What Thinking About Death Does for the Living

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

In a 1996 book, the philosopher Herbert Fingarette argued that fearing one’s own death was irrational. When you die, “there is nothing,” he wrote. Why should we fear death if we won’t even be around to experience it?

But then the philosopher got closer to the onset of his own “nothing.” In 2020, The Atlantic filmed a short documentary with the 97-year-old Fingarette. As our former film curator Emily Buder wrote, “Death began to frighten him, and he couldn’t think himself out of it.”

Is it worth it to try to think ourselves out of death? This question, of course, is so complicated that centuries of philosophy, psychology, and plain old human experience have not been able to answer it. What we do know is that thinking about one’s own death can have life-altering effects, both positive and negative. The idea of death can open up a person to more intimacy, or it can lead to emotional paralysis. In a 2015 article, my colleague Julie Beck offered some guidance for navigating these possibilities. “Maybe the key, then, is being deliberate,” she writes. “Not letting thoughts of death sneak up on you, but actively engaging with them, even if it’s hard.”

Julie ends her article with a quote from E. M. Forster: “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” “I don’t know if there’s really any salvation, but if we accept death, maybe we can just live,” she writes. Today’s reading list explores the idea of death—how to begin to accept it, and how to use it to feel more alive.

On Death, in Life

What Good Is Thinking About Death?

By Julie Beck

We’re all going to die, and we all know it. This can be both a burden and a blessing. (From 2015)

How to Die

By Jordan Michael Smith

As a psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom has helped others grapple with their mortality. Now he is preparing for his own end. (From 2017)

What It’s Like to Learn You’re Going to Die

By Jennie Dear

Palliative-care doctors explain the “existential slap” that many people face at the end. (From 2017)

Still Curious?

Other Diversions

P.S.

I’ll leave you with one charming moment from Julie’s feature. She notes that the coping mechanisms of adults and young children can look quite similar, citing the story of 5-year-old Richard from a 2015 book by two psychologists on the role of death in life:

“He swam up and down in his bath [and] he played with the possibility of never dying: ‘I don’t want to be dead, ever; I don’t want to die.’ … After his mother told 5-year-old Richard that he wouldn’t die for a long time, the little boy smiled and said, ‘That’s all right. I’ve been worried, and now I can get happy.’ Then he said he would like to dream about ‘going shopping and buying things.’”

— Isabel