Can Thinking About Death Lead to a Good Life?

Why spend time thinking and talking about death? Won’t this class be so depressing?

What makes life worth living in the face of death? Is denying death or paying our mortality lip service the best we can hope for? Death is one of the few absolute commonalities that we share. As a universal event, death transcends differences between us. We have a beginning and an end; we are born, and we inevitably die. How is it possible that most of us get to the end of our lives feeling surprised by our mortality and unprepared to deal with the decisions that need to be made?

It may be scary for some people to commit to this course. In fact, thanatophobia, the fear of death, is, according to many mental health professionals, no more rational than a fear of heights or spiders. Yet, so many of us fear death, whether rational or not.

Many ancient cultures required people to look at and think about death throughout life. These practices, known as Memento Mori (reflecting on mortality), were designed to incorporate death into life. Sufis tradition encouraged people to frequent graveyards to face death and ponder mortality. Early Buddhists practiced maraṇasati, the spiritual ritual of “remembering death.” Socrates said philosophy is “about nothing but dying and being dead.” This class series provides a space for Memento Mori in our otherwise busy and present-focused lives.

In this course, we’ll wonder how to construct a life with the clear realization of our mortality. Maybe we’ll think differently about our life choices when we work to neutralize the fear of death.

We will grapple with the ways tradition, culture, and religion shape how we think about mortality. We’ll dig into enduring questions about death and dying to guide our class discussions:

• What do we think about when we think of dying?
• Can we ever truly accept the reality of our mortality?
• What do we want most from this life?
• Do our ambitions and priorities change when we accept mortality?
• Does thinking about death help us to live more fully?
• Would immortality be good for us?
• What Is the best attitude to take toward our mortality?
• How does death affect the meaningfulness and meaning of our lives?
• What if thinking deeply and talking about death doesn’t make life pointless but rather purposeful and vibrant?

This course will provoke, support, and encourage students to sit with the reality of our mortality and engage with ideas about death and dying through literature, nonfiction, and film.

A note about the practical aspects of the course

Unlike other Premise courses, this course has a practical component alongside our philosophical approach. We’ll work through the workbook A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death by Dr. BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger, and we’ll share updates on our progress for 20-30 min of each class session.

Class readings and films:

• A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death by Dr. BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger
• The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
• The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
• Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande & Letting Go by Atul Gawande
• On Death & Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D.
• A Very Easy Death, by Simone De Beauvoir
• After Many A Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley
• Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat
• ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ by Henry James
• ‘The Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin
• Documentary film: Flight from Death
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and
• On the Nature of Things (book 3) by Lucretius