Leveraging Death To Truly Live

If we carefully consider our inevitable future death, it can create space for us to think about how we can best live life now in meaningful and joyful ways.

What I watched: “Why Thinking About Death Helps You Live a Better Life” by Alua Arthur. Posted July 6, 2023.

As I write this post, we’re entering the holiday season and nearing the end of 2023. I don’t typically celebrate much during this time of year, but I thought it would be nice to give my readership a present.

The TED Talk by Alua Arthur is one of the best things I've watched in a while. I’m confident there’s not a person reading this who will not benefit from watching it. It’s that good. Its message is that universal.

I know. Death isn’t a fun topic. But it’s the universal reality. Accepting that can help us live a better life in the present.

Then why think about it at all. Death creates context for our lives. My entire life is leading up until that point. How we die creates the period at the end of the sentence, but it is the period that makes it a sentence at all.

Arthur mentions how we celebrate birthdays as the passage of time. We count them because they’re finite. They mark the passage of time because time on the planet is special, and someday we won’t have any more time. Again, not a gloomy thing. Reality. A reality that if leveraged can help us live a better life in the here and now and make our day-to-day lives much better.

Arthur’s message is also a cautionary tale for the driven among us who focus intently on climbing corporate ladders, making more money beyond what's needed for the basics, or gaining more fame. In the end, none of that will matter, and that's a really important lesson to learn.

Arthur explains how she came to her current work as a death doula. An encounter with a random strange sparked Arthur’s thinking about her own mortality and she did not like the experience at the time.

I noticed then that I had to live life on my own terms because I was the only one who was going to have to contend with all the choices that I've made at my death.

Speaking of mortality, I also pondered the concept in a recent article, “On Morality.”

As I age and friends around me deal with physical challenges far worse than I’ve yet experienced, mortality is on my mind lately. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not afraid of my inevitable demise. These aren’t morbid thoughts. Rather, I see it as a staring into the face of obvious reality.

Thinking about death can either freak someone out, making them push such thoughts out of awareness. Or, it can help one to focus on that which is truly important in this life we’ve been privileged to be granted in the first place.

When I'm thinking about my present life from the vantage point of my graceful death, I can see very clearly who I want to be, how I want to spend my time, and what of me I'll leave behind. It allows me to consciously curate my life right now and also figure out my little whys right now. Because what are we waiting for anyway? Like, death?

Arthur illustrates some of her points by offering a composite story cobbled together from the many clients she’s worked with as she assists them with their journey toward death. The client was highly successful, had people she loved as well as good friends and romance, and was widely traveled. In essence, quite a good life. But the client was suddenly confronted by an aggressive form of cancer.

The cancer spawned a sense of pointlessness in the woman’s life. Reflecting back on her 60 prior years, the woman couldn’t figure out what she’d been doing with her time because she was, like many of us, caught up in the constant doing, the busyness mindset that plagues so many people today.

It turned out what the woman truly valued were the little things in life. Gardening. Reading books. Good food. Speaking of food, Arthur offers this tidbit of advice that’s humorous but also insightful.

You are going to die, so please eat the cake… Eat everything you want to, just eat it because you’re going to die. One day you won’t be able to anymore.

Then Arthur recounts the part of the story that resonated with me most. At various times in my life, I’ve worried about my legacy. One night I recall writing on a piece of paper that I wanted to write 100 books during my lifetime. I had read about the prolific writing of Isaac Asimov and wanted to emulate his productivity. It was a silly metric to aim for but that’s what stressing over our legacy does. It often creates silly, unrealistic, and unhelpful goals and desires that don’t truly serve us in savoring the present moment.

I decided at that point I would try to stop dangling unrealistic carrots in front of me and instead simply allow my level of productivity to be whatever it was going to be. If that was five or ten good books I can write in my lifetime, great. If it was one or two good books that moved people in some important way, that would be just as good. One good book? Just fine also. I stopped thinking about my legacy.

She was also really curious about her legacy. What, if anything, she'd leave behind. But leaving a legacy isn't optional. We're doing it every single day. You're doing it with every smile, every word, every kind word. every harsh word, every action, every inaction, every dollar you spend. You're telling the people who are paying attention exactly who you are, and that is what they'll tell of you when you are gone.

At her funeral, despite all of her career accomplishments, nobody talked about any of that. They talked about who she was. Nobody cared about what she'd done. When we focus on our productivity, we highlight what we have to do to feel worthy rather than who we get to be where worthiness is our birthright and we are human.

Highlighting so poignantly that we humans are meaning-making machines able to craft a story about anything to propel us through life, Arthur suggests considering making “meaning out of the magic of the mundane.” By doing so, we can at the same time absolve ourselves of the heavy burden and responsibility of always trying to have some grand life purpose that so much self-help material pummels us with from every direction. We can instead give ourselves permission to be entirely human and fallible. We can, in the words of the esteemed late Ram Dass, choose to be here now (paid link).

I’ve often said to friends that when I die, I want them to throw a raucous party. No reveling in sadness but rather celebrate that I lived at all, that you knew me, and hopefully liked or loved me.

I’m not a person of faith. My atheist self loved Arthur’s description of what happens when we die. She evokes glitter. Glitter is fun. Glitter is celebratory. Glitter is multi-colored. Glitter never scatters the same way twice. I want my last bits of existence on the planet in my current form to be something like her description of how all that glitter explodes out of me and become a continuing part of the unending great universal story in different ways.

That said, don’t use glitter itself in any ceremony please. Even if you think you’re using eco-friendly glitter, you’re probably not. But, please whatever you do, think about your death and let that future inevitability guide you to living a better life in the present moment.

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