and a substacker, to name just a few roles in what sounds like a very busy and gratifying life.

I was honored that she included my essays in her BETWEEN CHAPTERS project.

Here is my essay which is a version of a chapter in my latest book, You’re Going to Die But Not Me.

Thank you for reading, substack friends!

peace and love,

When my mother died, her apartment at her assisted living place looked kind of like this:

Okay, it didn’t actually look like this but it’s how it seemed to me. Endless piles of paper everywhere! I mean EVERYWHERE!

I bagged up dozens upon dozens of huge garbage bags and hauled them to the dumpster. At first I gave some effort at sorting, in case there was anything important. What I found were bags upon bags upon bags of receipts. Receipts from Duane Reade drugstore, from the dry cleaner, from several grocery stores and Macy’s and Starbucks. Old bus tickets and used power balls. A title to my stepfather’s old Fiat that hadn’t been around for over 20 years. You get the gist. Luckily and gobsmackingly, just as I was about to just snowplow every last thing away, I found a copy of a life insurance policy. A life insurance policy that my sister and I knew nothing about. A life insurance policy that was in the bottom of a brown paper bag covered by receipts from Ling Garden Restaurant. An active life insurance policy. (I wrote about the mr.-toad’s-wild-ride that was involved in sorting out this life insurance thing in my 2019 memoir, This Never Happened.)

Because of the nightmare that was that experience, I have swung out to what might be the opposite extreme. I have informed my kids—and reminded them every several months or so—that they will find important information in this fireproof box under my bed…

…

….the key to which will be in this kitchen drawer….

…in this container.

And in that fireproof box, along with my passport and birth certificate, is a document that contains the following:

• My social security number

• My master PIN code and address of password manager

• Pre-paid information on what to do with my body

• all my financial institution account information

• credit card information

• people to contact along with their telephone numbers

• attorney contact information

• advanced healthcare directive

• trust documents

• copy of my driver’s license

• title for my car

• contact information for my CPA

• mortgage information

• long term care insurance policy

• 4 silver certificate dollar bills

• eight hundred dollars in cash

What am I missing?

Leave a comment

Love and peace,

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We seem to be fascinated by movies and books about the end of the world, and by “we” I mean ME. I am. I love these stories. Can’t get enough of them. I read The Road the day it was released, re-read it several months later; watched the movie the day it was released and re-watched it when it was available to stream.

I know I’m not alone. Just off the top of my head (a head that can’t remember why I just came into this room, btw), here are some titles:

The Day After Tomorrow

Don’t Look Up

28 Days Later

Contagion

Mad Max

The Road

World War Z

City of Men

Independence Day

War of the Worlds

A Quiet Place

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Dr. Strangelove

Melacholia

Etc., etc., and I could go on…

WHY DO WE (I) LOVE THESE STORIES?

I have some thoughts. Maybe it’s because….

1. These stories give us a chance to rehearse our own end, aka a kind of simulation

2. Okay, maybe I’m about to die but so is every single other person on earth

3. My own death is too scary to think about but human extinction is, well, maybe less personal

4. They take every single thing down to the basics, i.e. who cares about a to-do list if armageddon is afoot!

5. Every single living soul is likely to be 100% in the present

6. We have a chance to test our resilience and ingenuity, like foraging for food or rubbing sticks together or making tools

7. They are metaphors for aspects of our personal psychology that maybe we are reluctant to face directly, i.e. our fear of losing control, or our fear of personal weakness, or our fear that our life might be meaningless

8. In a weird way, they can connect us to the sublime. The vast and terrifying and awesome nature of it all can be beautiful in its own way.

Does this all sound too weird to you? I’d love to know.

Love and peace,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be most grateful for a ❤️, a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️ and perhaps a pledge of support!

THINGS I NEVER WORRIED ABOUT WHEN I WAS 20, or 30, or 40, or maybe even 50+

• my knees

• driving on the freeway

• driving after dark

• other people driving

• driving

• compression socks

• someday being a loaded word

• falling

• fiber

• staying up past 9pm

• bone density

• blood pressure

• cholesterol

• picking something up off the floor

• remembering why I came into this room

• a will

• a funeral

• dental insurance

• tiny print

• standing up too fast

• what’s up with this mole

• did I already take that pill

• sleeveless dresses

• getting out of a bathtub

• inflammation

• dinner reservations after 6pm

• walking down stairs without a rail

• the side effects of ibuprofen

• sleeping wrong

• what was I just thinking

• noise levels in restaurants

• long term care insurance

• whether I will outlive my dog

• traffic

• SPF 50

• root canals

• having a second cocktail

• reading glasses

• that spot wasn’t there yesterday

• night guards

• two-factor authentication

• arch support

• a chair with a back

• scams

THINGS I DON’T WORRY ABOUT NOW THAT I DID WORRY ABOUT WHEN I WAS 20, or 30, or 40, or maybe even 50+

• being cool

• getting a wrinkle

• saying the wrong thing

• wearing the wrong thing

• having my life figured out

• being single

• changing my mind

• looking silly

• admitting I was wrong

• Making one wrong decision that would ruin everything

• whether everyone likes me

• not being invited

• leaving early

• whether my jeans are on-trend

• my picture on my drivers license

• having a bad hair day

• my bad side

• covering every gray hair

• wearing the same outfit three days in a row

• staying home on a saturday night

• saying no

Anything you’d add?

Love and peace,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be most grateful for a ❤️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

My dear, late friend, Robert, loved obituaries. He was a brilliant writer himself and at least part of the appeal to him was to re-write these in his head. I’ve never been a reader of this genre myself, except maybe, for when a famous person dies. That said, even though I do not open the paper to the Obit page, I will for sure home in on AGE when I do come across one. How old was this person when they died and, especially if they are younger than me, how did they die…and uh oh, maybe I’m going to die of that too.

(I actually was asked to write Robert’s obituary which you can read here.)

Obituaries, like funerals, often present the deceased in the best possible light. From the small sample that I’ve read, I usually think, oh come on. S/he can’t be that good! Of course I hope I’m remembered fondly…but actually, it’s more important to me that I’ll be remembered accurately. Okay, fondly and accurately 😂.

As I was researching this piece I came across what turns out to be a pretty famous obit of a person who actually wasn’t very famous in real life, a mister Harry Stamps. Here’s his obit…I think it’s amazing!

So here’s a stab at my own obituary:

Liz managed to live as long as she could. While she worked hard on her fear of death…even going so far as to write a book about it…sadly, she was still afraid at the end. BUT, she did manage to feel guilty about that, not wanting to stress out her family with all her angst.

She did die with regrets: she never went to Africa to see the animals and she never lived in Paris for a year. Even worse, she was never able to finally let go of the belief that every problem in the lives of her loved ones was hers to solve.

Liz will be remembered for the family gatherings around her enormous dining room table. Birthday dinners, Thanksgiving, Seder, usually capped off by her telling everyone to just go home already!

Her favorite food was potato chips.

She is well-known for repeatedly telling stories of life in the sixties, usually accompanied by this song that her daughter keyed up the minute she launched in to something they’d already heard multiple times:

Liz loved playing games, especially ones where laughter is a guaranteed outcome. In fact, she was constantly chasing that elusive experience of laughing so hard that your stomach hurts, you can’t speak, you double over and practically fall off your chair.

Her later life was marked by boring people with her incessant need to talk about her dog, Billy.

And even though it horrifyingly smacks of the narcissism of her mother, her last words were, “Don’t forget me.”

I’m really curious. Have any of you thought about this?

Love and peace,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be most grateful for a ❤️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

I was so pleasantly surprised. She has not read my book but I think she really captured its essence.

I quite love it so thought I’d share it with you all.

Love and peace…and taking minor chances,

I have Natalie Serber—-who, IMHO, is the queen of substack to thank for helping me. Check out her substack. It’s amazing!

YAY, let the comments commence! 😄

On the other hand….

Maybe we are rehearsing from the start. Maybe from the jump we are practicing…and I mean the real jump: BIRTH!

In the process of getting born we are forced to leave the utter safety and sheer comfort of the womb and are thrust into a cold, alien environment. I don’t know about you but that feels like death practice to me.

The process typically goes from this…

to this…

YIKES

Talk about a transition!

The experience of birth is our first experience of letting go. And what is death but the most ultimate letting go.

Some other ways to think of death include:

Death = an ending

Death = a transition

Death = letting go

Death = change

Death = loss

It’s true, death might be the ultimate experience of all these. But it may be helpful to think of the zillion ways/times/occasions when we are called on to change/let go/transition/mourn, etc as opportunities to PRACTICE DYING.

One example is from YOGA, which I practiced for about 10 minutes, disliking it with intensity the whole time. The one and only thing I liked in my long yoga career was savasana i.e. corpse pose. Finally, no more trying and failing to twist my body into the shapes that every other person slipped into with ease. The original intention of savasana was a profound meditative practice of symbolic death and surrender. For ancient yogis, this absolute physical stillness was a way to quiet the ego, release worldly attachments, and rehearse for the ultimate letting go that occurs in death.

So if you practice yoga, you are likely practicing death on the regular. A death test.

If we think about death as the final exam, we have countless pop quizzes that come up throughout our lives. Every goodbye, every disappointment, every life change, every birthday ending in a zero is a tiny practice death.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a movie star-veterinarian-princess. It took a few pop quizzes and some tears to contend with the actual reality.

And we all sit for countless pop quizzes throughout our lives, whether we frame it that way or not; whether we frame these experiences as practice for dying or not.

Pop quiz: you leave home after high school

Pop quiz: you break up with your first love

Pop quiz: your mom dies

Pop quiz: your last child moves out

Pop quiz: you realize you’ll never be a ballerina

Pop quiz: you get divorced

Pop quiz: you go through menopause

Pop quiz: what the hell is my mother’s skin doing on my arms!?

I could go on for pages!

The universe seems deeply committed to making sure we don’t arrive for the final exam completely unprepared.

Small comfort, maybe. But there is something in this framing that eases my mind. A bit; a tiny smidgen; a skosh. 🤷‍♀️ 🤷 🤷‍♂️

Thoughts?

Love and peace,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be so grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

I’d never heard of André Ricciardi before but consider me a fan now. This remarkable documentary follows Ricciardi for three years, from his diagnosis to his death from colon cancer.

There have been other docs kind of like this. There was Roger Ebert: Life Itself. There’s Death in Hollywood and Autopsy: The Last Hours Of…Death in Hollywood. And just last year there was Come See Me in the Good Light—a poignant, intimate and often funny documentary that followed poet Andrea Gibson as she navigated a terminal illness.

I don’t know, maybe it was the particular mood I was in. I was moved by the Gibson film, for sure. But there was something about this guy André. He was the sort of the one-of-a-kind oddball characters that I am always drawn to: disarming, counter-culture, warm, odd, funny, and as open as it gets. Oh, and how could I forget BRAVE! I loved being in his weird, singular presence.

The film chronicles Ricciardi’s three-year journey from diagnosis to death from colon cancer. It’s raw and open and no-holds-barred and his primary motivation for agreeing to be filmed was to have his case serve as a public service plea. He gave himself the idiot moniker in the title as a reference to his forgoing a routine colonoscopy when he turned fifty, waiting instead until what they found was stage 4 terminal cancer. Too late.

Like I said, I’d never heard of this guy before but now he’s one of my role models. Of all the stories I read in researching my book it was his story, his attitude, his demeanor that I’ve found most enviable. If I can be half the person he was in my approach to death, I’ll be mighty proud of myself.

BUT FOR THE SAKE OF THIS POST…

I want to spend a minute here on something that occurs in the film, something I’d never heard about before: THE DEATH YELL.

In one scene, Ricciardi visits a man who teaches or coaches people in creating their final words or final shout—a kind of rehearsal for death.

In this surprisingly funny and moving sequence, André experiments with different last lines and screams them into the void as a way of confronting mortality with humor rather than fear.

Here are a couple of the “death yells” André tries:

“So long, suckers!”
“Come and get me, Spaceman!”

It’s a funny scene, for sure. But it also captures one of the film’s central themes: if death is unavoidable, can we approach it with creativity, absurdity, and even laughter? For André, the exercise seems to be both a joke and a genuine attempt to think about how he wants to meet the end. He approaches this death yell experience as a way of asking: If I get one final line, what do I want it to be?

I have no idea what I’d yell into the void.

Don’t forget me ?

Take care of my dog ?

I love you all ?

I’m sorry ?

I forgive you ?

Do you have ideas? I’d love to know.

Love and peace,

PS: If you liked this post, I’d be most grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

I ask because I have definitely had this experience. I’ve definitely found myself easily revealing extremely personal details to, in the case of the bartender, a total stranger. In the case of my hairdresser, someone who I never see outside of our bi-monthly appointments.

Our tendency to reveal ultra personal details in these settings is so commonplace, it’s practically a trope. People just tend to confess more easily to someone they’ll never see again.

Why is that?

I think there are some easy to understand explanations, including:

• Anonymity can create honesty.

• There’s no long-term consequence.

• We can confess without accountability

• A stranger has no fixed idea or expectation of us.

• Interactions can exist outside ordinary social structures.

I’ve had this experience on the very heavy-duty topic of death.

In the years I was working on my book on the subject and since it’s release, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in topic of death. More times than I can count, I’ll find myself in an intimate conversations with a complete stranger. I might be working on my laptop at a coffee house or waiting in a long line or reading a book about death at the park and if the conversation happens to turn to the What do you do question, we are off and running.

With these relative strangers, the speed at which conversations become real once death enters the room is mind boggling. Once death makes an entrance, there’s no space for chit chat. Small talk suddenly feels absurd.

I know that this phenomenon is not confined to my topic of interest. People reveal all sorts of things to strangers…affairs, illnesses, crimes, you name it, all manner of things they haven’t talked about with their spouses or best friends.

But I’m curious here about how the topic of mortality tends to collapse social norms.

I have some theories:

• Talking about death seems to immediately bypass the usual personality branding i.e. things like “the career self” or “the dating self” or “funny self”or “competent self.”

• The phenomenon where near-disasters create instant emotional closeness:
  turbulence, medical scares, blackouts, pandemics—and tell me one thing that’s more like a “near-disaster” than one’s death.

• It can be embarrassing to admit, as I came to reveal, that my terror lies in being annihilated, of disappearing into the void.

• There’s really no winning when it comes to death which might just eliminate the competitive aspect that lies under the surface in conversations about so many subjects.

• The topic of death might just make fellow compatriots of people who have zero else in common. We’re all gonna die, right? And precious few of us feel the way Timothy Leary did when he was approaching his own death.

One last musing: It may be that there’s something oddly comforting about being emotionally honest about this most profound subject in a fundamentally casual place. Like your fear can coexist with neon beer signs and somebody dropping a tray of mozzarella sticks down in front of you.

That contrast can make the very, extremely, mind-boggling truth that YOU. ARE. GOING. TO. DIE feel just a tad more survivable.

Love and peace,

PS: If you liked this post, I’d be most grateful for a ❤️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

I just watched The HBO documentary The Dark Wizard which…SPOILER ALERT….details the deaths of Dean Potter and Graham Hunt during a proximity wingsuit flight from Yosemite’s Taft Point through a narrow gap known as “The Notch.” If you don’t know what wingsuit flying is, take a look at this video and let me know how long it takes you to say, “OH, HELL NO!

Dean Potter (1972–2015), who made his name as a free-solo rock climber, seems to have struggled with severe, maybe undiagnosed mental health issues, which he termed his "darkness" or "demons". Maybe his high-stakes free soloing and BASE jumping were driven by these intense inner struggles; maybe he used these endeavors as a way to find temporary relief and meaning.

If you watch the documentary I’d love to know if you see any glimmer of fear on his face when he’s doing things like this…

or this….

Because I looked…closely…and I didn’t. I didn’t see the slightest whisper of anything that would be in the fear column.

Let me say here that it is wrong, wrong, WRONG for a therapist to diagnose someone they’ve never met. Totally unethical, albeit very tempting. So, just between you and me, when I watched this series, I was practically screaming at the TV: THAT IS SOME MASSIVE COUNTER-PHOBIC REACTION, MAN!!!!

A counterphobic reaction—a concept from psychoanalysis, especially Sigmund Freud–adjacent—is when someone moves toward what scares them instead of away from it. It masquerades as courage but it’s more like a psychological maneuver to get control over fear by confronting, mocking, or mastering it.

Some things that look like bravery but might actually be something else, something else that’s actually the opposite of bravery.

I was thinking about the different ways people experience and express fear as I watched Dean Potter do things that, to me, seem utterly terrifying. And I was —-you will not be surprised—-thinking about fear of death i.e my fear of death i.e. what I spent years exploring and writing about in my book.

Here’s where I landed. Even though as I watched The Dark Wizard I was thinking, boy, Dean Potter and I are not even the same species, I now think, maybe not. Maybe he and I are actually kindred spirits. Maybe even though outwardly we vary wildly, perhaps inwardly we echo one another. Of course, who knows what was in Potter’s heart…I’m just guessing here.

Regardless: fear is fear no matter the outfit it’s wearing.

Love and peace,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be most grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

I was guest on a podcast the other day and the host asked me about the use of humor in my new book….which is about DEATH, btw. I was thrilled to get that question and also to have this review in Kirkus call my book “…frequently and effortlessly hilarious.”

I can die now.

Not really, duh! But if Kirkus had asked me what I’d most love to hear, it would be that.

DARK HUMOR IS MY JAM

I may be more prey to this myself than I am admitting or aware but I see many clients who use humor as a deflection and a defense. They might make a joke to distance themselves from a strong feeling that they are not ready to deal with.

Nothing against defenses. We all need our defenses after all. They are there to protect us. Deconstructing defenses takes time and care. We are ready when we are ready and it is often my job as a therapist to help ease someone into that place of readiness. It can be frickin’ scary, that stuff we’ve repressed.

So yes, humor—our/my use of humor—is sometimes maybe/probably a defense that a good therapist could help us/me dismantle.

ON THE OTHER HAND

There are, IMHO, highly useful and adaptive uses of humor.

For example:

• Good humor doesn’t hide the truth—it changes the lighting.

• Humor doesn’t make something less real, it can just make it more livable.

• Humor doesn’t avoid the weight of a topic, it just may carry it differently.

Humor doesn’t eliminate discomfort—it repackages it into something you can handle in real time.

Of course there’s the issue of timing. And this is especially true when it comes to humor about DEATH.

Your first instinct might be NO WAY! But it depends, right? Sometimes/often the person who makes the joke is the grieving one who most needs permission to move forward. Maybe they’re not trying to trivialize anything but to shift the atmosphere just enough to function.

It’s not really about being funny. It’s more about:

• reintroducing normalcy

• signaling that conversation can continue

• making the moment slightly survivable

And sometimes something is just flat out funny!

And one final thought: As jokes go, doesn’t the cosmic one take the cake?!

Love and peace…and some laughs,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be most grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

For sure, death shows up in some very ordinary and very obvious ways. Things like:

• Going to a funeral

• Visiting someone in the ICU

• Having a hospital stay yourself

• Seeing a dead body

• Reading obituaries

• Visiting or even driving by a cemetery

• Hearing that someone you know has died

• Being involved in an accident

• Getting a bad diagnosis

• Hearing ambulance sirens

• Seeing your aging self looking back at you in the mirror

But death is also doing some background work.

This more subtle awareness of our death leaks into our ordinary lives in quiet, kind of undeniable ways. Things like:

• The urge to mark time
  You notice birthdays, anniversaries, even seasons with a faint sense of accounting—another year gone.

• Overvaluing or undervaluing moments
  Sometimes you cling—taking too many photos, trying to “capture” things. Other times you do the opposite: this won’t matter in the long run, so you detach.

• Sudden impatience
  Tolerance drops for things that feel trivial—pointless meetings, shallow conversations, waiting in long lines. This can be a little inner voice reminding you that time is a infinite resource.

• The pull toward meaning
  Once again, Ernest Becker and his “immortality projects.” You want to feel like you matter. Because is you matter…..well, you can fill in the irrational blank there.

• Rituals and routines
  Daily habits—morning coffee, exercise, journaling—can function as small stabilizers against the larger instability of what can be a terrifying background awareness.

• Aversion to stillness
  We can use silence or idleness to avoid scary, uncomfortable, feelings because it’s in the empty spaces when bigger thoughts tend to surface.

• Sentimentality about the ordinary
  If you notice an increase in sentimentality when you experience the morning light that hits your bedroom or the sound of you daughter’s laugh or the spring flowers blooming, it may be because part of you knows these aren’t permanent.

• Humor about death
  If you find yourself making more comments or jokes like “famous last words” or “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” that could be a way of approaching the topic sideways, keeping it close but not too close.

• Care for the body (or neglect of it)
  Some people double down on health—diet, exercise, longevity hacks. Some of us throw up our hands—because what’s the point? Both can stem from the same creeping awareness.

• The need to be remembered—or to disappear
  You might feel a pull to leave something behind (writing, art, impact), or the opposite—a desire to be free from legacy altogether. Both a reaction to the same inevitability.

• Low-level background anxiety
  Not explicit thoughts about dying, but a kind of free-floating icky unease about, you know…..

None of these things scream “fear of death,” and still. Wondering what else you think might be on this list.

Love and peace, y’all,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be so very grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

If you are not me, maybe your life feels complete.

If you are not me, maybe you say things like:

• Everything ends. That’s the deal.

• Everybody dies. Why should I be different than any other living thing?

• I’m curious about what it’s like.

• I’ve had a good run.

• It’s not up to me.

• It’s the fact that we die that makes life precious.

Here’s my question though:

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INTELLECTUAL ACCEPTANCE and EMBODIED ACCEPTANCE?

I’m going to own my belief/assumption here. If you disagree, I’d love to hear, but I believe there is often/usually/always (?) a split between how you might theoretically feel about your death and way you might feel if you get a terminal diagnosis.

A split between “I understand death” and “I actually feel it.”

• Intellectual Acceptance i.e. “Of course I’m going to die. Everyone does.

• Embodied Reality i.e. what happens when you get that phone call, that diagnosis.

I wonder if the “at peace with death” stance is sometimes a kind of posturing….and I do not mean that as a slam. After all, as Ernest Becker posits, we build entire identities to avoid feeling what we claim to accept. I just might be the poster child for mortality fear so any attempts at trying to avoid that particular inevitability is not one whit surprising to me.

It’s just that DISTANCE CREATES COURAGE. I would never bungee jump…not in a zillion years and not for Bezos-level money. BUT….if someone said I’d have to bungee jump in two years or something really bad would happen to my dog, I’d be less scared now than I would be when they were strapping that harness on.

It’s easy…or should I say easier…be equanimous about your mortality when the reality of it is abstract. And, IMHO, we kind of need to keep it abstract because, come on. Sometimes denial is uber-helpful if not necessary.

But there are UNTIL moments. Most people/many people/some people can be somewhere in the unruffled column until:

• it’s their name on the test results

• their doctor appears with soft eyes and a quiet voice

• they see a semi-truck barreling toward them in the wrong lane

• they feel their heart do something really weird

• their much younger friend develops a weird disease and dies months later

What I’m saying is that the body does not always agree with the mind. Our bodies are not philosophers. Even if someone believes they’ve accepted death, when confronted with the up-close possibility, the body alarm system can get activated which might include things like:

• increased heart rate

• shallow, rapid breathing

• elevated blood pressure

• muscle tension

• release of cortisol

• and on and on and on

My daughter teaches a methodology that helps people learn to return their nervous systems to the parasympathetic state….a counter-balance to the fight-or-flight sympathetic system. From her I have learned about the very many not-so-great things that can occur when we are in a chronically activated state. So OF COURSE it makes sense that we need to do something with what can be an utterly terrifying notion. It seems that it is necessary to our physical and emotional health that we are not constantly 100% of the time thinking I AM GOING TO DIE! I AM GOING TO DIE! I AM GOING TO DIE!

One final thing. I doubt there is a finish line about this whole thing where you can spike the ball and do the victory dance. Acceptance of one’s mortality is more likely to fluctuate. Acceptance probably recedes under pressure. Equanimity is a place to visit, not a destination.

Where are you mortals on this continuum?

Love and peace,

PS: If you liked this post, I’d be so grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

I devoured this text when I was writing my own book—reading and furiously thinking, yup, yup, definitely.

One of Becker’s most cogent contentions is that in our efforts to (mostly unconsciously) deny that we will die we engage in what he calls immortality projects.

These “projects” as Becker sees them fall in to different categories:

• Cultural/symbolic immortality: This is about when we attach ourselves to something bigger that will outlast us…things like: religion, art, science, moral or national causes…This can include things like:

  -Writing a book (😱)

  -Starting a company

  -Being a justice warrior

MY IMPACT LIVES ON

• Biological immortality: you know, like:

  -Having kids!

I MIGHT DIE BUT SOME OF ME CONTINUES

• A personal hero identity: thinking of oneself as successful, admired, important, etc.

I HAVE EARNED THE RIGHT TO EXIST (FOREVER)

No matter the underlying mechanisms that support our denial, we can just go on about our quotidian lives somehow convincing ourselves—albeit not in our rational minds—but convince ourselves nonetheless, that WE WILL LVE FOREVER.

OF COURSE, no one wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I will deny my mortality.”

BUT

We behave, almost constantly, as if time is not only abundant, but endless. We gently buffer ourselves from the fact that our time is finite. We wait patiently to become better versions of ourselves; to read the articles and books we mean to; to organize our closets; to circle back to that thing, plan to do that important thing later; to write that book we’ve always wanted to write. We buy vitamins in bulk and make elaborate plans for our retirement.

It might be worth asking, every now and then:

WHAT AM I ASSUMING I HAVE TIME FOR LATER?

Love and peace…and a little awareness of finitude,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be most grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

Several years ago I went to a reading with my dear, late friend, Robert. The book was a memoir in which this very lucky author told the story of her idyllic childhood: summers in a sprawling house on the coast of Maine with a jillion cousins; lessons in horseback riding and ballet and piano; winter vacations skiing in Vale; four doting and loving grandparents who lived four blocks away.

I don’t remember the name of the book or the author. But I do remember how it landed on both Robert and me.

No offense, person whose name I can’t remember. But Robert and I could not figure out why this book was written. Maybe the author wanted to memorialize her beautiful childhood. Okay. Maybe it was to connect with readers who were similarly fortunate. Or maybe it was to let all the rest of us know what we’d missed. Whatever the intent, I was bo-red!

My late writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer, used to tell us that all writing should a) make us laugh, b) break our hearts, and 3) teach us something.

For me, any piece of literature that does not break my heart is of just about zero interest to me.

Which brings me to this bold contention: all great literature is—either directly or indirectly—about death.

There are the obvious examples. Books like The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or The Road, or Never Let Me Go, or As I Lay Dying, or The Bell Jar, or Everyman, or Lincoln in the Bardo.

Or, or, or……..

Pretty obvious..if you were reading one of the novels listed above in your book group, I’m betting that everyone would agree that the theme of these books is death. Pretty obvious.

But what about books like:

• Never Let Me Go

• A Little Life

• Station Eleven

• The Great Gatsby

• Mrs. Dalloway

• The Things They Carried

• Tinkers

• White Noise

• The Book Thief

• Train Dreams

Death is for sure a presence in these books—maybe not quite as on-the-nose—but a looming presence at the very least.

Even books like Normal People or Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I realize your book group is not likely to identify these as books about death. BUT……even if these are books that on their face are about miscommunication and relationships and missed chances and the narrowing of options, they are, in large part, about the passing of time.

SIDEBAR: In my book (You’re Going to Die But Not Me), I have a chapter that outlines Ernest Becker’s fascinating theories in his book, The Denial of Death. One of his contentions is that we manage our fear of mortality psychologically by building systems that make us feel less finite….things like romantic partnerships where the unconscious calculus is: If I’m not fully separate, maybe I’m not vulnerable to disappearance.

Even if a book is not directly about death, isn’t a piece of literature that is, in large part, about the passing of time really about death?

Most books are marketed as being about something else. Love, frequently. Or family, or a woman staring out a window reconsidering her life choices. But if you wait long enough, it becomes clear that every story is operating under the same constraint: someone is going to die. Maybe not on the page, maybe not dramatically, but inevitably.

It might be that for many contemporary writers, death is not explicitly on the page but it is often the deadline every character is quietly moving toward. It’s what gives even the smallest decisions their weight, their urgency, and their faint air of desperation. Without it, a novel might just be a very long to-do list with no reason to finish.

Because what is the point of literature, anyway?

• to hold on to what might disappear

• to reveal what matters

• to make sense of our lives

• to practice dying before dying

• to help us imagine the unimaginable

• to supply language for the unspeakable

• and so many other things

My favorite writer is W.G. Sebald.

In Sebald’s work, death isn’t an event or even a theme. It is the atmosphere. If Tolstoy shows us death arriving, Sebald shows us what it looks like after it has already passed through, quietly rearranging everything. It is the aftermath and the shadow over everything.

In Austerlitz, the Holocaust is barely…if ever…addressed directly but it saturates every page. In The Rings of Saturn, everything is infused with what has already been lost. The Emigrants reveals how our memories of others show us how completely they can disappear.

Sebald uncovers all the accumulated death we haven’t finished processing.

People die. BIG DUH! Writing about that can be obvious and verge on banal. But when I read Sebald, I am more unsettled—-and I mean that as a compliment. There is something about his style—-melancholic and meditative and oblique—-that hits me in the deepest way.

I recently had a conversation with my grandson about the limits of language. I do think that experiences at the extremes are beyond language. Words can be so inadequate and can cheapen the most horrific and the most sublime experiences. I don’t know how he does it and I bow down: Sebald can somehow meditate on these most weighty issues in a way that is….hmmm, whatever the opposite of heavy-handed is.

But enough fan-girling and back to my contention that all great literature is about death. Literature tries to show what a life amounts to, and death is the point where ordinary busyness stops and the deepest questions become unavoidable: What mattered? What was wasted? What survives? A major critical tradition treats mortality as central because writing imposes structure on life and death, giving them meaning rather than leaving them as random events.

You can argue that literature is not just about death in the narrow sense of bodies dying, but about mortality: fragility, loss, time, finitude, and the fear that life may not be enough. On that view, even novels or poems that seem “about something else” are often really circling the fact that human beings live under the shadow of death.

My belief is that—some how or other—ALL great literature is about death.

🤷🤷🤷🤷 But maybe that’s just me 🤷🤷🤷🤷

Wanna debate?

Love and Peace,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be most grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

Would you want to know when you are going to die? I mean like which year, which day?

Maybe one answer to that question is: It Depends.

If I try and throw myself back into my 30-year old mind and were I to find out in some magical way that I would die in 50 years, sure, I think yes, I would want to know. I would most likely/maybe/hopefully structure my life in a way with that end date in mind.

I guess. Though when I was 30, planning for 50 years in the future would feel pretty much like it might as well be 500 years.

On the other hand….

That’s a world of difference from sitting across from a sober-faced physician telling you you might have maybe six months—-if you’re lucky.

So, it depends

Hearing or believing that I will die in some number of decades is abstract, verging on meaningless. Planning for something that’s 50 years in the future has no urgency, right? Two years, six months? That’s a whole other kettle of fish.

It’s probably human nature to make some vague guesstimates, especially if you are under the assumption that your death is far in the future. Like guessing you’d likely die in 50 years if you’re 30—(even though we all know how irrational that might be)—-seems pretty low stakes.

But if you’re 40 and you are told (not sure how that would happen but just for argument’s sake) that you would die in 10 years, that could be life-altering.

Six months! That’s another story all-together. Depending on who you are that could bring everything into the sharpest relief in the most clarifying way AND/OR be unbearable and paralyzing.

I think we kind of live with “fuzzy death dates” and there are things that might even make your guesses less random, things like:

• actuarial tables

• family history

• risk factors

• lifestyle choices

Yeah, but there is always that fickle finger of fate.

PROS AND CONS

On the PRO side of knowing when you will die, the urgency might encourage you to:

• walk the camino de santiago trail like you’ve thought about for forever but keep putting off

• quit that soul-sucking job and not worry about health insurance

• move to Costa Rica, open a surf shop and never bother with sunscreen

• leave that partner you’ve been just tolerating

You might say everything you want to say, never do anything you don’t want to do, and leave any event when you damn well please.

You might ditch your computer and smart phone and order lobster for breakfast.

On CON side of knowing when you will die, you might:

• start measuring everything in your life where all good moments comes with a subtitle: only 9 more of these left.

• experience every holiday and special event as the last one…even ordinary things, like this might be my last Thursday.

• become obsessive, fatalistic, weirdly reckless or weirdly frozen

• be treated by others like you’re fragile or already gone

• not transform at all i.e still procrastinate, still avoid hard conversations, still waste time scrolling IG for dog videos.

Me? I think not. Of course, I’m not 30…or 40…or 50….or 60…or…SIGH. So, I know it’s out there, maybe not at my fingertips but sure could be arm’s length.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Love and peace,

PS: If you enjoyed this piece, I’d be so grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

It’s about the rest of us.

I had conversations with so many people on the topic of death as I was writing my book. Gotta say, it has been head-smackingly mysterious to me when I hear people (outside the category of folks in the above circumstances) say things like:

• I’ve lived. I participated. That’s enough.

• I don’t have to panic about what I can’t prevent.

• Death is natural.

• All things are impermanent.

• I’m not afraid of being dead; I’m afraid of the dying part.

• When it’s time, it’s time.

Well, OF COURSE.

BUT…

Is Acceptance of Death the Same as Giving Up?

What about the raging against the dying of the light?

There’s a continuum, isn’t there? Full-on defiance all the way to (if you can believe it) excitement.

At the defiance end, there is the story of how Susan Sontag approached her death. I explored this in a chapter of my book, frankly because it served as a cautionary tale to me. Her son, David Rieff, chronicled her..IMHO…delusional battle in a memoir called Swimming in a Sea of Death: A son’s memoir. This was his attempt to understand his mother’s desperate struggle against the inevitable.

I guess some people could call her struggle heroic but as I was reading accounts of her approach to her very, VERY obvious impending death, I found it…sorry Susan…pathetic.

On the other end of the continuum are people like Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, both of whom I also wrote about in my book.

When Ram Dass was close to death he was asked when he knew he was ready to die. He said, “When I arrived at my soul. Soul doesn’t have fear of dying. Ego has a very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite.”

And Timothy Leary is said to have expressed excitement about his impending death, calling it his “…next great adventure.”

It seems to me that this continuum lies on the fault line between resilience culture and existential honesty.

Susan Sontag ⬅️—————————————————————————-➡️ Ram Dass

No offense to Ram Dass because, well, he’s Ram Dass. But once a psychologist, always a psychologist. When I hear someone say they have no fear of death—- i.e. folks at the far right end of that continuum—-I tend to chalk that up to what we in the trade might call a counter-phobic response. A counter-phobic response is a psychological reaction in which someone moves toward what frightens them rather than away from it.

Instead of avoiding the feared object or situation (a phobic response), the person does the opposite: they approach it, challenge it, mock it, or try to dominate it. Like that guy who free-soloed the 1,667-foot (508-meter) Taipei 101 in Taiwan.

It’s not the absence of fear. It’s fear flipped outward.

No way will I get anywhere within spitting distance of Dass and Leary—-even if I had three more decades which, of course, I do not.

BUT, I am determined to move as far away as I can from Sontag’s end of the whole thing. Like I said, thanks for the cautionary example, Susan!

Love and peace,

P.S.: If you liked this post, I’d be grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️

Like we are in the grief olympics or something.

Or, “Well, you can always get another ___(dog, cat, hamster, bird, guinea pig, horse.)”

Like we lost a scarf or an earring.

RANKING PAIN IS ABSURD.

My dog, Billy, weighs just 17 pounds but he has rearranged my home. Sure, there is now a dog bowl in the guest bathroom and more toys strewn around than in a overcrowded daycare center and everything has a coat of dog hair….and sometimes if it’s raining really hard, there’s a 18 square inch pad on which he has deposited a poop.

My mantra, though?: animate over inanimate.

What I mean to say here is that Billy has rearranged the emotional and psychological essence of my home.

Pretty sure I am preaching to the choir here.

Our relationship with our pets is qualitatively unique.

One of the unique and challenging things about the relationship is that when we bring a pet into our home and heart, we are entering into a contract with impermanence. We know — abstractly, quietly — that their lifespan runs on a different clock than ours. We are agreeing to outlive them. And yet we sign up anyway.

The relationship is that meaningful.

The grief we feel after losing a pet occupies an awkward tier in the invisible hierarchy of acceptable sorrow. A parent, a spouse, a sibling — these are sanctioned losses. People come with casseroles; gather for memorials. The death of a dog often comes with a gentle smile and the word “just.”

Just a dog.

The word just is a scalpel. It makes me want to slap someone. Just implies that it is scale that determines legitimacy. That a smaller body, a different species, produces a smaller grief.

But grief is not about size or species. GRIEF IS RELATIONAL.

I truly do not think I have ever in my VERY long life been 100% myself—-and I mean 100%…with another human, every day, all day, 24/7. But I am with my dog. I think he may know me better than anyone ever has. He is my silent witness. He knows me in a way that I am:

• Unfiltered

• Undiluted

• Completely unguarded

• Without pretense

• Without polish

There is no judgment. No need to explain. No ledger is kept.

(This post is mostly about dogs and their unique relationship with humans. I also have a cat. I adore my cat. I’ve always had cats. Cats are spectacular. AND, I’m pretty sure my cat is judging me 🤷🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️.)

Dogs—IMHO—know more about truly unconditional love than any human animal every has. Prove me wrong!

And, I will never get tired of the unvarnished, hard-to-contain joy that awaits me whether I’ve gone downstairs to get the mail or returned from a two-week trip.

Plus, is there anything better than the ZOOMIES!!!???

@doguniverse__Compilation of dog zoomies 😂🥰 #dogzoomies #compilationofdogzoomies #dog #cute #funny #creatorsearchinsights

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One of the people who very kindly provided me with a blurb for my latest book (shameless plug: available for pre-order now) was E.B. Bartels who has written a beautiful book herself called Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter.

I was so happy when E.B. agreed to answer a couple of questions for me. Enjoy!

What makes pet grief uniquely intense — or uniquely complicated?

Mourning a pet is considered a type of “disenfranchised grief”––one that isn’t as well-known or as socially acceptable or talked about as much as, say, mourning your parents. (Other examples of disenfranchised grief includes mourning a miscarriage, the loss of a home to a fire, the end of a marriage, or even mourning someone lost to a stigmatized type of death like death by suicide or an overdose.) So it can be hard to navigate grief while you’re also trying to figure out what feels “socially acceptable” when mourning your animal. There’s also the element that pets are our responsibility from the day we get them until they die––they never grow up and move out of the house and go to college––so when a pet does die, the pet’s caretaker can feel like it was their fault, even if it was inevitable. Plus, relationships with pets are very special and different from our relationships with humans––we don’t have the same kind of baggage with our pets that we have with human family members, the love is much more pure, and in some ways then it can be a lot harder when we lose that kind of unconditionally loving relationship. And pets are a huge part of people’s routines, so when a pet dies, suddenly your whole schedule and daily life is upended which can be very disorienting––more so than when an older relative who you only see a couple times of year dies.

Why does the death of a pet often feel disproportionate to outsiders but devastating to the owner?

Because mourning pets is a disenfranchised type of grief, not everyone gets how hard it is to go through. People have told me that one of the biggest challenges they had while mourning a pet is being hit with “it was just a [type of animal]” from people who don’t get what a big deal pet loss is. Often these comments come people who have never had pets, and so they don’t get the special nature of a relationship with an animal because they haven’t experienced it themselves, but also I think in general it is often hard for someone who does not live with you and your animal to know just exactly what your relationship with your pet was like. Often pets don’t leave the home, so outsiders may have no idea how much you rely on your cat or tortoise or even aquarium full of fish for companionship, or interactions can be extremely limited like running into a neighbor while she is walking her dog, so often the love between a human and their pet is a very personal, private thing, which can be difficult to explain to others. But I think now with the rise of people sharing so much about their pets on social media, people outside the home get to know your relationship with your pet much better, and so they can be more understanding when that animal does inevitably die.

Is there something morally destabilizing about choosing the time of death?

I have a whole chapter in my book Good Grief about euthanasia because it’s such a big component of pet death. This is another reason why I think pet death can be harder than a human family member’s death––only in rare circumstances do you have to make a decision about when a human family member should die and even then it’s something like taking a person off of life support, not making an appointment to have your family member killed, which is basically what euthanasia is when you look at it in a really dark way. It’s really hard to make that call, and the vast majority of people I spoke with for my book told me that they realized afterwards that they waited too long and that their pet was suffering while they were having a hard time coming to terms with that decision. But something I learned while researching Good Grief was that most veterinarians really feel strongly that euthanasia is a gift to give an animal who is in pain––you can end their suffering long before it gets to the point where, say, they are slowly suffocating to death because of tumors in their lungs. Euthanasia means literally “a good death” and when you think about it that way, it can be an easier decision to make––it can feel wrong and difficult, like who am I to decide when this animal dies, but if I think about it like a promise I made to my pet, it’s easier for me to do. Your animal has trusted you to make the right decisions for them in terms of food, shelter, activities, healthcare, etc. so this is just one more decision they are trusting you to make for them.

How does pet loss shape a child’s understanding of death?

The death of a pet is often the first major loss a child experiences in their life––alongside the death of a grandparent and/or a major move. No matter the kind of pet, losing an animal––especially an animal that the child was responsible for, a pet that maybe they had campaigned hard to get, that their parents emphasized would be “a lot of responsibility”––can be really upsetting for a child. Still, I don’t think that means parents shouldn’t get their kids pets to have them avoid these sad, hard feelings. Instead, I really think that pet death is a good way to practice grieving and mourning––which is an inevitable part of life––and it can be a way for kids to take ownership over many of the rituals surrounding death. Kids can plan their pet’s funeral, burial, obituary, etc. in a way that they can’t for human family members, and taking charge of these things can often be really helpful for the grieving process. There’s also the fact that psychologists point out that losses and grief compound on each other, so every time you experience a new death in your life, it reminds you of every other death you’ve experienced before, and so in a way, every time you grieve for the rest of your life, it may be reminding you of those very first pet deaths. So making sure to take the time to grieve those pet deaths and grieve them well can pave the way for how a person copes with death and loss for the rest of their life.

Does pet grief reveal something fundamental about how attachment works in general?

Grief and love are two sides of the same coin. You only feel profound grief when a pet dies because you loved that animal so much––same goes for when you lose a human family member. It’s so painful when you lose someone you love, but the amount of pain you feel directly correlates to how much you cared for that person or animal and how special your relationship was. And even though the grief is brutal, at least speaking for myself, it has never been so bad that it has made me never want to experience the joy and companionship of having relationships––with humans and non-humans––again. The love is worth the price you pay when you experience the loss.

THANK YOU SO MUCH, E.B.

Here are E.B.’s substack and her website. I hope you will support her and her beautiful mission.

Love and peace,

….and Billy and Mac

PS: If you liked this post, I’d be grateful for a ♥️, a subscription, and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️…oh, and a picture of your dog!

DIGRESSION: There is a “third state” that some theorize as a liminal space, something that challenges the binary framing of life or death…you know, kind of like that cat.

At one not-hard-to-understand/believe level, this other iteration can be a state of suspended animation like in cryonics and medical hypothermia. Also, it’s not even a little stretch for me to believe that AI advances will be able to construct a me from uploaded images, memories and all the rest of the digital traces I will leave behind. Creepy, IMHO, but that train has likely left the station.

And then there is the multiverse and quantum mechanics. These theories are blindingly, head-spinningly fascinating and mostly opaque to me, even at a PHYSICS 101 level. But I listened to a lecture by Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and one of the take-aways for me was that if the universe is infinite (and I ask you, what’s the alternative?), there is another Liz Scott sitting at another coffee shop on NE Williams Avenue in a town named Portland, in a state called Oregon in a country on planet EARTH who is wearing a black hoodie and jeans BUT has on sneakers instead of boots.

Infinity = everything is possible.

So, that could be another option instead of just alive or dead.

BUT I DIGRESS.

I know that I want to live as long as I can…assuming, OF COURSE:

• that I still have the majority of my marbles

• that I am not racked with pain and extreme, unmanageable disability

• that at least my family and some of my friends are still around

• that I don’t have to deprive myself of pleasures like potato chips and ice cream

Also, yes, I do want to live as long as I can but not like the longevity people (read: fanatics) that I talked about in my post The Losing-est Battle. Too, too far. Too, too annoying. Too, too much deprivation. NOT TO MENTION, spending all that time measuring and weighing and swallowing and analyzing is, to me, a way to fritter away the time we actually do have.

So, let’s play this out. If humans lived to let’s say 150, urgency would become a shadow of itself. No one would rush toward anything; we would take our sweet time. “It’s due Friday” would carry the same emotional weight as “Someday.” We would treat time the way children treat Halloween candy—carelessly, generously, without savoring a single piece.

If my lifespan were 150 years, I’d likely wait until I approached my 130th birthday to take stock. I’d apologize for my embarrassing exploits as a 75 year old. I’d put off and put off and…..

Calendars would stretch and procrastination would stretch with them. We would still believe we had time to become better people. We would still mean to call. And somehow, even with an extra half-century in our pockets, we would be shocked—shocked—when it ran out. “He only made it to 132” would carry the same tone of shock we now reserve for 54. The finish line would move, but the dread would follow it like a loyal dog.

Scarcity is what sharpens things. Don’t you think that the last bite of cake tastes better than the first?

Scarcity doesn’t just create urgency—it creates meaning. A limited edition book or print matters because it’s limited. A human life, too, derives its voltage from the fact that it ends. Remove the limit and you don’t necessarily get more significance; you may just get dilution. The pressure that makes coal into something else disappears.

And the strange thing is, we already live as though we have 150 years. We delay the hard talk. We defer the art. We promise ourselves that depth is coming later, after we’ve handled the emails. Perhaps the real experiment isn’t extending life but noticing how the hint of its brevity is the only thing that keeps us from drifting entirely.

Psychologically, fear doesn’t disappear when the threat recedes; it relocates. We are not afraid of death because it happens at 80 instead of 150. We are afraid because it happens at all. Existential anxiety, like Ernest Becker argued, is baked into consciousness itself. Extend the timeline and you don’t cure the anxiety—you stretch it thinner across more decades. You might even intensify it. A longer life means more attachments, more identities, more to lose.

The fantasy is that more time equals more peace. The psychological reality is that we would still fear loss, still procrastinate meaning, still struggle with purpose. The horizon would recede, but our restless minds would follow it there.

Also, there’s this: I was meeting with a client this morning, a healthy and fit 52 year-old man. He was talking about the challenges with his aging mother and said, “At least I’ve got maybe another 30 more years…” To which I said:

If you’re lucky

Love and peace…and maybe a little scarcity,

PS: If you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful for a ♥️ and a SHARE/RE-STACK ⬇️