This edition we’re voyaging into territory that may be uncomfortable for some. We’re exploring how mortality and our reaction to the very idea that we will die at some point drives behavior. Part of what I found remarkable is how our behavior changes based on how we choose to respond.

This is a companion to the second episode of the What Does It Mean to Be Human? podcast subseries with Maria Ross. I wanted to give you the heads up on the topic as we dive in.

“You aren’t familiar with death,” I was told by my energy healer Marie during a session in May 2021. While I dealt with the death of several friends in the preceding year, she was right, death wasn’t something I had much experience with.

“Your grandmothers are old, they can’t live forever,” she continued, referencing my 97 and then 102-year-old grandmothers. “We need to get you comfortable with death,” she concluded.

She suggested I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead which Buddhist monks have used in attempts to understand the process of death and rebirth. While I made it through, the book is meant to be read thousands of times before true understanding can form, so I’d say I have a casual familiarity with the ideas within.

My maternal grandmother passed within weeks of my finishing the book. She was unconscious as the result of a stroke so when I saw her the day before she died she was unresponsive. I had a few minutes alone with her and fought to overcome feelings of discomfort to rest my hand on her shoulder and be present in her labored breathing. Joined by family, I remember my mom encouraging us to speak with grandmother as the hearing is the last of the senses to go when we are dying.

I remembered that lesson a year later when I was sitting with my paternal grandma in the last three days of her life. I knew this was the end. She was 104 and in a rehabilitation center after a hospitalization. While her will was strong, her body was winding down. She couldn’t live forever.

Probably ten years earlier we had talked about death. We were driving back to her house one evening after visiting relatives. We must have been talking about someone who had died and I asked her how she thinks about her own death. She reflected that it was part of life, she wasn’t worried about her own death, and she observed she lived a long time, much longer than anyone in her immediate family. It was all very matter of fact, just like the left-hand turn off Sunrise Highway on Long Island that I was making while we were having this discussion.

On her deathbed, the remarkable things happened late in the evening. At one point while she was still able to verbally communicate, she moved her head, tracking movement across the upper part of the room. I couldn’t see what she saw but she was clearly watching something and reaching out. She called out her long-deceased sister and mother by name. And the next morning she reported having seen my grandpa outside the window. This is very similar to stories that hospice workers report with their patients and has been studied by researchers like Dr. Chris Kerr at Hospice Buffalo.

I think it was the next night when I thought about my mom’s advice on the hearing. Grandma and I had already recited the recipe for her famous rice pudding, with me talking about the ingredients and her moving her hand as though she was writing down the recipe on a note card in front of her. It was clear that she could hear me and so, as she fell deeper in unconsciousness and the thrashing of terminal agitation, I thought I’d play a little music.

Thinking back to her age, I found collections from the Glen Miller Orchestra and also Judy Garland’s greatest hits. After going through those and having a teary sing along to Somewhere Over the Rainbow, I needed to play some of my favorite songs to recharge my batteries. I went straight to Kate Bush and Running Up That Hill which had been my favorite since college. While I was drawing inspiration from the song, grandma started back with thrashing her arms even though that had eased with the previous music selections. She clearly was not jiving on Kate Bush. Stevie Nicks didn’t work either. I went back to the big band sounds of the 30s and 40s. My needs were clearly going to have to wait this out, as they should, she was the one who was dying.

While there are some standard events that happen when people die, there’s no instruction manual or guaranteed timeline. The nurses and aides at the facility were like angels, providing support but unable to do much beyond helping with physical comfort. It was up to grandma and I to “land the plane”, a phrase that drew an odd look from the nurse when I said it out loud.

While her body wound down its activity around 3 in the morning, I couldn’t tell when the vitality and energy that was my grandma departed the room. There was no rush of energy. I sat on her bedside holding her hands, talking to her. I wondered if I would experience something distinct that would tell me her essence was gone.

Instead, it was a gradual decline. I was holding her hands but she was no longer holding mine back. The remaining spark drained from her eyes and they closed. Her breathing slowed. A nurse came and put on a pulse ox monitor to help identify when she was truly gone. I kept repeating to her that her family loved her and that there was nothing to be afraid of. I drew from what I recalled from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and told her to go toward the light that scares her as that is the portal to reincarnation. And I continued to repeat a thank you for all the love she had shared with me and her family. I told her I looked forward to seeing her again in another life and that it was alright for her to go.

And just like a feather floats down to gently rest on solid surface, we landed the plane. She exhaled for the last time. And there was stillness. Just what was her and me in the middle of the night.

A couple hours later in the pre-dawn, I got in the car with my mom to drive back to grandma’s house where we were staying. While I hadn’t slept more than an hour in two days, I felt a mental clarity and exhilaration. This was the most profound, simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking experience of my life. What a gift to be able to witness my grandma’s transition out of this life.

Being at her side, talking to her all the way till the end, bearing witness to those final hours has helped me with my comfort around death. Drawing from the Tibetan Buddhists, I won’t presume to understand everything but I can sit with death and the idea of it much better than before.

That understanding is enabling me to look at my life differently. And this awareness of death is part of what makes us human, as Maria and I discuss in the podcast episode. It turns out there is some research behind all of it too.

Psychology has spent decades circling the question of death and how our awareness and experiences drives our behavior. What the research has found is one of the strangest paradoxes in the field.

The same fact — that we’re going to die someday — has been shown to make people more judgmental, more tribal, and more defensive. And that exact same fact has been shown to make people more generous, more purposeful, and more connected to the people they love.

The same fact is leading to opposite outcomes.

Outcome #1: The Ego Flinch

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death, arguing that the terror of our own mortality quietly drives huge amounts of human behavior. Researchers took that idea into the lab, and it became Terror Management Theory.

Across hundreds of studies, one major body of research kept finding the same pattern: remind people of their mortality, even subtly, and they cling harder to their worldview, chase self-esteem and material goods, and grow more suspicious of people who aren’t like them. (In the spirit of honesty: some of these findings have faced replication challenges, so hold this as “research suggests” rather than settled law. But there is a pattern. It’s the flinch.)

It’s not dissimilar to the ancient threat-detection wiring behind Dismantle Judgment — the brain scanning the grass for predators, sorting the world into us and them who might cause harm. Remind that brain it’s going to die, and it doesn’t get wiser. It gets defensive. The world gets smaller.

Outcome #2: The Scrooge Effect

A different line of research found the opposite.

In 2002, researchers interviewed people about how favorably they felt toward charities. Some people were interviewed a few blocks from a funeral home, others directly in front of one. The people standing in front of the funeral home rated the charities more favorably.

The researchers called it the Scrooge effect: like Scrooge, transformed by one night of confronting his own death, reminders of mortality can make us more giving, not less. Death can make us bigger, too.

So which do you get — smaller or bigger? What decides?

In 2009, organizational psychologists Adam Grant and Kimberly Wade-Benzoni drew the line that makes sense of it all: there are two ways of encountering your mortality.

The first is death anxiety — the flinch. Abstract, panicky. Everyone dies. I’m going to die. Felt as a threat, it produces fear, dread, and self-protection. That’s the version that makes us smaller.

The second is death reflection — deliberate, specific, forward-looking. Contemplating your mortality on purpose, oriented toward a question: given that my time is finite, what — and who — actually matters? Death reflection turns people toward meaning, purpose, and other people.

Here’s the thing to carry out of this edition: the difference isn’t the fact of death. It’s how you hold it.

And that means don’t try to simply not think about it. Suppressed death thoughts don’t disappear, they leak out sideways as defensiveness. Avoidance doesn’t protect you from death anxiety. It guarantees it.

We all just watched this play out at scale, by the way. In Ignite 360’s Navigating to a New Normal research during the pandemic, when we asked people what they wanted to do when it was over, a surprising number said they wanted to be more empathetic, to build deeper bonds. That’s death reflection, happening society wide. Others wanted to race back to the self-esteem chase and the accumulation. This is death anxiety, and it also was society wide. Recall the division we were having about people going back to how things were and others wanting to change their lives? I believe this is what drove it. We were confronting real possibilities of death all at once and holding it in profoundly different ways.

Maria did death reflection right in the middle of our episode, without ever calling it that.

She told me about a conversation with her husband about a trip they were thinking of putting off until next year. Then she did the math out loud: she’s 53, so realistically she has maybe 20 to 30 “good summers” left where she’s mobile and strong enough to travel. A decision of “Let’s take that trip next summer” is a risk. Do we even know we have next summer? What do we want to do to make the most of the summers we have left? Where do we want to go? Who do we want to see?

That made me reflect. I’m 57. I likely have fewer summers ahead of me than I’ve had in my adult life. What am I going to do with that time?

Notice: that’s not spiraling. Maria was specific about summers, trips, her family and she was forward-looking instead of fixated on right now. Textbook death reflection, in real time.

Here’s the part that answers what any of this has to do with connection.

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen spent decades on what she calls socioemotional selectivity theory. The finding: when people perceive their time as limited, their priorities shift — away from status, novelty, and expansive networks, toward emotionally meaningful goals and their closest relationships. It’s part of why older adults, despite real losses, often report higher emotional well-being.

I’ve seen it in my interviews with peers and aging elders. Talk about bucket lists, and the grand adventure stuff falls away. What keeps coming up is people. Spending time with the ones who really know you and love you.

You might think that’s just what getting old does to you. Carstensen proved it isn’t. Older adults asked to imagine a medical breakthrough adding 20 years to their lives snapped back toward the preferences of the young. Younger adults asked to imagine their time running out flipped the other way, toward the familiar people they love.

It’s not the age. It’s the horizon.

The awareness of death, held the right way, doesn’t haunt your life. It edits it. It strips away the trivial and points you at what — and who — actually matters. Death is the editor that gives the time its meaning.

That brings me back to my grandma. If you dread the idea of ever being in that room, please reconsider. Being there is one of the most human things you will ever do.

You know me — it always comes back to asking good questions. Sit with these on purpose:

1. Do the math. How many good summers do you realistically have left? Write the number down. Uncomfortable? Do it anyway. For me at 57, it’s probably 25, maybe 30.

2. Who’s in the circle? Who would you choose to spend those summers with? Have you told them? What would you like to do with them?

3. What gets edited out? What are you carrying unnecessarily? A grudge, a grind, an obligation that a finite life doesn’t have room for? How might you let it go?

4. Start the conversation. A Care.com survey found 53% of adult children expect that talking with their aging parents about senior care will be difficult; only 33% of the seniors themselves felt that way. Adult children are more afraid of the conversation than the seniors are. I’ve discovered that one of the hesitations that keeps surfacing in my research is the topic of money. Perhaps reframe it. This isn’t about revealing bank balances if that feels too vulnerable. Instead, talk about the calculations: what would this desired life cost, what’s feasible, what’s the workaround? Take one step toward that conversation this week.

What’s resonating with you? Email me [email protected] or share your thoughts in the comments. I read and reply to every one myself.

I’d like to have a conversation with you. I’d be grateful if you are open to volunteering. I’m interviewing adult children, aging parents, and the professionals who guide them — doctors, social workers, death doulas, elder care specialists, financial consultants, lawyers and more — for my next book on cross-generational conversations about life transitions.

Sign up here. I would love, love, love to talk with you.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Maria Ross:

📺 Watch the companion video: https://youtu.be/ecpfWAdMJM8

Stay curious. Ask good questions. Let empathy follow.

-Rob