We don't talk about death enough. Not in therapy, not in community, and often not in the soft corners of our private lives. We tend to approach it only when forced, in hospice rooms, hospital hallways, or the sudden phone call that splits the day in half. Until then, we do our best to keep it at a distance, as though death belongs to some later chapter of our lives.
But death isn't simply an event waiting for us at the end. It's part of the condition of being alive.
It is with us constantly, whether or not we're paying attention. We treat death like a far-off shoreline, something we'll eventually reach, but in many ways we're already knee-deep in the waves.
I've been thinking about what it might mean to develop a more ordinary relationship with mortality. Not one organized entirely around fear, nor one that insists we must find beauty or meaning in every loss. I'm interested in what happens when we allow death to become part of our conversations about living, rather than something we discuss only when there is no longer a way to avoid it.
So much of our culture encourages us to imagine life as a continuous process of accumulation. We build careers, relationships, identities, homes, and plans for the future. We measure progress through what we've gained, accomplished, or managed to preserve. There's relatively little room in that story for endings, particularly the ones we didn't choose.
And yet, so much of being alive involves learning to live with what doesn't last.
Relationships change. Bodies age. People we love die. The futures we once imagined become impossible or lose their appeal. We outgrow certain versions of ourselves, sometimes willingly and sometimes through circumstances we would never have chosen.
I think grief belongs in this conversation, although I don't believe grief and death are interchangeable.
Death is a reality of living bodies, the ending of a life. Grief is one of the ways we respond to loss, a process that can unfold emotionally, physically, relationally, and across time. Death may be final, but our relationships with those who have died rarely end so neatly. They continue through memory, ritual, longing, anger, tenderness, and the ordinary moments when we find ourselves reaching for someone who is no longer there.
And grief doesn't wait for death.
We grieve relationships that have ended, communities we've lost, and places we can no longer return to. We grieve the safety we once believed in, the childhoods we didn't have, and the futures we imagined but won't live. Sometimes we grieve versions of ourselves that we worked very hard to become, only to discover that we can no longer inhabit them.
There are losses we recognize immediately and others that take years to understand.
I've come to think of grief as something woven into the experience of change. Not every transition is a tragedy, and not every ending needs to be mourned, but even the changes we welcome can carry a sense of loss. Becoming someone new often means leaving something familiar behind.
I wonder if part of our discomfort with death comes from how little practice we have acknowledging these smaller endings.
We tend to associate death work with hospice, funerals, and the final stages of life. These are important places where people encounter mortality, but I think our relationship with death begins long before we find ourselves in those rooms.
It begins in conversations about what matters to us and how we want to spend our time. It appears when we recognize that a relationship has changed, when we acknowledge the limits of our bodies, or when we realize that the life we've worked so hard to build no longer feels like one we want to inhabit.
Sometimes it means allowing a long-held identity to shift. Sometimes it means stepping away from work that has consumed too much of our lives, or admitting that something we once wanted no longer belongs to us.
I don't mean to suggest that every ending is a kind of death, or that leaving a job is equivalent to losing someone we love. These experiences carry different meanings and consequences. But I do think they ask us to develop some capacity for uncertainty, for releasing what we cannot preserve, and for continuing to live when something familiar has come to an end.
This is part of what draws me toward death work. I'm interested in how we might become more willing to speak about endings before they arrive, and how doing so might change our relationships with ourselves and one another.
There is a cultural dimension to this discomfort that I don't want to overlook.
We live within systems that place enormous value on productivity, independence, youth, and the appearance of control. Aging is treated as something to resist. Dependence is often framed as failure. Grief is given an astonishingly small amount of time before we're expected to return to work and resume our usual responsibilities.
Even dying can become something we're encouraged to manage efficiently, privately, and with as little disruption to ordinary life as possible.
These expectations are not separate from larger histories of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and the unequal distribution of care. Whose deaths are publicly mourned? Whose grief is recognized? Who has the resources to care for someone who is dying, or the freedom to step away from work when someone they love has died?
Our relationships with death are shaped by these questions, whether or not we name them.
I think there's something politically important about making more room for mortality in everyday life, not because talking about death automatically makes us resistant to oppressive systems, but because it asks us to reconsider some of the assumptions through which we've been taught to organize our lives.
If our time is limited, what does it mean to spend so much of it exhausted? What are we postponing until some imagined future when we've finally accomplished enough? What might we want to preserve, and what are we holding onto simply because we've been taught that letting go means failure?
I don't think mortality gives us easy answers. Knowing that we're going to die doesn't necessarily make us more courageous or less concerned with achievement. It can just as easily make us anxious, protective, or desperate to maintain some sense of control.
But perhaps it offers us an opportunity to ask different questions.
As a therapist, I'm also interested in how these experiences live in the body. Grief can be difficult to articulate, particularly when language feels inadequate to the scale of what we've lost. We may notice it in our breathing, our appetite, our sleep, or the heaviness that settles into our limbs. Sometimes it arrives as a tightening in the throat or an ache in the chest. Other times it feels like numbness, agitation, or an unfamiliar distance from the world around us.
Our bodies participate in grief, even when we cannot explain what we're feeling.
And our awareness of mortality can be bodily, too. An illness, an injury, the death of someone close to us, or simply noticing the changes that come with age can alter our relationship with the bodies we inhabit. We become aware, sometimes quite suddenly, of their vulnerability.
I don't think somatic awareness removes the fear of death, nor should it have to. But attending to our bodily experiences can offer another way of being with the uncertainty that mortality introduces. Rather than immediately trying to resolve or escape what we feel, we might become curious about it.
What happens in us when we talk about dying? What sensations arise when we imagine losing someone we love, or consider the possibility of our own absence? Where do we notice resistance, tenderness, fear, or even relief?
These aren't questions that need to be answered all at once. For some people, they may feel too overwhelming to approach directly, and that's worth honoring. We each have different histories with death, different experiences of loss, and different capacities for sitting with what remains unknown.
I am not particularly interested in telling people they should embrace death. I don't think we need to become comfortable with mortality in order to live meaningful lives.
But I do wonder what becomes possible when we stop treating death as a conversation reserved for crisis.
What would it mean to talk with the people we love about how we want to be cared for when we're ill? To speak openly about our fears of aging, dependence, or dying? To make room for grief without immediately trying to reassure someone that everything will be okay?
And what might change if we allowed ourselves to recognize the endings already taking place in our lives, without insisting that each one must become an opportunity for growth?
Sometimes loss changes us in ways we come to appreciate. Sometimes it leaves us with questions we'll never resolve. Sometimes it is simply painful, and no amount of meaning-making can make it otherwise.
I want there to be room for all of that.
I think about the ways death has shaped my understanding of intimacy. To love someone is to live with the possibility of losing them, although most of us cannot spend every moment conscious of that fact. We have to make breakfast, answer emails, walk the dog, and continue with the ordinary responsibilities of being alive.
And perhaps that's part of what makes mortality so strange. It exists alongside the most mundane details of our lives.
Someone dies, and the laundry still needs to be done. The seasons continue changing. We find ourselves laughing at something unexpected, then feeling the sudden ache of remembering who isn't there to share it with us.
Life doesn't stop making demands simply because we've encountered death.
I find something both unsettling and tender in that reality. The ordinary world continues, and somehow we continue within it, carrying what we've lost alongside everything that remains.
Maybe this is what I mean when I say death is an everyday practice.
Not that we should wake each morning contemplating our eventual absence, or organize every decision around the knowledge that life is temporary. I mean that we might become more willing to acknowledge endings as part of living. That we might make room for grief in our relationships and communities, speak more openly about mortality, and recognize the ways our lives are shaped by things we cannot control.
I want to be part of creating spaces where these conversations feel possible before someone is sitting in a hospital room or planning a funeral. Spaces where death can be approached with curiosity, fear, humor, tenderness, and whatever else people bring to it.
I don't believe talking about death will free us from the pain of losing what we love. But I do think our silence around it can leave us unnecessarily alone when loss arrives.
And perhaps that's where I find the greatest value in making death part of everyday life. Not in becoming fearless or perfectly accepting, but in learning how to remain connected to one another through the realities we cannot change.
We are going to lose things. We are going to change. We are going to die.
And in the meantime, there is a life happening here, in all its ordinary, complicated, unfinished beauty.
I'd like us to have more room to talk about both.
Yours in existential curiosities,
