I thought I had a decent relationship with death. At least it didn’t register as my anxiety’s greatest hits. But when the pandemic hit and sudden death was rampant everywhere, waiting in a way that was disturbingly urgent for us all, I became obsessed with chicken breast.
The amount of poultry I could pack in the freezer was directly proportional to how safe I felt, a kind of buffer against illness and death. why? who knows. I needed to find a way to control this uncontrollable existential threat and my brain decided to stock up on bird meat. While it was at least somewhat practical and made meal planning easier, this approach had its limitations. For example, every time I took food out of the freezer, I started crying. Not suitable for people who eat a lot of chicken.
And if the global miasma of death wasn’t enough, in October 2020, my mother-in-law, who was living alone in a wheelchair, had an accident that left her bedridden in a nursing home. Because of the pandemic, my husband, sister-in-law, and I were unable to visit, assist with care, or effectively advocate for her care. And by the time we were allowed inside, her physical health had deteriorated severely from neglect and lack of intensive care. The breakdown in communication and the overall chaos the COVID-19 crisis has caused in an already fractured aged care system. She entered a painfully long spiral towards death. There was little we could do about it.
To cope with this newly uncontrollable situation, I became obsessed with cooking dinner (you may be sensing a theme). I got over my chicken-specific anxiety and started focusing more on general meal preparation. My day revolved around planning, shopping, choosing recipes, and cooking. Because I felt that our food choices tied our lives together.
This wasn’t my first rodeo with death. I’ve grieved the tragic and untimely deaths of friends and family members, and I’ve survived dramatic car accidents like the one in the driver awareness video. The car went down a steep embankment and overturned (my friend and I managed to get away). Minor injuries).
But those events were just that: events. There are moments of sadness, but they are fleeting. This new threat of death felt more like a shift in the story, harsh and never-ending. When death instinctively and relentlessly threw itself into my life, I realized that I was actually pretty bad at dealing with it.
Death is one of the only truly universal human experiences, yet it is strangely difficult to understand and accept. For many of us, death exists only in the abstract for most of our lives. Even as children, we know that death is a fact of life. But it’s easy to feel like it happened to someone else, preferably someone you don’t know. For us, death is a safe escape from the realm of possibility, until it suddenly becomes impossible.
Throughout history, humans have developed a tradition of walking a tightrope between the fear of death and the denial of death. It is said that in ancient Rome, it was the slave’s job to whisper in the general’s ear that victory was short-lived and that his death was inevitable. The tradition of memento mori, which means “remember that you will die” in Latin, is as old as Christianity. Seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings featured skulls, rotten fruit, and hourglasses prominently to remind viewers of the fleeting nature of life. And the Buddhist tradition has a variety of approaches, from meditating on the impermanence of life to literally observing the stages of decay in a corpse.
There seem to be several parts to the equation for dealing with death. One, you have to see (or witness up close) death to believe in it. Another thing is that you have to meditate on death in order to accept it. We have to accept that it happens to our loved ones too. We have to accept that it will happen to us and that we have little say in its schedule. While some people find this acceptance through religious belief and prayer, in general, modern traditions of dealing with death are anemic at best. And in any case, I had nothing. So it became very clear that the fear of death would not go away and I needed to find a way to overcome it myself.
Written by Eden Robbins. Sourcebook landmarks.
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My personal tradition of meditation on death began when I chanced upon a documentary called Obit about the New York Times obituary desk. In the documentary, we learned that most mornings when the obit writers went to work, they received a short summary about the person who had died. It also probably included some phone numbers for loved ones. They were expected to research, write, and submit a complete obituary by the end of the workday. One day, one life.
There was something very moving about this project. It involved spending an entire day learning everything you could about strangers and then assuming the solemn but glorious responsibility of telling their lives in print. It was painful, but it also felt heroic.
I’m not a writer, but I am a novelist. So I decided to write obituaries for fake people. I wrote one thing every day for months. My first article was about a woman who died of neglect in a nursing home. This wasn’t a conscious choice, but in hindsight, it may have been a way to process what my mother-in-law was going through. After writing this first sentence, I was intrigued by what the woman briefly mentioned about her adopted daughter. So the next day I wrote my daughter’s obituary, which in my fictional world happened many years later. Every day for months, I would get up and sit quietly until something piqued my interest. Then out of that interest came life and death. I thought deeply about who these people were, who they loved, and what they loved. You won’t know the full story of your life until it’s over. It was really comforting to look back on my imaginary life and write about what was special about it. I had a vague idea that these stories might become novels, but I hadn’t planned anything in advance.
During meditation, we focus on our breathing, bringing this autonomous, unconscious function into consciousness. Rather than controlling your breathing, participate in it and observe it. That attention affects systems in the body that we don’t have conscious access to. In this way, meditation is truly a magic trick, a secret portal into the mystical interior.
It didn’t make any sense at all, but by writing obituaries for fictional characters and allowing them to access their grief in an emotionally safe way, I was establishing my own way of meditating on death. . I was building a sandbox where I could be interested without trying to control or be controlled by my sadness and fear. Fiction is a kind of magic in itself, a secret portal to a mysterious world.
And after weeks of writing fake obituaries, I realized I could breathe easier.
Laura Miller
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In the 1980s, psychologists developed “terror management theory.” This theory holds that when faced with reminders of existential threats or the danger of death, we seek the comfort of certainty and our opinions about other cultures, religions, religions, etc. become more polarized and aggressive. We hypothesized that there would be a tendency to political ideals etc. There is some evidence that when we are reminded of our own mortality, we will punish people we judge to be dissimilar to us. Conversely, when faced with an existential threat like a pandemic, we may choose to channel that fear into the act of creation, open ourselves to curiosity and flexibility, and cultivate a sense of purpose. Researchers are observing. Connection in the face of uncertainty and death. So I added a third step to the equation. First you have to face death, then you have to accept it, and finally you have to try to make something beautiful out of it.
I started writing my daily obituary in January 2021, around the time of the peak of anxiety over chicken breasts in the freezer and the storming of the Capitol, and eventually my My new novel is called Remember You Will Die and will be published on October 22nd. .
‘Remember You Will Die’ is told entirely through my linked obituary (plus some news summaries and other ‘found’ documents included), but tradition There is no specific story). I finished the final draft in July 2023, the day my mother-in-law passed away.
That’s certainly one way to persuade young people not to vote for Donald Trump. Dating apps have destroyed in-person romance. Now they are trying to revive it. Barron Trump does the most Trump thing ever in college Alex Cooper didn’t ask Kamala Harris’ favorite sex position when she called her dad. What she asked could have been worse.
Her death, even though I knew it was imminent, was still shocking and awful. To honor her memory, her husband and sister-in-law spent the evening watching her favorite movie (Murphy Romance) and making potato boats, a family favorite her mother used to make when she was a child. I decided to make it. chicken involved).
Since I had a lot of experience writing fake obi letters, my husband asked me to help him write his mother’s real obi letters. I’m ashamed to say that it became a task that I had put off many times because I was afraid of it. Somehow knowing her personally made it very difficult to view her life from the helpful (and, well, fictional) distance that allowed me to write the novel.
That event, and my relationship with death, is still a work in progress. So I’m not saying that writing this novel solved my fears or that I was able to overcome my sadness. But by starting a gentle but consistent practice of looking at death, meditating on death, and creating something creative out of fear, I began to develop a healthier relationship with the fact that we will all die. . We cannot escape death, but we can create a life that includes and respects death. that.
