What death teaches us about life

Life is better when lived with an awareness of death.

Death has a way of surprising you, even when you know it's coming.

Several years ago on a hazy August morning in New York City, I went out for coffee and a stroll around my neighborhood, returning to a curious package waiting at my doorstep. 

I opened it to a worn-out copy of a book called Death Benefits, the subtitle promising to share how “losing a parent can change an adult’s life—for the better.” I forgot that I’d ordered a $5 copy off eBay months earlier at a friend’s recommendation, after my father (with whom I had a complicated relationship) was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. Its belated arrival felt ominous. 

That afternoon, I got the call: my dad was dead. He’d died of sudden organ failure at a friend’s home. Although he had been seriously ill, the news came as a shock. He had been given a nine to 12 month prognosis, and I thought we had months left together. This wasn’t how I imagined it. I thought I’d have some warning. I envisioned myself by his side for his final moments. But I didn’t get to be there, and I never got to say goodbye. 

After Death swept into my life, I went through a nearly three-year period of disorientation and existential crisis. Less than eight months after my dad’s death, my brother died of a heroin overdose. In the wake of both losses, I was consumed by grief and shock to the point that I had a hard time fully engaging with life. But life marched on (cruelly, it seemed), and eventually, I found a way out of the darkness. Following in my father’s footsteps, I took my refuge vow and officially became a Buddhist. I got pregnant and gave birth to my son. My husband and I bought an old farmhouse in a tiny town called Freedom, Maine, where the long, dark winters and lush summers drew me into a deeper relationship with nature’s cycles of birth and death, and taught me to trust in renewal. 

Looking back, the book’s arrival on his death day (which also happened to be his 66th birthday) felt like a cheeky parting message from my dad, an armchair philosopher with a self-deprecating self of humor: Find the death benefits. 

Through my long, winding healing journey/existential crisis, what I’ve found is this: Death is a part of life. Death benefits life; it gives meaning to life. And facing death gives us the existential kick in the pants we need to live the lives we’re actually meant to be living.

In other words: Life is better when it’s lived with an awareness of death.

Knowing that you, and everyone you love, will die makes life more precious, more beautiful, more vibrant, more alive. 

You are alive. 

In light of death, life stops being an abstract concept. Right now, at this very moment, we are alive!

Most of us spend most of our lives unaware of aliveness. We drift blindly through life like the confused fish in David Foster Wallace’s parable: 

How’s the water today? says one fish. 

Says the other: What the hell is water?

“The most obvious, important realities,” explains Wallace, “are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”  

It’s often the loss of a loved one that wakes us up to that most obvious, important reality of death. Other times, it’s an illness or accident that forces a confrontation with our own mortality. 

That was the case for my creative partner Maura, a death doula and entrepreneur working in the deathcare space. After losing her mother to breast cancer at the formative age of 20, she graduated college adrift and in a deep depression. The call to the mountains helped her begin to find her way again, and she moved to Aspen, Colorado, where she became an event planner for the rich and famous. Years later, a two-week series of unfortunate events—including a death at a wedding and a brush with life’s fragility while hiking in the Alaskan backcountry—awakened her to the reality of impermanence and led to her calling: reimagining how we think, talk about, and approach death. 

But death doesn’t just come in these dramatic, life-shattering moments. If we pay attention, we’ll start to see that death is all around us, all the time. Every breath brings us closer to our last. Things are always ending, and new things are beginning. The seasons keep changing. We lose jobs, homes, friends, old versions of ourselves. Death is always right there with us—and that is as it should be. 

We don’t have to wait for a tragic loss or terminal diagnosis to experience life more fully. To really ask ourselves what it all means. We can choose to reflect on our mortality in order to experience death’s “benefits” in our lives, right now. 

You are going to die. 

The Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön tells a story about taking her teenage kids to go see His Holiness the Karmapa, one of the most important spiritual leaders in Tibetan Buddhism. She asked him to share a teaching with her children that might be meaningful to them despite their general lack of knowledge about Buddhism. He said, simply, “You are going to die.” 

Indeed: We’re all gonna die. The one unavoidable fact of life is that we don’t get out of it alive. 

Being born is the death sentence, the terminal diagnosis. As religious studies professor Anne Klein says, “Life is a party on death row.” 

This is a fact that we, as a culture, go to great lengths to avoid. While most of us know it’s important to have these conversations with parents and family members, few of us are actually having them. Over 90 percent of people think it’s important to talk to their loved ones about end-of-life care, yet only 32% of people actually do it. 

Humanistic psychologist Rollo May compares American culture’s denial of the existential reality of death to the repression of human sexuality in Victorian England. At other times in human history, ignoring death would be an impossible feat. Death was always top of mind. People died earlier and more visibly: at home, in childbirth, out in nature, on the battlefield. But today, death is largely sequestered, so we don’t have to look at it. The shocking reality of death might break through in moments of collective crisis like the Israel-Palestine War and the early days of the pandemic, but we quickly avert our eyes and return to autopilot. There are endless distractions to keep us from facing death unless we or someone we know is actually dying.

According to Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and founding father of existential psychotherapy, our denial of the basic facts of our existence is the root cause of our neuroses. Our fear of death has all kinds of ripple effects that we’re not aware of but that color our attitudes towards life nonetheless. Psychologist Robert Greene describes the fear of death as a “latent fear”—a back-burner anxiety that makes us afraid of failure, afraid of risk, afraid of uncertainty and change. In other words, when we’re afraid of death, we’re also afraid of life. 

If we’re honest with ourselves, we are forced to acknowledge that death could come for us at any moment. We have no way of knowing how much time we have left. The next time you say goodbye to your kids, or a close friend, could be your last. 

Looking at the numbers can help make this a bit more concrete. I am 34 years old, for instance. If I live to the age of 80, I have around 2,400 weeks left. That’s if I’m lucky. I may or may not get there. If I live as long as my father, then I’m already more than halfway to the end. I have already outlived my brother, who only made it to 32. 

We don’t have to see this as something dark or despairing. As humans through history have known, on the other side of our fear of death is the fullness of life in all its messy, impermanent beauty. 

So what exactly would it look like to invite death into our lives? What might change—and how might we see ourselves and others differently?

Death (contemplation) benefits. 

Looking death in the face is a radical (and maybe even rebellious) act in a culture that habitually turns away from it. 

When we do this, we reclaim a powerful force for growth and change. Arguably, it’s the self-help we actually need. An edgier, more confrontational wellness practice to add to our existing yoga and therapy and skincare regimes. One that cuts through our self-deception and makes plainly apparent what we actually need to be happy, rather than what we’ve been told that we need. 

In the bright light of impermanence, real change—finding purpose, deepening our relationships, sparking creativity, just being happier—actually becomes easier, more natural, perhaps even more fun. It’s the electric shock that instantly cuts through the bullshit and jolts us out of autopilot. We get clear on what actually matters, and what doesn’t. We will probably realize that, at least in one area of our lives, we’ve been on the wrong track and it’s time to change trains.

The psychological benefits of contemplating mortality are increasingly well-known. Taking time to reflect on your mortality can reduce feelings of anxiety and loneliness, support emotional well-being, boost empathy and compassion, and help us to find a sense of meaning and purpose in life. The “ontological confrontation” with death, to use the scientific term, can bring our deeper desires, values and priorities into focus, which can help guide our decisions and actions towards a more authentic and fulfilling life. 

Summarizing the research findings for Scientific American, clinical psychologist Michael Wiederman wrote, “our mortality affects us in ways we do not even realize, especially in how it can transform our goals.” 

After a brush with mortality, people tend to shift from more materialistic goals like chasing wealth and success to more personally meaningful ones: deepening relationships, doing creative work, personal and spiritual growth. And in turn, people who focus more on these kinds of personally meaningful goals tend to be less afraid of death—presumably because they feel good about the way they’ve been living their lives. There’s less to regret.  

This isn’t exactly a new discovery. Humans have known all this for a very long time, and they’ve developed many philosophies and practices for befriending mortality in order to fully embrace life. In shamanic cultures, facing one’s own death is a form of initiation: a rite of passage of confronting one’s deepest fears to activate a new level of personal power. In Buddhism, the contemplation of impermanence is considered the “deepest and most supreme” of all meditations. 

The Stoics practiced “memento mori”: remembering that you will die and allowing this reminder to guide your daily actions. And existentialists like Heidegger and Nietzsche considered contemplating mortality an existential obligation—an essential practice for anyone who sought to live an authentic life and discover who they really are. 

So what does it look like to live with a deeper awareness of death? It’s different for everyone. 

For me, death became a trustworthy barometer for what matters. I made some big life changes in the years after losing my dad and my brother. I committed to my Buddhist practice. I invested in my creative work. My husband and I started spending a lot more time in Maine, where I’m learning how to grow flowers. 

And then, maybe more importantly, there were a lot of small, everyday things. Less rushing. Less striving. More reading. More flowers. Having the difficult conversation with a friend instead of swallowing my emotions (again). Calling my mom more often. Staying present while I’m with my son. Saying yes to more invitations. Saying no to unnecessary obligations. Learning to better decode my body’s signals telling me what is actually a yes, and what is a no. 

How to Start Thinking About Death  

It’s not necessarily easy to wrap your head around the reality that you will die. Our human brains weren’t designed to accommodate the idea of non-existence. It’s difficult to really imagine the experience of this body breaking down, losing your physical and mental faculties. 

The Buddhists wisely suggest that we begin by reflecting on impermanence. We can see things around us constantly changing. We can become a more conscious observer of the passing of time. We can become a more present witness to the changing of the seasons, both in nature and in our own lives. We can notice the endings that make way for new beginnings. The time to leave a job, a home, a relationship. The time to start a new creative project, a family, a spiritual path. 

We can start to look at the flow of change, all these endings and beginnings, from the lens of mortality. If you knew you were going to die by the end of this year, what changes would you make in your life? What would you do differently right now? 

Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes death as “an advisor that can give us clarity about what really matters.” He suggests asking Death to advise you: What are you beginning right now in your life, and what is dying to allow that to happen? What would Death say to you about your life this year, today? 

If you’d like to share your reflections, we’re all ears. Feel free to reply to this email to share with me and Maura. We’d love to hear.  

-Carolyn Gregoire