3 Benefits Of Thinking About Your Mortality At Least Once A Day

By Shoshana Ungerleider, M.D.

As a culture, Americans—more often than not—have a tendency to avoid thinking and talking about death and dying. Yet pondering our mortality can have a profound impact on our lives.

Our health care system is set up with a single, default pathway for all medical care: aggressive, invasive treatment, no matter how old or how sick you are. For some people, this makes perfect sense and can save lives. For others, a different approach to care is required. But it starts with having a relationship with our own mortality and reflecting on what matters most in our own lives. I have seen far too many people suffer by receiving treatment that is not in line with their goals and values.

In our modern era of fast-paced life, constant digital connectedness, and a culture striving to be “doing” all the time, it’s easy to get caught up in things that don’t matter. If we can reflect on the bigger picture in life, the preciousness of each moment, we can more easily let go of things that aren’t important. I believe there are three key benefits to thinking about our mortality at least once a day:

1. You’ll be motivated to leave a legacy.

Ask yourself, what do you want to leave behind? The idea of legacy awareness is a way to connect with our own mortality as it relates to our work, loved ones, and creative endeavors. If we think about legacy as a means to transcend death, we may be more likely to invest in our health and personal development throughout life. 

Artists, for example, live on long after they’re gone thanks to their creative legacy. That’s just one way of forming a legacy. Whether you are creating art, giving back to your community, raising a family, or making a positive impact on the lives of others, these are all powerful ways to leave a legacy for generations to come.

2. Life will instantly feel more precious.

Too much of a good thing decreases its value. Life is precious. It’s also temporary. Even when you’re young and healthy, your life could end unexpectedly at any time. Recognizing that life is fleeting helps us find joy and meaning in the small things—sunset and sunrise, a smile on your child’s face, a tree in the park—that sometimes get lost in the day-to-day. The people in your life can take on a new value because we realize that their lives are also temporary.

3. You’ll learn not to sweat the small stuff.

Thinking about our mortality can serve as inspiration to think more holistically about what it means to live our best life. In other words, it can move us to exercise and eat well because we only get one body. And at the same time, it’s an invaluable reminder that we only get one life, and we better enjoy it. So many of us are on a quest to find balance in our lives and define our own priorities. Remembering that we have this one life to live can help when weighing where we want to put our energy and attention.

Countless psychological studies have shown that a recognition of our own eventual ending can allow us to live a richer life—one filled with gratitude, presence of mind, and happiness. As you go through the checklist of factors contributing to your overall well-being—getting quality sleep, eating healthy food, exercising regularly, and sustaining meaningful relationships—make sure that forming a relationship with your own mortality is high on the list.

No one knew how important this practice was better than Apple’s Steve Jobs who, during his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, said, “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.”

If contemplating your mortality triggers fear, consider this.

Does thinking about our own death trigger fear? According to the 2017 Survey of American Fears conducted by Chapman University, 20.3% of Americans are “afraid” or “very afraid” of dying. While for some, fear of death is healthy as it makes us more cautious (such as wearing seat belts and minimizing high-risk behaviors), some people may also have an unhealthy fear of dying, which interferes with their daily life.

Psychologist and spirituality expert Stephen Taylor looked at those who lost loved ones, and many tend to have a more accepting attitude toward death. This may result from “post-traumatic growth,” or personal growth from trauma. Others suggest that much of our fear of death stems from not wanting to lose the things we’ve built up (i.e., relationships, possessions, or status). By letting go (even a little) of fierce attachments, it can allow for valuable shifts in perspective and benefits to our well-being. 

My friend and colleague, B.J. Miller, M.D., puts this in a different light. “Death is not at odds with living. You can’t get one without the other.” Whether we like it or not, death is always present. Connecting to the fact that life is defined by the fact that it will end one day will allow you to live more fully, experience deeper relationships, and provide new meaning to your days.

Next time you have the opportunity to reflect on your mortality, think about how it might enrich your life today.

Complete Article HERE!

The Evening Thread

The Evening Thread” is a short stop-motion film made entirely by hand with watercolour and paper cut-outs.

In the film, an old woman prepares to die. Accompanied by her granddaughter, she reflects on the memories of her life, and on the profound experience of being human, before taking the next step into the unknown.

How Attending A Death Cafe Helped Me Heal After My Grandmother’s Death

I found myself opening up to strangers about death and finding a sense of comfort in the process.

By

On the last day of my grandmother’s life six years ago in fall 2014, I hugged her goodbye after an afternoon at my grandparents’ home in South Florida and expected to see her for lunch the following day. However, I woke up the next morning to the news that my grandmother had died suddenly in her sleep. Instead of meeting up for lunch, my family called to make funeral arrangements. I rescheduled my flight and figured out bereavement days with my job at the time. Because I was on vacation, I thankfully had time to spend with my grandmother during her last unexpected days. The shock from finding out she had died lasted through the week and well beyond her funeral.

After her death, I flew back to New York City to return to what remained of my old life. I’d wanted to leave everything I knew and loved behind and embark on an adventure to a place where I knew no one and recognized nothing. In winter 2015 I’d finally had enough courage and money saved up to visit Iceland on a solo trip for my grandmother’s belated deathiversary. I didn’t expect to find a group of Americans and road trip around the southern coast of Iceland and fall in love with traveling alone, a new part of my life my grandmother will never know.

Every year since my grandmother’s death, without fail, I panic around her deathiversary. How could I commemorate her and the impact she had on my life? In the years since Iceland, I’ve talked with family, went to yoga and stayed low-key. In 2018, four years after she died, I thought I’d go on another solo trip because I wasn’t working and had the time to travel.

However, instead of traveling, I did something different and more close to home. I attended a Death Cafe, where strangers gathered together to talk about death in a supportive environment, at a cemetery in Brooklyn on a cold autumn weeknight. I was intrigued about going to a cemetery where the topic of conversation revolved around death. It wasn’t like death was a hot topic of conversation for small talk, so I didn’t really have the opportunity to bring up death on a whim to friends and family, specifically my grandmother’s death, which happened years ago. I wasn’t sure what to expect or how much I would even talk about such an intimate part of my life with people I didn’t know. Once inside the crematory’s chapel, I noticed a small group of people gathered around trays of cookies and water bottles. The director introduced herself and the backstory of the Death Cafe and then separated us into smaller groups.

My group chose a private back room with urns lining the walls. We pulled our chairs together in a circle and introduced ourselves. The conversation started with why we were there and why we decided to attend a Death Cafe and then expanded to religion, stories of loved ones and friends and their passing and then to the beyond: What happens after we die? Is it good that we don’t know what happens? What would happen if we did? One girl asked how grief changes over time, and how grief changes people. We sat in reflective silence and I thought about the week after my grandmother died when I needed to be around only close friends and family. All of my senses had been muted. I lived life that week in quiet contemplation surrounded by familiarity, the exact opposite experience I was having at the Death Cafe: alone and surrounded by strangers.

After we rejoined the main group, the organizer shared two poems about death with us before concluding the Death Cafe. I felt a sense of peace at having talked about my grandmother to a group of strangers and keeping my memory of her alive. After my grandmother’s death, I was so angry at how she died. The director spoke of a good death and what that means, and my mom, after my grandmother died, had also mentioned that it was a good death. I’ve realized I was upset at the way my grandmother passed and, in a way, of our unfinished conversation. Never saying goodbye and never having that final lunch together.

In the years since my grandmother’s death, I needed to confront my ideas about life, death and everything in between and beyond. I needed the space to talk to people who hadn’t moved on because they didn’t have a starting point to move on from. I found myself opening up to these people and becoming more intimate the further our conversations progressed. After all, how do we talk about death when death is such a taboo topic to talk about?

My grandmother’s presence is still here, in the jewelry and pictures and memories left behind. Attending a Death Cafe provided a space of comfort and allowed me to talk openly and freely about my thoughts and feelings to strangers, and since then, family and friends, about all aspects of death in an open manner. My grandmother’s deathiversary, I’ve come to realize after leaving the Death Cafe, is another day that comes and goes with the passing of time. While my grandmother’s death came as a shock, the ending of her life came, as my mom said, as a mercy to her. A good death to a good person, and these realizations came from open conversations about death.

Complete Article HERE!

Death, Be Not Proud:

Literary Lessons on Death and Dying

Rituals like funerals, now less common, used to help us deal with death.

By Jeff Minick

For over three decades, Reverend F. Washington Jarvis served as headmaster of Boston’s Roxbury Latin School, the oldest school in continuous existence in North America. During this time, Jarvis delivered a series of addresses to the student body, the best of which were collected in “With Love and Prayers: A Headmaster Speaks to the Next Generation.” For a number of years, I taught “With Love and Prayers” to high schoolers and found that both parents and students valued the book for its wisdom, wit, and moral lessons.

In his chapter “The Spiritual Dimension,” Jarvis relates this anecdote to the young men in his charge:

The celebrated headmaster of Eton College, Cyril Alington, was once approached by an aggressive mother. He did not suffer fools gladly.
“Are you preparing Henry for a political career?” she asked Alington.
“No,” he said.
“Well, for a professional career?
“No,” he replied.
“For a business career, then?”
“No,” he repeated.
“Well, in a word, Dr. Alington, what are you here at Eton preparing Henry for?”
“In a word, madam? Death.”

As Jarvis then points out, the principal mission of Roxbury Latin is to prepare its students for life. “And,” he goes on, “the starting point of that preparation is the reality that life is short and ends in death.”

These few lines bring much to consider. Do we aim at getting our young people into “good” schools while neglecting to instill in them the classical virtues? Do we recognize that “life is short and ends in death”? If so, what outlook on the world should such a truth inculcate?

Before seeking answers to these questions, we must recognize that our ancestors were more familiar with death than we moderns. They lived among the sick and dying in ways we do not, and were forced to deal with circumstances that today are the domain of our health professionals. Victorian poetry, for example, is a thicket of verse about death and dying.

We are more distant from the dying. Low infant mortality rates have thankfully removed many of us from witnessing those tragedies, and though a majority of Americans want to die at home, only 20 percent do so.

Lacking this intimacy with the death of earlier generations, we may, if we wish greater familiarity, turn to literature, Victorian or otherwise. Stories and poems can give us intimate portraits of the hope and the despair, the joy and the sorrow, the courage and fear of the dying and those who surround them.

Let’s look at four novels in which the characters exit this earth in dramatically different ways. Each of them offers a lesson on death.

‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’

Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1887, by Ilya Repin. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Leo Tolstoy’s novella and perhaps the greatest of all fictional meditations on the debt we owe to nature, Ivan Ilyich lies on his deathbed wondering whether he has lived a good life.

As doubts fill him, and as death creeps ever closer, he suddenly realizes that “though his life had not been what it should have been, this could still be rectified.” In his last hours, he is flooded with sorrow and pity for the son and wife he has neglected, and though they cannot understand him when he begs their forgiveness, he dies “knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand.”

Ivan Ilyich goes to his grave in peace, knowing the truth of Katharine Tynan’s lines from “The Great Mercy”: “Betwixt the saddle and the ground/was mercy sought and mercy found.”

Here Tolstoy reminds us that even on our deathbed, we may yet clear our conscience and set right those things that we have done or failed to do.

‘Kristin Lavransdatter’

Sigrid Undset as a girl. The Noble Prize-winning novelist wrote a trilogy called “Kristen Lavransdatter.”

In Sigrid Undset’s trilogy of medieval Norway, “Kristin Lavransdatter,” we discover the importance of ritual in death. The Christian injunction “To bury the dead” means more than tumbling a corpse into a grave, covering it over with earth, and moving on. During the long death of Kristin’s father, Lavrans, the neighbors visit, the priest performs the last rites, a vigil is held after Lavrans breathes his last, and later there is a feast to celebrate his memory.

From Kristin and her kin, we moderns might learn once again how to “bury the dead.” More and more, I hear of people and know a few of them who when a loved one dies, conduct no ritual of passage, no funeral, no memorial service. An obituary may appear in the paper, or not, but otherwise the survivors put the deceased into the grave or columbarium without ceremony.

With this practice, we fail to realize that we have cheated ourselves of the comfort of a formal farewell and have tarnished our humanity in the bargain.

‘A Tale of Two Cities’

In “A Tale of Two Cities,” Charles Dickens puts Sydney Carton, a barrister, an alcoholic, and a cynic, onto the platform of a guillotine after Carton nobly takes the place of another man sentenced to die by execution. Carton’s thoughts before the fall of the blade bring him solace: “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

From Carton, we receive a lesson in courage when faced with death.

‘Little Women’

Louisa May Alcott, the author of “Little Women,” wrote one of the most heartrending death scenes in all of English literature. In the story, based on her own life, she describes the death of her dear sister Beth.

Of course, as Louisa May Alcott notes in “Little Women,” “Seldom except in books do the dying utter memorable words, see visions, or depart with beatified countenances …”

In describing the passing of young Beth March, whose “end comes as naturally and simply as sleep,” Alcott shows her readers that, like Sydney Carton, those who die possess the power to bequeath gifts to the living. Before she slips into the shadows, Beth reads some lines written by her beloved sister Jo. And she realizes that her illness and impending death have caused Jo, her caretaker, to grow and mature, and to take from her lessons in bravery and her “cheerful, uncomplaining spirit in its prison-house of pain.”

Like in these novels, the loved ones with whom I have sat while they closed their eyes and faded away have given me instruction. Perhaps the best of these teachers was my mother, who died from cancer 30 years ago. In her final lesson—perhaps her greatest lesson—she taught me and my brothers and sisters by way of example how to die with grace and courage.

If I find myself in my mother’s circumstances, with time to bid goodbye to those I love, and if I possess even half of her strength, I will die a fortunate man.

Complete Article HERE!

Working Too Hard For A Good Death

Has Competitive Dying Become A Thing?

By Howard Gleckman

We Americans love to compete. We bet in March Madness office pools on who will win the annual college basketball championship. We pay a pretty penny for the best manicured lawn in the neighborhood or the biggest flat screen in the condo.  Some of us will pay bribes to get our kids into the best colleges.

And, now it seems, there is a growing need to compete over who will have the best death. You know, the one where we are at home, pain-free but alert, surrounded by our loving families, singing our favorite songs, fully at ease with our last moments of mortal life.

For many of us, the reality will be quite different. Despite everyone’s best efforts, we may die in a hospital. The kids may not make it in time from their homes in LA or Chicago. The medications that relieve our pain may also slow our thinking. And we may not have resolved all those family issues that lingered inexplicably for decades.

More guilt

What’s troubling about this drive for a good death (or, perhaps in our competitive world, the best death) is that many of us never will achieve it—often for reasons out of our control. And that may leave our surviving loved ones with an even bigger sense of guilt than they already have. And paradoxically, those who cared the most may end up feeling the most guilty and depressed.

Failing at some ideal of death may even make dying more difficult. Dr. Andreas Laupacis, a palliative care physician and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, shared this concern in a wise 2018 essay about the idea of good death: “I worry that the term makes people who die with pain or psychological distress think that it is partially their fault…. They haven’t tried hard enough or aren’t tough enough.”

He even suggests it may add to the psychological burden of their doctors: “I worry that health care practitioners who have provided their best possible care will feel inadequate.”

A good life

Just as troubling: An excessive focus on the last hours of life shifts attention from the months or even years before that. Many older adults will die after living a long time with chronic conditions. It would be nice, as we focus on a good death, if we also think about a good life, especially during the time when it may include some level of disability.

The idea of competitive dying may be counterproductive in part because there is no true good death. Or rather, there are millions of them. For decades, clinicians have tried, and largely failed, to establish some agreed-upon norms. And researchers have no real idea how many people do in fact die a good death, by whatever measure.

Physicians and surviving family members, it turns out, often have different ideas of a good death than those who are doing the dying. For example, family members are much more likely than patients to say that maintaining dignity is important at the end of life.

But this uncertainty isn’t slowing us down. Google “good death” and you’ll get 1.97 million hits. Search Amazon, and you’ll find dozens of books. Bloggers blog on their own impending deaths or that of their relatives. A 2016 literature review turned about three dozen peer reviewed articles on what constitutes “successful dying.”

Better to watch a sunset

One Amazon reviewer wrote that she had read 60 books on a good death to prepare for her own passing. I don’t know if she was living with a terminal disease or just thinking way ahead. But I can’t help but wonder if her time would have been better spent watching a sunset, going to a concert, or having dinner with friends instead of being so focused on how to do death right.

This trend is by no means all bad. We are thinking—and talking—about a topic that for too long has been taboo in the US. But like those parents who were bribing college officials to get their children into the best schools, we may be going overboard. And we may be setting unrealistic, and counterproductive, expectations for ourselves and our families.

We absolutely should be proactive when it comes to preparing advanced directives, choosing health care proxies, and talking to one another about death. Especially talking. But we also need to recognize that, sometimes, circumstances mean that many of us will die alone, or in some pain, or with unresolved family issues. All we can do is our best. And nobody should be keeping score.

Complete Article HERE!

Obituaries are the only redemptive news anymore

By Philip Kennicott

Toni Morrison is dead. So are D.A. Pennebaker and Aretha Franklin, and Philip Roth, Stephen Hawking, Ursula K. Le Guin, Milos Forman and too many others to name, even when limited to artists and writers who have perished in the past few years alone. By some accounts, two people die every second, thousands every hour, tens of millions every year. But at this moment in American life, the death of our best people has become a collective lifeline and refuge for our anxieties. It sometimes seems that the obituary is the only news that makes us feel whole.

Morrison was our essential conscience, a writer of narrative brilliance and moral clarity. The magnitude of her loss, at this moment in our descent into barbarism, is incalculable. But to spend time today with her work, with memories of her life and the testimony of those who knew her, is infinitely more rewarding than reading about all the other terrible things that have happened in the past few days. The deaths of artists and other creators make us reflective, and we live at a moment when looking back is much easier than looking forward.

We also crave the reassurance that we are not, as a species, entirely spent. Morrison died only days after two mass shootings, which are not only a regular fixture of American life, but also a recurring reminder of our political paralysis and the corruption of our democracy. We are in the midst of a trade war, markets have plunged, Greenland is hemorrhaging ice and our president tweets racism to inflame a hungry audience of white nationalists who dream of a world without people like Morrison in it.

Death and remembrance, at least, come with the customs and norms that have been shredded in most of the rest of public life. If nothing else, death still inspires a pause in ordinary life and, in the case of artists, a respectful consideration of their habitually ignored accomplishments. The reflective look back on a life and a body of work such as Morrison’s is ultimately celebratory, a chance to think the best of another person and, by extension, ourselves. Artists, performers, scientists, writers and other creators rarely “make news” in the same way politicians do, even though their influence on our culture is greater, deeper and more meaningful. The obituary is a belated observation and acknowledgment that people like Morrison, in fact, made news every day through their work. They formed the deeper part of the minds that our pollsters seek to measure and quantify in the frenzied haste of the news cycle. They are the atmosphere of American culture, while all else is merely weather.

Obituaries are a paradox of sorts, a distraction toward meaningfulness, a diversion to what really matters. The response to the rest of the news is often an impulse to escapism, a turning away. But while Morrison shares space with the usual firehouse of bad news, her passing offers at least one impulse to go deeper, to read more, dig in, think more critically and disconnect from the ephemera. Obituaries like the ones that have been written about her in the past day are even better than the usual “good” news, which is often little more than a reminder that somewhere, somehow, someone has done an unnecessary kindness; obituaries are redemptive on a grander scale.

We seem capable of only two modes of existence: panic and sadness, the former fast-paced and full of collateral damage to the world around us, the latter at least sometimes constructive and reflective. America has experienced periods of intense reflection around death in the past, as when the last remaining veterans of the Revolutionary War were dying in the middle of the 19th century, leaving people to wonder whether there were any steady voices and clear heads to steer us away from, or through, the accumulation of civil strife and political violence. The deaths of those who fought in World War II offered an occasion to think about the fraying of the old 20th-century social contract, the dissolution of the bond between the generations enshrined in key social-welfare programs, and the extinction of American optimism — that we might live in a society without poverty, without unnecessary suffering, with genuine opportunity and social mobility.

But the death of an artist is different from the loss of political leaders, no matter how wise or benevolent, or the larger passing of a generation, which has continued since the beginning of time. Morrison’s work remains with us, intractable, urgent and uncompromising, and it is no less effective today than it was on Monday. It is curious to listen to people on television debating the effectiveness of this policy or that plan, often arguing themselves into the absurdity that because nothing has yet worked, therefore nothing new should be attempted.

Meanwhile, the work of artists outlives them, operating on minds too young to be cynical. Politicians die and, if they’re lucky, are memorialized for having fixed something in the broken world they inherited. Artists die, and we flock to what they left behind, reanimating it, refreshing its meaning and reincorporating it into the body politic.

If you want to change the world, authentically and for the better, would you live your life like a politician, or a businessman, or a pharmaceutical executive or Donald Trump? Or would you live it like Toni Morrison?

When your time is up, I hope you drop like the dead donkey

The sooner we realise we are all going to die the better – it gives us time to get used to the idea

‘It took the death of a neighbour down the road when I was in my 20s to make me realise that one day I myself would die.’

by Padraig O’Morain

The first time I experienced death as real was when I watched a donkey being put down at the crossroads beside the farm I grew up in.

I was probably about seven or eight at the time. The donkey had been around for a few days and nobody knew where she had come from.

Somebody got in touch with somebody and a man came out from Naas to deal with the situation. He must have come to our house first because I remember following him up to the crossroads.

He stopped in front of the donkey and quietly took the humane killer, as it is called, out of a bag. This instrument is like a gun that drives a spike into the brain. He patted the donkey’s head, put the humane killer against her forehead, and killed her.

I’ve always remembered that the donkey was dead when she hit the ground.

I don’t know what happened next. I suppose the man went off, that I inspected the donkey, that the kennels of the Kildare Hunt took her away to feed hounds. That was how we got rid of dead cattle and other large animals.

Spread a tablecloth by the graveside, bring a picnic basket with the cucumber sandwiches, the homemade apple tart, the wine and the lemonade and enjoy

I was no stranger to animals dying, and every year we killed turkeys for the Christmas market. I was able to approach these deaths in a pragmatic manner.

What had really struck me about the donkey was that she died as she fell. I had never realised how quickly life could disappear.

Shortly after the death of the donkey, I found two white candles wrapped up inside a drawer in a sideboard in our gloomy sitting room.

I immediately assumed the candles were for use when either of my parents died.

In all probability, the candles had been put aside for a power cut but, as I say, the room was gloomy. Also, the sideboard has come from a priest’s house in Allenwood where, some years previously, a maidservant was possessed by the Devil. She had had to be exorcised to stop her breaking plates and furniture and terrifying the priest. We called the sideboard “the Devil’s sideboard” and we imagined Satan was inside.

Gloomiest possible conclusion

So it’s understandable I came to the gloomiest possible conclusion.

But that realisation – and I still recall the chill of it – was about the death of other people. It took the death of a neighbour down the road when I was in my 20s to make me realise that one day I myself would die.

This realisation comes to everybody sooner or later and I think sooner is better than later. It gives you time to get used to the idea. It becomes like a shadow, sometimes behind you and sometimes in front of you but you get used to it. I suspect if it comes too late in life it can hit hard, shattering your protective illusion that death happens to the rest of humanity but not to you.

I was led to these thoughts by Laura Kennedy’s recent article in The Irish Times in which she advised that the inevitability of death should motivate us to get on (within reason) with what we want to do.

I agree with her and I would add two points. First, it’s okay to be afraid of dying because to be unafraid of dying is not natural.

Second, if you want to get more out of life, remember that you don’t have to go skydiving, mountain-climbing or jet-skiing unless you want to. For some, going to the movies once a week would make a really big difference to their quality of life. For others, to make a difference, they might have to sail around the world. One type of person is not better than another type of person.

So spread a tablecloth by the graveside, bring a picnic basket with the cucumber sandwiches, the homemade apple tart, the wine and the lemonade and enjoy. And when the time comes I wish you as quick a step out of this world as the donkey had.

Complete Article HERE!