Death As A Teacher
How contemplating death awakens us to life. Plus, creative exercises on decay and renewal.
Hi y’all,
Lately I’ve been grateful that I went to funerals as a child.
My mother, who took me to these services, was the sort of person who knew a lot of people—and when you know a lot of people, you also know a lot of people who are going to die. She went to funerals and visitations several times a year. I often came with her.
Looking back on it, having this early familiarity with death, grief, and loss as a child was a blessing.
My mother’s openness toward death came from her upbringing in the rural south and Eastern Kentucky. Her attitude about funerals and memorials—and why it was healthy to take a child to them—had a distinctly Appalachian bent. People in the mountains tend to view funerals as convenient opportunities to hold a party. Funerals are where you catch up on gossip, tell stories, and eat banana pudding. Author Silas House writes that at an Appalachian funeral, half of the room will be weeping while the other half of the room will be howling with laughter. My mother was not raised in a culture that buried emotion.
Since growing up and leaving Kentucky and entering the milieu of a certain kind of white, urban/suburban professional class, I’ve noticed how much discomfort there is around death, grief, and loss in mainstream U.S. culture. Death is worse than a taboo. Death is a faux paus.
It is impolite to die. It is impolite to grieve.
When my mother was dying ten years ago, I had just started a new job at a nonprofit in Chicago. I told my manager that I would need time off to take my mother off life support and plan her funeral. On my first day back at work—which was my first official day on the job—my new coworkers cheerily asked me how I was doing.
There was no sympathy card on my desk. No flowers. No condolences. No looks of understanding.
My manager had not told anyone on staff that my mother had just died.
No one knew.
I don’t totally understand why my manager didn’t tell anyone of my bereavement, but I can tell you this: That man’s mama never took him to a funeral.
We think that exposure to death will traumatize us rather than guide us into a mature view of the world.
I remember the very first memorial service I went to.
I was five. A little boy in my classroom had lost his mother to cancer. The casket was open. I didn’t go close but saw his mother’s profile, the thick dark hair and bangs—which someone mentioned was a wig—and how her hair, its replica, looked identical to my classmate's hair. Thick and dark. He was younger than me, three years old. The age my daughter is now. To my five years, he seemed like a baby. He sat on an adult's lap and cried and cried for his mother.
I did not leave the funeral home with an inordinate fear of losing my parents—children already carry this primal fear with them—only a memory of the sadness I felt for him. Later at school whenever he acted out with a tantrum, or whenever I felt annoyed with him, something in my young brain clicked into a more sympathetic, more patient view. He wanted his mother.
Going to funerals as a child made me aware that everyone dies. Everyone experiences loss. My friends lose their parents—not just orphans in fairy tales. Part of being human is to ache for another human’s sadness and loss alongside them. That itself is a form of love. The denial of death weakens our capacity to love others well.
The DSMV—the diagnostic manual used to treat mental illness—classifies thoughts of death as symptoms of mental illness. I mean, sure, one can certainly become fixated on death, but its regular contemplation encourages us to face the basic existential challenge of being human and mortal.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the contemplation of death is often the first thing one does before formal sitting meditation. Recognizing death and impermanence has the regenerative effect of directing our attention towards the preciousness of human life.
To acknowledge death, to accept it, is also to die a little within that moment. To let go. The recognition of death acts like a bracing, astringent medicine. It tones the mind and our capacity to see things as they are. Or, as philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber writes, “Learning to die means seeing reality without pushing it into some pleasant direction. That alone is what it means to really see.”
In a culture that is determined to deny death, that would prefer death to be kept hidden and taboo, and outside the realm of polite society, it feels especially important to learn how to die. When we suppress death we rob ourselves of life.
When we recognize that death is always with us, we change the way we want to live and what we want to live for.
And that’s why I’m offering a list of creative exercises on the contemplation of death. They can be used as inspiration, journaling exercises, and writing prompts for poetry, essays, and fiction. October feels like a good month to offer these. We’re approaching the holidays of Samhain, día de los muertos, and All Saints’ Day—all of which celebrate and honor death.
It’s my sincere hope that these exercises lead you to a renewed awareness of life and how precious yours is.
Paid subscribers are welcome to leave the first 200-300 words of their exercise in the comments or direct message me. I will respond with feedback that will include an observation about the strengths of your work, along with two reflective and/or generative questions to help you develop your piece.
Moving forward, I will offer creativity and writing exercises each month and respond to the work of paid subscribers. You can read about my credentials as a creative writing teacher here.
Creative Exercises On Decay and Renewal
Write an obituary for yourself, but one that does not directly mention or name your family members or your profession. What did you give while you were alive? What did you receive? You can start with the sentences,“In her life, she gave….” and “In her life, she received…” and use that as a refrain.
Go smell something that is in the process of decay: trash, compost, rotting leaves. Put on a timer for twelve minutes. Don’t hold your nose. Write a poem praising the god or goddess of death in a tradition that is familiar to you.
In 2014, the people in Iceland held a funeral for a glacier named Okjokull. What’s an environment from your childhood that has been destroyed or lost? It doesn’t have to feel as a significant as a glacier. It could be a meadow where you played as a child, filled with groundhog dens, where a housing development now stands. Give that place a name. (Like “The Groundhog Meadow.”) After you’ve named the lost place, scroll down to the bottom of this page to read the traditional Irish Gaelic song, “Lament for Riley,” translated by poets Tony Hoagland and mythologist Martin Shaw. Write a lament for the place you lost and mourn.
Find a picture of an ancestor you do not like or understand. Write a letter to them exploring why you do not like them or understand them. See what happens if you try to forgive them.
Write a description of this tree in your own voice using vivid sensory details. (Or better yet, go outside, take a walk, and find a tree that interests you.) When you are done, go to this page where you will be given the second part of the writing prompt. Don’t look at the page before you’re done with the first part of the prompt.
Go to a forest or wooded area. Look for what’s rotting or decaying. Find at least five things that are in the decomposition process. Spend some time smelling and touching the decaying dirt and leaves. Collect leaves and dirt and put them into a bag, and place them in your garden or a piece of land that has been overly developed. First consider: What’s decaying in your life that you are afraid of losing? What is it in your life that needs to decay to help another part of your life grow? Then write a prayer for the renewal of decay.
Write about why open casket funerals weird you out. If they don’t weird you out, write about why you think that is.
Watch this movie, Tukdam, a documentary about how some yogin in Tibet clinically die without decomposing for several days. Talk to someone you love about what you make of it. Write down your thoughts and your questions.
Simone de Beauvoir never wanted to live with her lover, Jean Paul Sartre, but she is buried next to him. Write about that.
Read “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” by Karen Russell, a story where the former presidents of the United States have been reborn as horses. Write an alternative ending to this story.
Saeed Jones has an excellent prompt on writing an essay that you know will fail. He writes, for example, “In this essay I will end grief.” Attempt to write an essay that will end death.
Writer Suleika Jaouad says: Rather than living every day as if it’s my last, I’ve shifted to a gentler approach of living every day as if it’s my first. I want to wake up and meet the day with the wonder of a newborn, to cultivate childlike qualities like curiosity and play. (You can find the original quote in Andrea Gibson’s beautiful piece about their bucket list.) What do you think is the difference between living each day as your first, and living each day as your last?
What is a song you want played at your funeral? Make a playlist. (Mine includes “Do You Realize?” by the Flaming Lips, or possibly this cover by Willie Nelson.)
Why do so many movies about animals have the animal die at the end? Write about that.
If you have a close family member who has died, collect all of the objects in your house that they gave to you. Take a photo of each one. Write a paragraph about each object and its relationship to both you and your deceased family member. Then write about how all the objects feel connected.
Go to the grave of a loved one or a place you know they would like. Read them their favorite poem, or sing them their favorite song, or say their favorite prayer. What was that experience like?
Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote about a dream where he attended his own funeral as a ghost. When his friends began to leave the funeral to go to the party afterward, they told him, “You’re the only one who can’t go.” Write a story about a ghost who shows up for a party and knows they shouldn’t be there. Use one of your former workplaces as the setting.
If you have ever sat with a loved one in the hospital as they have died, what were the personal belongings that both they and you kept in the room? Write about what you carried away with you on the day your loved one died.
Make an altar to a spiritual ancestor who feels like kin but is not blood relative. What’s that feel like?
Write a list of ten things that have ended in your life. Then write a corresponding list of ten things that grew or changed in their absence. Pick one, and write a thank-you letter to the thing that ended.
At the end of their marriage, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in two separate houses connected by a bridge. However, Diego wished that his ashes be mixed with Frida’s and kept at the Anahuacali Museum. Due to a disagreement with his last wife, that never happened. Write about that.
Read
essay on how she wrote a novel as a series of obituaries, and then go buy her book, Remember You Will Die. Then write a story in the form of an obituary.Read this poem, “Married,” by Jack Gilbert:
I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment crying hard, searching for my wife's hair. For two months got them from the drain, the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator and off the clothes in the closet. But after other Japanese women came there was no way to be sure which were hers and I stopped. A year later, repotting Michiko's avocado, I find this long black hair tangled in the dirt.
After you read the poem, write a list of the surprising things your loved one left behind in your home. Write a poem about one of those things.
Death is a part of life. Make it a part of your daily feed.
