As a young man I read the words of an old teacher: to do anything truly meaningful in life, you must first make friends with death. I remember well how the thought both inspired me and left me with questions.
Many years later, after life’s unpredictable twists and turns, I found myself reading a scientific article on how reminding people of their own mortality led them to value life more highly. Thinking about death gave life a more beautiful tone. Reading it, I was tempted to pause and feel whether thinking about my own death would actually change anything. At first I didn’t even know what exactly to think about. So I took a question from the same article: “What do you think will happen to you when you die?” One thought led to another, my perspective shifted several times, and after a while I noticed that a different state of mind had indeed appeared.
The stress that had weighed on me during that period – born of a constant lack of time – eased. A wider view of existence saved me from making too much of small things. That was when I remembered the words I had read as a young man. There had to be something to this befriending of death, if both new and ancient wisdom spoke of its value.
From then on I began to notice more and more knowledge, from different times and places, that in one way or another came to the same conclusion: if you wish to live a better, happier, freer or even healthier life, it is worth thinking about death now and then. “There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death. After which, everything is possible,” wrote the French writer, philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus. Many great minds have understood that, at least at some point in life, this subject is worth feeling through.
The well-known model of the death-studies pioneer Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, today mostly known as a model of grief, was originally created for coming to terms with dying. According to it, acceptance of the end may come only after passing through several emotional states: denial, anger, bargaining and depression. A difficult journey, certainly. But if the subject of death has been opened up earlier in life, one may never end up in crisis at all. People who have had a near-death experience, for example, have in a sense entered into a dialogue with their own death. Peace of mind often follows. Research has found that near-death experiences also have a calming effect on others – on people who meet these stories from the side.
A remarkable number of studies show that looking one’s own death in the eye has a positive effect on self-esteem, eases stress, makes us more inclined to humour, and may even reduce the need for painkillers.
Taking life’s impermanence into account gives life its flavour.
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” asked the technology entrepreneur Steve Jobs. In the developed world, people have recently begun to look at the end of life with an increasingly open gaze. Death is no longer the taboo it once was. The Death Café movement is spreading fast, driven by millions of people who want to talk about death freely. There are camps, retreats and meditations; clergy write books about death. And the morbid tone has given way to a brighter one – as if humanity had broken free from behind the dam where death was kept taboo.
During the COVID years, technology dealing with death and dying also took off. End-of-life start-ups have sprung up like mushrooms after rain, and many of them were founded by women. Empathy matters here, because they are trying to meet people’s deepest needs. It seems humanity has come to see the wisdom of taking death into account. It is, after all, the one thing we know for certain.
Originally published in Estonian in the magazine Eesti Naine.