes up. It's natural that it will cause anxiety; trust that reaction is coming from your value for life and desire to continue living. Invite in that anxiety, that disquiet, feel the perceivably solid ground of your world tremble slightly. Notice how it lessens as you think about death more. Approach the topic with compassion, and remind yourself it's a natural part of life that we're all fortunate to experience. The payoff? A more meaningful, mindful life.

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The Creative Penn

Writing, self-publishing, book marketing, making a living with your writing

Writing About Death, Dying, And Grief With Dr Karen Wyatt

posted on March 19, 2018

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:00:39 — 49.4MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

Death is an inevitable part of life. We spend a lot of time trying to forget that fact but as writers, our job is to face the difficult things and write about them anyway.

In the introduction, I discuss the Audible Romance Subscription payout , the new Audible.com Author pages that use your Amazon Central Profile to pull from [ here's mine ], and the New York Times new audiobook bestseller list. Audio is not going away!

Plus, predictions on 2018 – 2038 from Peter Diamandis, whose companies span asteroid mining and human longevity, including 5G streaming internet for global mobile users by 2020, and self-driving cars as mainstream by 2026 – both will mean a LOT more consumers. We are only just starting this digital transformation!

My personal update about walking last week on the Amalfi Coast in Italy – pics here on Instagram , although it did rain a lot! I talk about the need for fallow periods, writing about places you haven't been, gathering ideas and emotional reaction to place, as well as creating a life you don't want to escape from. Plus, I recommend Seth Godin's new podcast, Akimbo .

You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher or watch the video here , read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

• Lessons learned from working with those close to death
• On paying attention to our inner passion for writing
• Tips for dealing with death and grief in our characters and our writing. Joanna talks about some of the issues tackled in Desecration .
• Why we are able to write about grief that we might not have experienced personally
• Why it's okay to be comfortable with the subject of death
• On changes in death culture as boomers age
• My interview on End of Life University on writing about death and dying

You can find Dr. Karen Wyatt at KarenWyattMD.com and on Twitter @spiritualmd

You can find another interview with Karen on how traveling has helped her deal with death and grief here .

Transcript of Interview with Dr. Karen Wyatt

Joanna: Hi, everyone, I'm Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today I'm here with Dr. Karen Wyatt. Hi, Karen.

Karen: Hi, Joanna, thanks for having me.

Joanna: Oh, it's great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.

Karen is a hospice physician and bestselling author of books about death, loss and grief. She's also the host of the “End of Life University” podcast, and an inspirational speaker who teaches how to live a life that really matters by embracing our mortality.

I have something to show you, Karen, and the viewers on the video, because I wanted to do this because this is what I have on my desk next to me all the time. This is a sugar skull for those on the audio.

I have a sugar skull covered in butterflies right next to my writing desk, because I absolutely believe in thinking about death and mortality all the time. But enough about my skull.

Tell us a bit more about you, Karen, and why and how you chose this path for your career in writing?

Karen: Well, like so many writers that you've interviewed, I had a passion for storytelling and writing as just a young child. But I took the long route to becoming a writer and I decided to become a doctor.

So all those years during my medical training and practice, I really wasn't able to write. I would have 30 minutes here and there, and I have notebooks full of projects I tried to start because I had this constant flood of ideas in my head, always thinking of a new story.

I could write a play about this. I can write a screenplay. Like, what about this? I always saw the stories, but I had no time to write them. So it took all these years of a long medical career.

During that time I started working in hospice, taking care of dying patients, which really changed my life. I got there because I was trying to cope with my own grief after my father committed suicide. So hospice really became a refuge for me where I could just focus on death and dying and bring my grief.

I learned these amazing lessons from working there. And I always knew I have to write about this, but still I was in medicine. I still had a long career to go through.

About eight years ago, I met a woman who is a psychic at a party who just came up to me knowing nothing about me. And she said, “You have an unfulfilled passion within you. I can read it right now. And if you don't start paying attention to that, you'll get sick.”

Instantly I knew it's time. I have to start writing. That happened on a Friday, and on Monday, I resigned from my job and I started writing. I took it seriously. It's been an eight-year journey. Since then I've been trying to write my stories that are in my head.

Joanna: I think it's really interesting you say about that, whether it is somebody externally who says, “You must do this or you will get sick.” Or the evidence of so many people I know who are writers who start to write because they did get sick.

It's like you got there first. But I know so many people and in fact, I did. I was spiritually sick and I was probably 20 pounds heavier than I now, when I was so miserable in my job.

If we have an unfulfilled desire, we can get sick.

Now circling back then to you mentioned the lessons you learned in the hospice. I imagine one of them is that you must do the thing that's unfulfilled before you die.

Karen: Very true.

Joanna: So what were some of the other lessons that you really feel? And, of course, you've written a book about lessons from the dying.

Give us a couple of the things that really stand out.

Karen: One of the things that I saw from all the patients to sitting at their bedsides, I saw how important relationships are. How many of them had regrets that they didn't reach out more to the people they loved. How many needed to practice forgiveness in order to be at peace.

It made me realize I don't want to go there. I'm going to work on my relationships now.

And also the idea of being in the present moment, which I had always heard about. I hear so many people talking about the power of now, be in the present moment. But I witnessed it with dying patients.

I'd sit with a man while he was watching the sunset, and he took in every color and every cloud, and he watched the entire sunset until it completely faded away.

And the reason is because he didn't know if he would ever see another sunset. And it became clear to me, like, wow, I've never enjoyed a single sunset I've seen to the extent that he has.

It made it clear to me that when we're aware that we could die at any time, we can really go to the depths and really mine every one of our experiences for everything that's there, and really make the most of it. I saw the power of being aware of death and mortality.

Joanna: I totally agree on that present moment emphasis, and I do catch myself, particularly because Jonathan and I work in the same office. And he'll be saying something and I'll be like, “Just stop it. I'm concentrating on my thing.”

And then I'll be like, “No, stop and pay attention to what he's talking about.”

But then that we have to balance living in the present moment with doing our writing work, which often means we're living in the past or imagining something else.

How do we balance doing our writing work, the work of our soul with that living in the present moment?

Karen: I like to think of it as separating my soul from my mind, in a way, and that if I'm writing in the present moment, I'm being in the present moment, even if what I'm thinking about and processing is something from the past.

I'm being right here, right now doing what it meant to do and what my soul is supposed to be doing by writing.

I think of it always as both ways. I'm in the present even though I'm processing the past or planning for the future, I'm aware of everything happening around me right now.

Joanna: Now, that makes sense. Thank you for that.

Circling back on death in general and hopefully, the people who are still listening into this topic. I'm imagining everyone else has gone away, but so many people struggle to talk about death and to think about death.

I particularly notice with my parents, how different they are. My mum has organized everything. Everything is all paid for, all the paperwork's done and my dad just will not even talk about it.

The denial of death is, is huge in some people, right?

As writers, how do we tackle this difficult subject, either in memoir or in fiction? How do we bring ourselves to the page to even face that fear?

Karen: I think we do have to do our own inner work first, and look at our own fear of death and our own thoughts and emotions when we contemplate our death. And then also look at our own history with death.

Do we have unresolved grief over a loss we've had in the past? Has that entrenched our fear of death even more, so that we kind of open ourselves up to the subject of death.

For me, the moment I started studying death by working with dying patients, instantly my fear went away and I was instantly able to just sit with it and realize, “Oh, this is just part of life.”

Why had I shut off that part of myself for so many years and not addressed it or thought of it. And it was actually, a huge relief once I was able to just bring death into my awareness every day.

I think if writers would like to write about death, they need to spend a little time journaling first and doing their own inner work to prepare for it.

Joanna: It seems like we see a lot of deaths even on screen and in books, but we may not have seen it in real life. And often, the death we see on screen and I'm thinking of “Game of Thrones,” for example, which is very violent and there's a lot of death and dying.

But it's not, as you say, on an emotional level. It's done as entertainment.

There's so many things I want to ask you about, but let's stick with the writing.

What do people get wrong with things like writing about death, with writing crime novels, with writing entertainment, that you see as is incorrect?

Karen: I don't necessarily see it as being wrong, but I think many writers objectify death. They project death outside of themselves, as if it's something that happens to other people but not to them. That allows the reader to do the same thing.

The reader can read all kinds of crime novels and thrillers and watch violent movies and play video games, and never think about their own death because they're only seeing the death of the other, of someone else outside of them.

That's also because of the emotions around death are not being addressed in that way. I think what writers need to do, again, is explore their own thoughts and feelings about death and even their own experiences, if they're carrying their own pain of some sort of grief that's really valuable and trying to write about it with a character.

And then remember, death is the most common experience of every human on earth. Every single one of our characters in some way should have some thoughts or feelings about death.

If we remember to incorporate it in the back stories of our characters we can ask what has this person's experience been? What are they grieving? How are they accepting and coping with death and how does that affect their behavior?

That's the one thing I'd love to see more authors address it. Just like you did in “Desecration” with Jamie Brooke when her daughter was dying. I just thought that made Jamie such a rich and authentic character because she was genuinely grieving.

We got to see her doing her detective work and we had all the thrilling aspects of the crime thriller, but there was genuine emotion when Polly died. I hope I'm not spoiling the book. I'm sorry.

Joanna: No, I think that that's fair enough. I was going to bring that up because I am a happily child-free woman, and yet I wrote about the death of a child in that book, that has not happened to me.

My experience of grief as I was writing it, I've never actually, other than that book, cried when I was writing a scene and it did affect me, because I was empathizing with someone who was going through that. Even though I haven't been through that myself.

Which implies that we can imagine this even if we haven't been through it. Would that be right?

Karen: Yes, absolutely. Because we've all been through loss and we all go through they call them the “little deaths.”

The Buddhists refer to that the little deaths of life, and each one of us has probably had a relationship breakup, or a betrayal in life, or something else, or losing a pet that we loved that died.

So each one of us has had losses throughout life and had that experience of grieving when something you loved that was just here with you is now gone. I think we can apply all of that.

You clearly did because you wrote in a very authentic voice about Jamie's grief. So to me it sounds like you did draw from that well within of a level of grief you had experienced.

Joanna: Part of it also is I feel like I have been thinking about death all my life. I was going to ask you about this because like you mentioned as a child wanting to write.

I remember thinking about death as a child and my mom getting upset about this and I'm like, “It's nothing to do with you, mom.” I had a very happy childhood. I just think I've always been aware of that.

Some people have said, you know, “You're an old soul or something like this.”

Do you believe that there is a different awareness or belief? Have you seen evidence that different people have different awareness of death that perhaps they have, even as children? And if you're a parent of a child who seems a bit morbid, that maybe you shouldn't worry?

Karen: Absolutely. I see it all the time and those of us who ended up doing hospice work, many of us talk about, “Oh, I've always felt comfortable with death.” Or, “I've always been interested in death.”

We ended up doing that work because it's fulfilling to us and meaningful, and we're not afraid to be there with someone who's dying.

Don't be afraid at all because the people who are comfortable with death and aware of it, they end up really benefiting from that overall in life because if you can cope with death, you can cope with other things that happen in life. It really helps you have equanimity.

Joanna: I have actually thought about getting involved in hospice work. Some people wanna be wedding celebrants. I'm interested in death culture and end of life stuff, which is why you and I connected when I came on your podcast. I find it endlessly interesting.

Let's get more into the emotional side because there's obviously upset, there's perhaps wanting to self-harm or the destructive side. I also think about grief and death, especially it seems of parents, is guilt and anger.

Guilt and anger seem to be difficult emotions. And yet I suspect that that's just very common.

What do you think about guilt and anger when it comes to dealing with grief?

Karen: I think on the one hand, they can come from these unresolved issues in a relationship that never got addressed, and we can feel guilty after the death of a loved one, because there was something we should've said or we wish we had done.

That was huge for me after my dad took his own life because first I'm a doctor and I treated depression yet I somehow couldn't see this coming with my dad and couldn't help him.

It was a terrible, the guilt that I felt over his death. And then anger. It's one of those stages in the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, “Five Stages of Acceptance,” that we just go through anger because it feels wrong, and it feels like this should not have happened to me.

But part of that comes again from our lack of awareness on a day to day basis that death is normal, and death happens to everyone at some point. The fact that we're so offended and upset when it happens is part of just our denial of it all along, that we weren't accepting all along.

Someday my parents will die and I need to be prepared for that. I need to know that everyone around me eventually will die.

Joanna: And in terms of writing as a form of healing, is that something you've seen work for people?

Karen: It absolutely worked for me. Because that's the thing that was my solace and my savior after my dad's suicide was journaling a lot and sometimes writing poems, writing letters to him, writing stories about things that had happened between us.

It was really a way to put my grief on the page, but I could go back and reread it, and it helped me process. And at a time when it was very difficult to find people I could talk to about it.

Writing was a great alternative. I wrote, I discussed my grief with my journal basically.

Joanna: My grief was a broken relationship when my first husband left me. It was a shock, like your dad. I was like, “What? How did that happen? I didn't see that coming.”

It's interesting reading my journals from that time. I wanted to self-harm. I was angry. I went through those stages of grief. And then I read it back and I don't recognize the woman who wrote that.

Is it the same with the grief in death process; you look back at those and do you recognize yourself?

Karen: Definitely for me, I look back and see, wow, I can see where I was and what a deep hole I was in at that time, and just how much transformation has taken place.

That it gives me great peace and a lot of acceptance about my dad's death in the first place, because I realized I wouldn't be writing right now, I wouldn't have written the book I've written, I wouldn't have gone to hospice work.

Not that I'm saying that justifies my dad's death, but I can accept that it happened now and it has a place in my life. I'm not angry that it happened or that I'm trying to eliminate it from my life history. I embrace it and include it in my life story because it was something important that made a difference to me.

Joanna: That's a message of hope for anyone listening who is still in the depths of it is that if you can work it through, there is a point where you start to emerge.

Karen: Yes. I always think about the process of writing a book, when you're in the middle build and things just don't always make sense and it's confusing and you're not sure where you're headed with this story, and it feels like things are falling apart and you're losing the thread.

But when you keep remembering there will be an ending and I am going to come up with the ending, and I am going to put these pieces together and it will happen. That's how I look at it.

Sometimes we're lost in the middle section. As long as we keep our hope and know we will find a way for these pieces to come together and the loose ends to be tied up eventually.

Joanna: I wanted to ask you as a medical doctor, you've dealt with physical bodies. This is one of the things that I was really interested in exploring in “Desecration.”

My theory being that the physical body at death is no longer us. However, people believe in a religious sense, doesn't really matter. But given the number of people you've seen go through the death transition as such.

Did you see that evidence that the physical body was no longer the person?

Karen: Absolutely, and it was never more clear. I was with my mom when she died five years ago and the transition was amazing and that suddenly when she stopped breathing and I almost felt as if her spirit was leaving her body, and what was left on the bed was a carcass, and it didn't look like my mom.

It didn't feel like my mom. It was not her. I could feel her in some ways bigger than that outside of that body.

But the body, as you said, it was just a body like just like the clothes we take off at the end of the day laying there. So you're exactly right. For me, at least, that was the experience I had.

Joanna: That gives me hope. I don't believe in an afterlife.

I don't think it matters what you believe, but that we're not left in that physical body is the important thing.

Karen: Yes, exactly. I think that's the mentality behind the whole green burial movement, is that we need to stop trying to preserve the physical body and embalming it and using vaults and caskets to try to keep the body from decomposing.

Allow the body to go back to nature. It's part of nature and let it be that and let the normal process happen. That happens for every other living thing on the planet.

Joanna: I did want to ask you about this because I received an email today from some research firm about the change in the boomers reaching 70. A lot of them reaching 70, including my parents, my husband's parents, everyone's hitting 70 in our generation's parents.

It's the boomers, I think, also changing things around death. We have seen a change in death culture as this hippie generation of going, “We're not going to do that the same way.” In one way changing death culture, death cafés, that type of thing.

But also interestingly with the life extension, those boomers who are not ready to die.

What do you think is changing in the death culture with this aging of the boomers?

Karen: It's absolutely changing because boomers tend to be very self-actualized; the most educated generation. The first most educated generation to come along, and having witnessed our parents dying.

I think that's the thing that made the biggest transition for boomers is to see, “Whoa, I don't like the way my parents experienced death and that's not happening for me.” And so they've decided that they need to make plans, they need to get educated.

I do think that a lot of the movements that are happening and including death with dignity here in the U.S. is because baby boomers are saying, “I want to take death in my own hands. I don't want to at the mercy of other people making decisions for me.”

That's a huge movement that I think is probably going to keep growing over time because of the boomers, but also talking about death more and preparing for it.

Though I still see a lot of baby boomers are youth-obsessed and focused on anti-aging, and so we have a ways to go to convince them that it's actually okay to be getting older.

Joanna: The idea that it's okay to be getting older is the interesting thing. My hair has really getting grayed out and I look at yours and I'm like, I actually, I'm waiting for when I can let my hair go. At the moment it's just a little bit.

I was talking to my hairdresser and she said, “You just need to wait till all the roots are going and then go for it.” I like that acceptance. And I actually love that idea of just letting things go. I love Mary Beard, you know Mary Beard, the classicist?

Karen: Mm-hmm. Yes, yes.

Joanna: I just think she's awesome. She's an amazing woman.

I'm fascinated with this acceptance of death with this mortality, life extension. There's even some of these Silicon Valley billionaires getting blood transfusions of younger blood and stuff like that.

Is this just mad? Or, do you think there is some life extension stuff?

Karen: I personally see it as a by-product of the fact that we've evolved to this rational thinking in a way, and that causes us to reject death even more. So I see it as still kind of death avoidance and not really appreciating how valuable death is to us really.

Steve Jobs in his commencement speech, that you might have heard said, “Death is life's change agent.” That we wouldn't have life if we didn't have death. If you look in the natural world.

I feel like some of the life extension, it's slightly misguided and I understand people. I understand it's intriguing and what can technology do and what's available, but I still know in my heart, we will all die one day, no matter how much we managed to extend a few more years here and there, we will still all die one day and we need to be aware of that and we need to grapple with that. That's ultimately what makes us human, is grappling with that reality.

Joanna: I don't know if you saw the very violent program, “Altered Carbon” on Netflix?

Joanna: Quite recent series that just came out as we talk in 2018 and based on a book. It's basically that the physical body is like a sleeve and you swap out your mind into these bodies and you can live forever if you're rich, just for swapping out your bodies.

It's interesting to me how many films and books are tackling this right now because it's a trend that's growing, which is fascinating.

Circling back on the physical body and other cultures. I was in Italy last year and put some pictures on my Pinterest and everything of the jewel skeletons in the churches, these saints that are venerated. Skeletons very much used in, not worship but in the church.

You've recently done a trip, haven't you? A grief pilgrimage to Italy.

Tell us about that and how travel helps you and what you've been writing.

Karen: Yes, I got the idea because on two of my previous trips to Italy, I was dealing with death. One the death of a young patient, a child, the day we were leaving for Italy, a child I had taken care of in my office which devastated me.

And our second trip, my brother-in-law died while we were in Italy. I realized there's something about Italy and death for me. So I need to go back there and recreate these places we've been, but through the lens of grief and really looking at this country.

What can I learn about grief when I keep open to it, instead of just being a tourist to going to see how many pictures I can take. It was really phenomenal because I saw things like in Marina Grande, the little port village near Sorento, the women there still wear mourning clothes.

They wear black for a year after a loved one dies. So grief is visible. They walk around the streets and you see a woman in all black and you know she's grieving.

And in Naples, they put up posters, black and white posters in the neighborhood when someone dies with their photo on it and their date of birth and date of death and funeral information. And so noticing that as you walk down the street in Naples, you see, oh, someone in this neighborhood on this street died yesterday.

There's the poster to tell everyone about it. It's visible, and the grief is visible. It's really powerful to feel connected to everyone there. Like, everyone in that neighborhood is grieving Giuseppe, who died yesterday, and to feel connected and how that experience of grief is the one thing that binds us to everyone in every culture, every religion, everywhere on our planet.

For me, it was really profound looking through the eyes of grief in the first place, and then also being aware, as you said, of churches with decorated with skulls and skeletons and how common those images are in Italy that we don't see very often here in the U.S.

Joanna: I was just researching in Pittsburgh, you have a massive collection of religious relics.

Karen: Really? I didn't know that.

Joanna: I was just researching relics in America and you have a ton of relics in Pittsburgh of all place. I might even have to come visit, but this is interesting because the Catholic religion definitely does death in, you know,

I'm not of any religion but from a Protestant upbringing. I have an Irish friend. And we were joking one day and I said, “Whichever one of us dies first, the other one must ululate at their funeral.” Because women ululating, this sort of wailing is just not common in the British culture.

Karen: No, no, and not here in the U.S. either.

Joanna: But it seems to me like a really good thing to do to kind of let it lose and that kind of thing.

What have you seen about the different cultures and different ways that cultures deal with death that seem more healthy than the west?

Karen: When you brought up the ululating. When we were in Italy on this trip, we stopped in Paestum, the Greek ruins there and there was an exhibition at the museum of tombs that had been painted and had pictures of women mourning and they were paid mourners. Hired mourners. Not the family necessarily.

I watched a little video about that and there are places in Italy where there are professional mourners who come to funerals to weep in order to help the family with their grief, and I thought that was just beautiful. I loved that idea that we can weep and grieve openly at a funeral, just as you were mentioning.

I know in the Tibetan and Buddhist cultures, they're very open about death and even have a spiritual practice of thinking about death five times a day and focusing on death, and also their rituals around dying and cremating the body and allowing the body to go back to ash and back to the air.

They're just so accepting of the disintegration of the physical body. I think that's something, as we mentioned before, we're really missing in our western cultures of letting the body go.

Joanna: We don't talk about the business of death very often, but in America particularly the embalming and these massive caskets.

And that's why my mom's cool and she's already chosen all that and sorted it out and got the cheapest, most basic stuff. And I'm like, “Way to go, mom.”

But also, she's very green and very concerned that even with cremation and the stuff that goes into the air. But I think these technologies are going to change with the boomers. That's what I hope anyway.

Tell us about your “End of Life University” podcast because I think it's very cool.

Karen: I started it once my book that I wrote about the hospice patients was released.

I had a rude awakening, that you can't just make a living by writing one book and putting it out in the world, but also, especially if you write a book about death and dying, it doesn't necessarily sell well in the beginning, especially in 2012, which is when it came out.

I knew I had to do something else. I had to build an email list, I have to get followers and I got the idea to start doing interviews and I called it “End of Life University.”

I just started emailing people all over the country who worked in some aspect of death and dying, and doing interviews and posting them on my website. At that time, I'd never heard of podcasts. I didn't know that was even possible and I hadn't discovered you yet.

So that's how I began and I remember it took me like two years to get my mailing list to 500 subscribers. I had been contacted about being on someone's radio show, and when she was processing the application, she said, “Oh, you have to have at least 5,000 subscribers to be on our on our show.”

I was just crushed, “Are you kidding me? I won't live long enough to get 5,000 subscribers. I talk about death. This is terrible.” But the interviews I did really helped because each speaker I talked to had their mailing list, and I got introduced to their followers.

And now, I'm up to 5,000 followers and subscribers. And things are so much easier now when you have an actual list and I can write to people, and 700 people buy my book overnight. That made all the difference. It just took a long time.

But what's happened now at this point, I have this whole library of interviews I've done of information and knowledge about death and dying that's out there for people to listen to and if people are curious about death, but they can just come and listen to two other people talking about it like we are and it'll help them a little bit with their exploration.

Joanna: We are almost out of time, but tell people where they can find you and your books, and the podcast, and everything online.

Karen: They can find me at karenwyattmd.com or eolniversity.com. And my book is for sale there, but also on Amazon. My book, “What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying.” That's the book that I waited all those years to finally write.

Joanna: And will there be a book about Italy? Because I'm really interested in that one.

Karen: Yeas. I'm actually working on that right now after our last trip. So hopefully by the end of the year, I'll have that finished.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Karen. That was great.

Karen: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you, Joanna.

Reader Interactions

March 19, 2018 at 6:16 am

What a fascinating interview. It really touched me today, because in the past weeks, I’ve been having panic attacks based on the fear of dying while birthing the baby I’m expecting any day now (no, there isn’t any medical indication, it’s purely psychological). People being dismissive (“oh, you’re just silly, birth is safer than driving”) doesn’t help. There’s anger (“why didn’t anyone stop me while I was thinking about another child?”), guilt (“how could I do this while my existing children need a mother?”) and grief – today we couldn’t take the kids to an activity they were looking forward to, and I just burst out crying because, for all I know, this could be our last time doing this. There’s also the relishing of every moment, such as Karen described. In the past weeks, I don’t rush through walks or bedtime stories, because for all I know, these are the last walks and stories. I don’t mind taking my time.

Finally, having stopped rationalizing and talking myself out of fears, I sat my husband down today, and talked to him about everything I want him to do if something happens to me – hospital litigation, applying for government aid, being there for the children, accessing my bank account, contacting my publisher. It made me feel better prepared for any outcome.

I realize I’m digressing here. Death is a powerful motive in literature, and I am strongly attracted to describing its emotional aspects in my fiction. I think it helps me process my personal fears.

March 20, 2018 at 1:50 am

Sending you strength, Hannah. It sounds like a rollercoaster time for you. I’m sure everything will go well, but I’m glad you were able to discuss your fears and practicalities with your husband. I find the practicalities helpful too. I have a letter detailing everything and plans in place in case of an accident. It makes me calmer to know it’s all ready just in case. I hope you can find time for some writing, as that can also help us navigate the crazy way our brains process life.

March 24, 2018 at 6:43 pm

I’m glad to be able to come back and say that our baby girl was born yesterday and we’re both well. Nevertheless, things happen, and facing fear ultimately makes us stronger.

March 23, 2018 at 10:52 am

Hanna thank you for sharing your story. I totally resonate with this because I experienced the same anxiety around the births of each of my children. As a doctor I had heard enough stories of tragedy to make me aware that death is an ever-present factor in life so it seemed natural to think of death when childbirth was at hand. I’m sending you lots of love and support that all will be well during this beautiful passage for you and your family.

March 21, 2018 at 6:41 am

I love how your interviews weave and wander hither and thither 🙂 This was of interest and help to me, both on a personal level…and in realizing where some of the death-thought in my first book came from. (It opens with a recently-bereaved young woman; there are subsequent events that cause her to reflect more on her loss and what it means.) And I drift to Keith Richards (I’ll someday finish that biography) and the skulls he wears (rings). We are all the same beneath the skin; mortality is an ever present thought. I cheer you, Joanna, as you came to your discovery of Who You Really Are and What You Should Be Doing comparatively early in your life. Thank you for all you give. You’ve changed lives.

March 23, 2018 at 10:57 am

Hello Cheryl, I agree with you that Joanna is an amazing interviewer! She has a way of getting to the deeper aspects of a subject. I’m happy to hear that you included loss and bereavement in your first book and I hope you’ll keep writing! With Joanna as our inspiration we are off to a good start! Best wishes to you.

March 21, 2018 at 1:05 pm

This was really an amazing interview to listen to. I am currently trying to write a book in which death is a personified character, and this was a great resource for me. After listening/reading I realized that writing this book is, in a sense, my way of coming to terms with death and what comes after, something I tend to think about too much. My mother is studying to become a doctor (go figure) and when I voice my concerns to her, she always combats them with asking /why/ I am afraid, telling me to be curious about those fears.

The story I am writing has a lot to do with death, and accepting it (spoilers, the main character dies) and I think being aware of the lessons in this interview is very important to portray the story correctly. Thank you so much!

March 22, 2018 at 8:07 am

I’m glad it was useful!

March 23, 2018 at 11:01 am

I’d love to read your book! I hope you’ll reach out to me through my website when it’s finished. Kudos to you for having the courage to think about death and face the fears that arise. Best wishes to you on your writing journey!

March 22, 2018 at 9:36 am

A lot of boomers are full of life – recycled teenagers- But many do think and plan. We went to a funeral at a riverside hotel with a humanist celebrant. The man had planned his own funreal – wicker coffin – we all left the room and went next door for lunch – he wanted no one to go to the crematorium. Another chap, a Christian, had a simple service at the woodland burial and the male voice choir he had belonged to led the procession out to the burial site. Both were lovely. I know others who have applied to donate their body to science and no funeral.

March 23, 2018 at 11:04 am

Thanks for sharing these lovely stories Janet. It’s encouraging to hear that people everywhere are beginning to be “pro-active” about death by planning ahead. It really helps reduce our fears and anxiety if we’ve already thought things through and made some choices for ourselves.

March 23, 2018 at 6:24 am

Palliative medicine is very different from all other branches of medicine because when you think about it, medicine is about not accepting death and using knowledge to extend life. Accepting your own mortality has value in getting over your fears and doing what you really want with your life, but so does not rushing death which gives you more time to enjoy life. Medical specialties extend on a wide spectrum between those with many solutions (like infectious diseases) and those with none where quality of life is the only thing that matters (palliative medicine). But as medical technology evolves many of them will move towards the first part of the spectrum, geriatrics medicine included. I don’t find being interested in life extension as being in denial of death, on the contrary. There is so much suffering in aging that searching for methods to slow it down or even better, cure it, is just as important as looking left and right before you cross the street or taking your medication if you have any disease where there is efficient medication invented and available. There are countless species of animals and plants which display no signs of senescence, so why should people accept aging just because it is a ‘disease’ affecting all humans? A balance can be reached between accepting your mortality (so that you don’t procrastinate) and not accepting it (so that you don’t prematurely die from things which were preventable). This is also what I noticed as a physician when working with long-lived patients – they were serene about their finite life, but also took great care about their lifestyle and not missing on medical appointments.

March 23, 2018 at 11:12 am

Hello Anca, I totally agree with you that balance is the most important factor – the balance between living fully and accepting mortality. In my experience those who can hold both of those perspectives in mind have the most equanimity and joy in life. But I have seen many patients who were seeking more life because of a fear of death rather than a love for living. Those patients were more likely to choose painful and costly treatment at the end of life, which may have diminished the quality of their last days. So my goal is to reduce the fear of death overall so that patients will choose a healthy lifestyle out of a love for life itself rather than fear of dying.

March 25, 2018 at 4:30 am

I agree with those types of patients, I encountered them as well, but at the end of the day we have different values and what is expensive to me may be cheap to someone else or what is not important to me may mean everything to someone else. I find fear of death to be completely normal, especially when young and/or when you didn’t finish doing what you set up accomplishing in your lifetime. But if you can reduce the fear of death in patients that is a great thing as it’s exactly this fear which can increase anxiety and turn people away from what they secretly want from life.

March 23, 2018 at 8:08 am

I really enjoyed this interview. We’ve experienced a lot of death in our family in recent years. In 2015, my brother committed suicide. It was rather dramatic as he went missing and wasn’t found until almost 2 months later. There was a lot of drama about identification and that took another 6 months. My brother suffered from mental illness for much of his adult life, and I have found great comfort in the fact that I believe he is completely healed and whole now – the person he was meant to be before mental illness stole so much from him. In September, my father passed away from cancer, but again, I take great comfort in both the belief that I will see him again and the fact that he had a well-lived life and left a lasting legacy. One thing I have found very interesting is that death is never grieved the same way. The way I grieved for my brother was very different than the way I grieved for my father. It was the difference between coming to the end of a book, reading the end, and while feeling sad the book was over, having a sense of this is the end of the story versus feeling like someone ripped the book out of my hands and the story wasn’t finished. Anyway, I really appreciated this interview. I always listen while walking my dog Kipper (think Lassie). I have learned so much from your podcasts and always find them uplifting, encouraging and challenging in the best of ways!

March 23, 2018 at 11:19 am

Thank you for sharing your story Rosanne. I so agree with your depiction of grief – having the book ripped out of your hands before the story is complete vs. reading all the way to the end with a sense of sadness but resolution. A few years after my father’s suicide I had a dream in which he was young, whole and happy and it still gives me great peace when I think of him now to see that image. In a way that dream helped complete the ending of my father’s story. Best wishes to you!

[…] my dad, and when I read it again it somehow gives me hope that everything will be alright. How does creative writing help you when you are dealing with something as real and heart breaking as death? Let me know in […]

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Perspectives of Death Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Medical perspective of death, psychological perspective of death, legal perception on death, cultural beliefs on death.

Death in the current world has received various perceptions and even different meanings. According to Levete (2010), death is described as a one of the many stages of human life. In the different interpretations of death, there is a section of people that believe death is the final stage in the life journey of both human beings and plants. On the other hand, there are those people who hold on to the belief that life exist after death (Levete, 2010).

According to the medical understanding of death, diseases are closely linked with death. In other words, diseases are perceived as type of death that is incorporated in the lives of the living things.

Although diseases may indicate the shift from life and death, they are also known to co-exist with life. Diseases have been described as death in living things, hence by dealing with them directly one will be doing away with histopathology, thus retaining the living organisms to their healthy condition (Lyng, 1990, p.144).

Although cultures may differ on perception of death, psychologically speaking death remains to be death. Death has been a concept since time in memorial, and over the years, it has been pulled in various directions until the inception of modern science.

Although death is perceived as an ambiguity term, it has been defined as an event that symbolizes the passage from living to dead. This passage is said to occur in our everyday period (Kastenbaum, 2000, p. 7).

Traditionally in legal perspective, death was not determined by the exact time of death. The law relied on legal fictions, which contributed to the honesty in which decisions of great importance about definition of life and death were decided (Shah and Miller, 2010). In the modern world, death has transformed into a prerequisite issue since the inception of vital organ donation.

In this perspective, the exact period of death hence became of great importance. The dead donor rule also reflects on the importance of defining death, as the donor should not succumb to death due to transplantation process (Shah and Miller, 2010).

Culturally speaking, death was a personal issue as well as a social event. Although death of a member in the society caused disruption in terms of duties and roles allocations, it also increased harmony and cohesiveness within the community. The death of a close friend or relative was a devastating sense of loss as well as an emotional experience.

These kinds of deaths remind the living of their state of mortality and the reasons behind death thus creating fear of dying. Initially death was associated with myths, religion, and magic. In many cultures death does not cease to exist but instead it proceed to exist and function even in the afterlife (Aiken, 2001, p.128)

Death in the modern world has been defined differently depending on an individual’s believe, religion, culture or even career. Some of these spiritual and religious beliefs have associated death with life. In this perspective people tend to believe the existence of a spirit or soul that shifts to another realm upon dying.

In addition to this, there is the belief that the dead body is resurrected in order for it to be reused in the afterlife. In the modern world, technological developments have changed the perception of death, as people with dead brains are still perceived alive.

Aiken, R. L. (2001). Dying, death, and bereavement. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum associates, Inc.

Kastenbaum, R. (2000). The Psychology of Death. NY: Springer Publishing Company, Inc.

Levete, S. (2010). Death . NY: Wayland/TheRosen Publishing Group, Inc. Web.

Lyng, S. (1990). Holistic health and biomedical medicine: a countersystem analysis . NY: State University of New York Press.

Shah, K. S. and Miller G. F. Can We Handle the Truth? Legal Fictions in the Determination of Death. American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics . Boston. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2019, May 4). Perspectives of Death. https://ivypanda.com/essays/perspectives-of-death-essay/

"Perspectives of Death." IvyPanda , 4 May 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/perspectives-of-death-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Perspectives of Death'. 4 May.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Perspectives of Death." May 4, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/perspectives-of-death-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "Perspectives of Death." May 4, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/perspectives-of-death-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Perspectives of Death." May 4, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/perspectives-of-death-essay/.

Of Death Summary

Bacon opens the essay with a simile of death and darkness. He starts his argument the men fears that death in the same a child fears the darkness. The fear of darkness increases among the children when the horrific tales about the darkness is narrated to them. Same is the case with men. With the stories of death is narrated to them, the fear inside them increases. It is natural to think about death, however, to think about it with composure is a virtue of the wise men. To worry about the sin after committing is the characteristic of a holy and religious man but to fear the death as the supremacy of nature is man’s weakness.

Bacon quotes another philosopher Seneca that one will be sensible to imagine and longed-for the death as it brings relief from the sorrows and sufferings of life. In certain condition, someone’s life might be too wearisome to tolerate, and death passes relief to them. Some people live a life without any excitement and actions in it. Such a life could neither be regarded as pleasing one nor the sorrowful. However, one cannot bear such a wearisome life for a long period of time. Eventfully, resulting in death.

Of Death Analysis

Critical appreciation:.

Brevity, directness, wit, and to the point arguments are one of the qualities that Bacon’s essay contain. The systematic way of writing makes bacon’s essay to move from one point to another logically. Moreover, the subject matters he discusses in his writing style are all based on the real life and the reader found an epigrammatic wisdom in it. With the use of metaphors, similes referring to various historical stories makes his essay comprehensible and agreeable.

More From Francis Bacon

Attacks on Walz’s Military Record

By Robert Farley , D'Angelo Gore and Eugene Kiely

Posted on August 8, 2024 | Updated on August 12, 2024 | Corrected on August 9, 2024

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino .

In introducing her pick for vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris has prominently touted Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the Army National Guard. Now, however, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance and the Trump campaign are attacking Walz on his military record, accusing the Minnesota governor of “stolen valor.”

We’ll sort through the facts surrounding the three main attacks on Walz’s military record and let readers decide their merit. The claims include:

• Vance claimed that Walz “dropped out” of the National Guard when he learned his battalion was slated to be deployed to Iraq. Walz retired to focus on a run for Congress two months before his unit got official word of impending deployment, though the possibility had been rumored for months.
• Vance also accused Walz of having once claimed to have served in combat, when he did not. While advocating a ban on assault-style weapons, Walz said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Update, Aug. 12: The Harris campaign says that Walz “misspoke.”
• The Republican National Committee has criticized Walz for misrepresenting his military rank in campaign materials. The Harris campaign website salutes Walz for “rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major.” Walz did rise to that rank, but he retired as a master sergeant because he had not completed the requirements of a command sergeant major.

A native of West Point, Nebraska, Walz joined the Nebraska Army National Guard in April 1981, two days after his 17th birthday. When Walz and his wife moved to Minnesota in 1996, he transferred to the Minnesota National Guard, where he served in 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery.

“While serving in Minnesota, his military occupational specialties were 13B – a cannon crewmember who operates and maintains cannons and 13Z -field artillery senior sergeant,” according to a statement released by Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s state public affairs officer.

According to MPR News , Walz suffered some hearing impairment related to exposure to cannon booms during training over the years, and he underwent some corrective surgery to address it.

On Aug. 3, 2003, “Walz mobilized with the Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery … to support Operation Enduring Freedom. The battalion supported security missions at various locations in Europe and Turkey. Governor Walz was stationed at Vicenza, Italy, during his deployment,” Augé stated. The deployment lasted about eight months.

“For 24 years I proudly wore the uniform of this nation,” Walz said at a rally in Philadelphia where he was announced as Harris’ running mate on Aug. 6. “The National Guard gave me purpose. It gave me the strength of a shared commitment to something greater than ourselves.”

Walz’s Retirement from the National Guard

In recent years, however, several of his fellow guard members have taken issue with the timing of Walz’s retirement from the National Guard in May 2005, claiming he left to avoid a deployment to Iraq.

Vance, who served a four-year active duty enlistment in the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent, serving in Iraq for six months in 2005, advanced that argument at a campaign event on Aug. 7.

“When the United States of America asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it,” Vance said. “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with. I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.”

In early 2005, Walz, then a high school geography teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School, decided to run for public office. In a 2009 interview Walz provided as part of the Library of Congress’ veterans oral history project, Walz said he made the decision to retire from the National Guard to “focus full time” on a run for the U.S. House of Representatives for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District (which he ultimately won in 2006). Walz said he was “really concerned” about trying to seek public office and serve in the National Guard at the same time without running afoul of the Hatch Act , which limits political speech by federal employees, including members of the National Guard.

Federal Election Commission records show that Walz filed to run for Congress on Feb. 10, 2005.

On March 20, 2005, Walz’s campaign put out a press release titled “Walz Still Planning to Run for Congress Despite Possible Call to Duty in Iraq.”

Three days prior, the release said, “the National Guard Public Affairs Office announced a possible partial mobilization of roughly 2,000 troops from the Minnesota National Guard. … The announcement from the National Guard PAO specified that all or a portion of Walz’s battalion could be mobilized to serve in Iraq within the next two years.”

According to the release, “When asked about his possible deployment to Iraq Walz said, ‘I do not yet know if my artillery unit will be part of this mobilization and I am unable to comment further on specifics of the deployment.’ Although his tour of duty in Iraq might coincide with his campaign for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional seat, Walz is determined to stay in the race. ‘As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq.'”

On March 23, 2005, the Pipestone County Star reported, “Detachments of the Minnesota National Guard have been ‘alerted’ of possible deployment to Iraq in mid-to-late 2006.”

“Major Kevin Olson of the Minnesota National Guard said a brigade-sized contingent of soldiers could be expected to be called to Iraq, but he was not, at this time, aware of which batteries would be called,” the story said. “All soldiers in the First Brigade combat team of the 34th Division, Minnesota National Guard, could be eligible for call-up. ‘We don’t know yet what the force is like’ he said. ‘It’s too early to speculate, if the (soldiers) do go.’

“He added: ‘We will have a major announcement if and when the alert order moves ahead.’”

ABC News spoke to Joseph Eustice, a retired command sergeant major who served with Walz, and he told the news organization this week that “he remembers Walz struggling with the timing of wanting to serve as a lawmaker but also avoiding asking for a deferment so he could do so.”

“He had a window of time,” Eustice told ABC News. “He had to decide. And in his deciding, we were not on notice to be deployed. There were rumors. There were lots of rumors, and we didn’t know where we were going until it was later that, early summer, I believe.”

Al Bonnifield, who served under Walz, also recalled Walz agonizing over the decision.

“It was a very long conversation behind closed doors,” Bonnifield told the Washington Post this week. “He was trying to decide where he could do better for soldiers, for veterans, for the country. He weighed that for a long time.”

In 2018, Bonnifield told MPR News that Walz worried in early 2005, “Would the soldier look down on him because he didn’t go with us? Would the common soldier say, ‘Hey, he didn’t go with us, he’s trying to skip out on a deployment?’ And he wasn’t. He talked with us for quite a while on that subject. He weighed that decision to run for Congress very heavy. He loved the military, he loved the guard, he loved the soldiers he worked with.”

But not all of Walz’s fellow Guard members felt that way.

In a paid letter to the West Central Tribune in Minnesota in November 2018, Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr — both retired command sergeants major in the Minnesota National Guard — wrote, “On May 16th, 2005 he [Walz] quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war. His excuse to other leaders was that he needed to retire in order to run for congress. Which is false, according to a Department of Defense Directive, he could have run and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before entering active duty; as many reservists have.”

“For Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experienced leadership most is disheartening,” they wrote. “When the nation called, he quit.”

Walz retired on May 16, 2005. Walz’s brigade received alert orders for mobilization on July 14, 2005, according to the National Guard and MPR News . The official mobilization report came the following month, and the unit mobilized and trained through the fall. It was finally deployed to Iraq in the spring of 2006.

The unit was originally scheduled to return in February 2007, but its tour was extended four months as part of President George W. Bush’s “surge” strategy , the National Guard reported. In all, the soldiers were mobilized for 22 months.

Responding to Vance’s claim that Walz retired to avoid deploying to Iraq, the Harris-Walz campaign released a statement saying, “After 24 years of military service, Governor Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform – and as Vice President of the United States he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families.”

Walz on Carrying a Weapon ‘in War’

Vance also called Walz “dishonest” for a claim that Walz made in 2018 while speaking to a group about gun control.

“He made this interesting comment that the Kamala Harris campaign put out there,” Vance said, referring to a video of Walz that the Harris campaign posted to X on Aug. 6. “He said, ‘We shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war to be on America’s streets.’ Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war? What was this weapon that you carried into war given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq and he has not spent a day in a combat zone.”

In the video , Walz, who was campaigning for governor at the time, talked about pushing back on the National Rifle Association and said: “I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt. … I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can do [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] research. We can make sure we don’t have reciprocal carry among states. And we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”

But, as Vance indicated, there is no evidence that Walz carried a weapon “in war.”

Update, Aug. 12: In an Aug. 10 statement to CNN, the Harris campaign told CNN that Walz “misspoke.”

“In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the Governor misspoke,” campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in the statement. “He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them.”

As we said, Augé, in her statement, said Walz’s battalion deployed “to support Operation Enduring Freedom” on Aug. 3, 2003, and “supported security missions at various locations in Europe and Turkey.” During his deployment, Walz was stationed in Vicenza, Italy, and he returned to Minnesota in April 2004, Augé said. There was no mention of Walz serving in Afghanistan, Iraq or another combat zone.

In the 2009 interview for the veterans history project, Walz said he and members of his battalion initially thought they would “shoot artillery in Afghanistan,” as they had trained to do. That didn’t happen, he said, explaining that his group ended up helping with security and training while stationed at an Army base in Vicenza.

“I think in the beginning, many of my troops were disappointed,” Walz said in the interview. “I think they felt a little guilty, many of them, that they weren’t in the fight up front as this was happening.”

In an Aug. 8 statement addressing his claim about carrying weapons “in war,” the Harris campaign noted that Walz, whose military occupational specialties included field artillery senior sergeant, “fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times” in his 24 years of service.

Walz’s National Guard Rank

The Republican National Committee has criticized Walz for saying “in campaign materials that he is a former ‘Command Sergeant Major’ in the Army National Guard despite not completing the requirements to hold the rank into retirement.”

Walz’s biography on the Harris campaign website correctly says that the governor “served for 24 years” in the National Guard, “rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major.” 

Walz’s official biography on the Minnesota state website goes further, referring to the governor as “Command Sergeant Major Walz.”

“After 24 years in the Army National Guard, Command Sergeant Major Walz retired from the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion in 2005,” the state website says. 

Walz did serve as command sergeant major , but Walz did not complete the requirements to retire with the rank of command sergeant, Augé told us in an email. 

“He held multiple positions within field artillery such as firing battery chief, operations sergeant, first sergeant, and culminated his career serving as the command sergeant major for the battalion,” Augé said. “He retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy.”

This isn’t the first time that Walz’s National Guard rank has come up in a campaign. 

In their 2018 paid letter to the West Central Tribune, when Walz was running for governor, the two Minnesota National Guard retired command sergeants major who criticized Walz for retiring before the Iraq deployment also wrote: “Yes, he served at that rank, but was never qualified at that rank, and will receive retirement benefits at one rank below. You be the judge.”

Correction, Aug. 9: We mistakenly said a 2007 “surge” strategy in Iraq occurred under President Barack Obama. It was President George W. Bush.

Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt was an undergraduate intern at FactCheck.org from 2010 to 2011.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through  our “Donate” page . If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

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How Tom Cruise’s Death-Defying Stunt at the 2024 Paris Olympics Closing Ceremony Came Together

It’s hard to top much of what we’ve seen come out of this summer’s Olympic Games . (The gymnastics friendships! The sweet parent-child moments ! The jewelry! ) Yet Sunday’s spectacular closing ceremony—which featured a one-of-a-kind stunt courtesy of Tom Cruise that took executive producer and creative director Ben Winston of Fulwell 73 Productions over a year to put together—was a definite contender for the most exciting moment of Paris 2024.

Tom Cruise on the roof of the Stade de France during the closing ceremony.

Shortly after a performance of the national anthem by H.E.R. at the Stade de France, Cruise could be seen rappelling from the roof down to the ground; accepting the Olympic flag from Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass; boarding his motocycle, and riding off into the Parisian night. Then, all at once, he was on a plane, jumping out of said plane, and turning the double Os of the Hollywood sign into the Olympic rings. All the while, the Olympic flag was being handed off to a series of athletes including mountain biker Kate Courtney, former sprinter Michael Johnson, and skateboarder Jagger Eaton.

Kate Courtney biking down the steps of the L.A. Memorial Coliseum with the Olympic flag.

A day before the ceremony, Vogue spoke to Winston about the Olympic flag’s journey from Paris to Los Angeles; organizing a live (and secret!) beach concert featuring the likes of Billie Eilish and the Red Hot Chili Peppers; and the mind-bending travel schedule Cruise kept in order to close out the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Vogue : I’d love to hear a little about how this video came about.

Ben Winston: We’ve been planning this for a year and a half, and we had this idea that it would be so beautiful if we could take the flag from the Paris stadium and make it travel all the way to Los Angeles and then go live and do something spectacular here. The thing about Paris is that there are so many iconic elements we saw in the opening ceremony, from the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. One of the things LA is best-known for is its beaches, so we thought, what if we could steal that flag, bring it to LA, and do a massive, amazing concept on the beach with all these amazing LA artists? It’s been incredibly exciting.

The first thing we did was pitch Tom, because there’s nobody better to do an incredible stunt. I pitched him on the idea of a stuntman grabbing the flag, coming down from the roof of the Stade de France, and then taking his mask off and you see it’s Tom Cruise, who then jumps out of a plane and lands in LA. Tom said, “I’m in, but I want to do the whole thing,” so it was this huge undertaking of this live stunt with Tom jumping off the roof. We wanted to keep Tom doing this daredevil jump off the roof a surprise, and then cut to this video we’ve been making where Tom gives the flag to these Olympic athletes, who then take us to a massive live concert on the beach with Billie Eilish, Snoop, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Every element took a lot of work!

How does it feel to be so close to seeing your project come to life?

This story will be going up just after it’s happened, so right now I’m still nervous because we’ve got all these elements lined up and it is live TV. But it’s been an amazing coming-together of wonderful people making it happen. I’m so grateful to Tom and to the artists and athletes taking the flag on its journey from Paris to LA.

Did any part of the planning process take you by surprise?

We really wanted to dream big. Once everyone had signed off on the idea, we were confronted with the reality of: How do you do a stunt with Tom Cruise at the Stade de France and then a massive concert on the beach with some of the most famous artists in Los Angeles? That’s been quite nerve-racking, because we aren’t in the safety of a stadium and the audience doesn’t even know what they’re showing up for. We have fencing at the perimeters of the beach, and hopefully by the time people realize what’s going on it will be over. [ Laughs .] The secrecy was tricky and there were lots of leaks, so it was a lot to live with for a year and a half, but I’m feeling very excited and proud.

Flea, Chad Smith, Anthony Kiedis, and John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers performing during the closing ceremony.

Were there any LA-centric aspects of this production that you particularly loved as an Angeleno?

When you first arrive in LA, you always look for the Hollywood sign, and one of the coolest things about this was the city giving us permission to film on the sign. Tom being up there six or seven months ago with nobody knowing what he was doing was amazing; I’ve been up there a lot with my team, and sitting in the middle of the Os was a pinch-me moment. Working with all this talent was, as well; the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing “Can’t Stop” over the transition of the flag going from Paris to LA is so cool.

Billie Eilish

Is there any other BTS detail you can share with us?

Well, I can tell you that Tom was filming Mission: Impossible in London, then got on a plane, flew 11 hours to LA, got off the plane, shot with us, then got right back on the plane and back to set. The commitment from him and the musical artists to keeping the beach aspect a secret was really amazing.

Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg

Vogue Daily

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