WHAT HAVE I LEARNT ABOUT DEATH?
After losing my uncle in late 2015, I experienced a sense of clarity about what I felt was important to me. Amidst the grief, I discovered something akin to a superpower.
I started to become more self-aware, I was direct in conversations and I finally felt brave enough to question my own career choices. It was a life-changing period. Mark Manson writing in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck captures the duality of such a moment:
It was someone else’s death that gave me permission to finally live. And perhaps the worst moment of my life was the most transformational.
But this superpower – this transformative sense of perspective – slowly dulled and eventually dissipated as normal life reasserted itself.
Earlier this year, I felt it again after spending some time in an intensive care unit. It led me to ask:
Can you experience the transformative clarity that comes from being close to death without actually experiencing death?
Spoiler alert: while this is an ongoing project, I’m fairly certain that the answer to this question is a resounding yes. It isn’t easy. Our mind erects a powerful forcefield to protect us from thinking about death on a daily basis. But these barriers can be overcome with intentionality and bravery.
Before setting out how it is possible to awaken a death-aware mindset without actually experiencing death, I want to share some insights into death from the research I’ve done:
Death creates solidarity
In Tribe by Sebastian Junger, the author tells the story of a man who remembering the Bosnian War of the 1990s jokingly wishes it happened again once a week. He wasn’t bloodthirsty nor was he ignorant of the suffering that happened. But he fondly recalled how conflict and the threat of death erased most of the differences – class, wealth and race – that normally divide people. Instead individuals were “assessed by what they were willing to do for the group”.
Recalling the work of psychologist Charles Fritz, Junger writes:
Disasters, he [Fritz] proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allow individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.
I’ve felt what it means to be part of a “community of sufferers”. In hospital earlier this year, I remember buying food for people just on the basis that they were also bedding down for the night in the intensive care unit. I remember being all alone after my brother was unexpectedly wheeled away for a liver transplant. The only other people there were a family who were also waiting for a transplant. They hugged me in my shock and gave me food. In the months after, I felt close to them and would check-in on their progress.
Lodged in my mind, the experience serves as a reminder of how we construct artificial barriers that stop us connecting to other humans.
Without death, would life have any meaning?
Tim Urban’s blog post ‘Your Life in Weeks’ invites you to visualize your life in small circles each of which represent a week:
Urban writes:
We tend to feel locked into whatever life we’re living, but this pallet of empty boxes can be absolutely whatever we want it to be. Everyone you know, everyone you admire, every hero in history—they did it all with that same grid of empty boxes.
But what if we had limitless circles to play with? In an essay for The New Philosopher, Oliver Burkeman persuasively argues that those “who dream of ‘solving death’ risk swapping one problem for a worse one, eliminating mortality at the price of eliminating meaning”.
Take a marriage for example. It has meaning because you choose to be with that person rather than someone else or to do something else. If life were infinite, Burkeman contends that “you could commit to a decades-long marriage without using up a single day of your time.” If it is no longer a commitment in the way that we traditionally understand it, does it have any meaning?
While any answer remains incomplete, a day is likely to come when humans have to grapple with the practical reality of exactly these types of questions.
Death is ever-present in our politics – now more than ever
The last conflict on American soil took place in the 1940s. And while there is debate many describe the Battle of Culloden in 1746 as the last battle fought in Great Britain. As a result, death is something that we’ve largely had to think of in relation to our foreign policy, especially after the World Wars and even taking into account the domestic terror attacks that we’ve experienced in recent years.
But a conversation with Ivor Williams, a designer who is developing new ways of thinking about and experiencing death, dying and loss, opened my eyes to how death is animating our domestic politics in the most divisive ways.
Williams spoke of how reminders of mortality can be used to reinforce cultural norms. For example, Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again”, invokes the idea that White America is at risk of losing control of the United States and dying out. Trump’s slogan affirms that he will protect White America and restore its privileges. Similar currents were undoubtedly present in the 2016 Brexit campaign.
The “good death” is a myth
I’ve asked several people two questions:
What would you do if you had a week to live?
What do you most fear about death?
In response to the first question, most people replied that they would make peace with those that they need to. A common reaction to the second was the fear of “not having time to close my account”.
Before my uncle died he expressed a wish that he wouldn’t be trapped in his body. In the end he was. The reality is that most of us don’t dictate the terms of our death. In The Five Invitations, Frank Ostaseski, co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project, writes:
The “good death” is a myth. Dying is messy. People who are dying often leave skid marks, dragging their heals as they go.
Don’t wait to close your account. Settle it as you go. Settle it now.
The idea of impermanence – the idea that everything is transient – is key
The chapter on impermanence in Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying opens with Montaigne’s famous line:
To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learn how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
To which Rinpoche responds:
Why is it so very hard to practice death and to practice freedom?
The idea of “practicing” death lies at the very heart of the question I’ve been researching. To bring death closer, I’ve read, listened or done something related to the subject every day for the last two months.
I’ve found that concerted reflection on death has infused my mind with the idea that everything is transient – a core part of Buddhist doctrine. From afar, I anticipated that focusing on time passing – like grains of sand through my hand – would paralyse me with fear.
Instead I’ve found that ordinary moments – like spending time with my sister – become extraordinary. You can’t hold onto precious moments so your best choice is to lean into them and live fully.
What is our life but this dance of transient forms? Isn’t everything always changing: the leaves on the trees in the park, the light in your room as you read this, the seasons, the weather, the time of day, the people passing you in the street? And what about us? Doesn’t everything we have done in the past seem like a dream now? The friends we grew up with, the childhood haunts, those views and opinions we once held with such single-minded passion: We have left them all behind.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying
Try writing a “living eulogy” for a loved one
A eulogy is a tribute to someone who has just died. The person who has died never gets to hear it. In some cases that is best. I’ll never forget trying to convince my younger cousin that comparing my uncle to Hitler in the opening line of his eulogy might not go down as well as he thought.
It’s an odd concept though. I wonder how often people say something that they never said to the person who died when they were alive? This question stuck with me. I decided the only way to see was to write a “living eulogy”.
You nurtured my imagination like no-one else and helped create a love of learning within me. One of my earliest memories is when you took pictures of me wearing an outfit along with a sword and shield in 278 Nanpantan Road. I moved around the room striking various poses. I’m sure I have the pictures somewhere. I’d later think it was embarrassing, but now it forms part of a firm feeling that you helped me to imagine. You bought me these Micro Machines sets and wrestling figurines all the time and while I’d be in my room making noises as they talked to each other, I’d be living beyond Loughborough, in another world. Amidst some of the turbulence of growing up, you helped me to escape!
Excerpt of my Mum’s “Living Eulogy“
We often show gratitude in response to something specific, but after writing a “living eulogy” for my mum, I realised that the process gives you permission to see how the person you love has impacted the entirety of your life. And in writing it, your mind naturally asks the question: “What would you say if this person wasn’t around for much longer?” In doing so, I felt that transformative clarity that I was seeking.
Talking about death can open the window – even briefly – to allow you to see what matters
After hosting a series of Death Over Dinner events, one of my guests texted me: “talking about death made me feel alive.” Many other guests said similar things. BJ Miller, Executive Director of the Zen Hospice Project, talks of the “endocrine rush” that can come when you finally face death head-on.
The idea behind Death Over Dinner is simple: to talk about death and dying. There is a real beauty in organising such an intentional gathering and it is an approach I may try to mimic for other non-death related dinners.
At one dinner where the majority of guests were female, fears about not being able to have a child and a type of death that is rarely discussed – miscarriage – came up. It made me reflect on how even certain conversations related to death are gendered and lack the appropriate visibility.