Issue #189: Thinking About Death is How We Become More Alive

A lifestyle writer walks into an existential crisis...

🎧 “Good Hang” Podcast with Amy Poehler: I’ve been listening to a lot of intense podcasts recently in preparation for this post, so this felt like a breath of fresh air! Poehler invites friends and celebrities (mostly comedians) on to hang and chat, as the title promises. Start with the first episode, featuring Tina Fey, which feels like being a fly on the wall between them!

📺 “The Studio” on Apple TV+: One of the best first episodes of a comedy series I’ve seen in a long time, Seth Rogen stars as a newly appointed studio head in this ten-episode miniseries that delightfully pokes fun at the film industry. A hilarious and spot-on peek at the chaos behind the velvet curtain, or in Rogen’s case, brick wall. Doesn’t hurt that the pilot ends with a nod to my favorite movie scene of all time, setting up the cringey second episode perfectly. (I also loved this piece about Rogen and his long-time collaborator and childhood bff, Evan Goldberg!)

🎥 ‘A Nice Indian Boy,’ in theaters: This new rom-com explores cultural nuances when Naveen (Karan Soni), who is Indian, meets Jay (Jonathan Groff), who is white but raised by Indian parents, at the Hindu temple they both attend. Sweet, funny, sexy—all the things you want a rom-com to be!

This is the first issue of ‘Plant Studies,’ a new six-part series on topics essential for living a fully engaged and meaningful life. In April, we’re kicking off with ‘Death + Mortality,’ a topic that will lay the groundwork for the series and, as you’ll read here, help you fall more deeply in love with your life.

I was thirty years old the first time I realized I was going to die.

I understood, of course, that people die—but that I would die? I had, up until that moment, never fully inhabited that inevitable reality.

At the time, I was in the tender process of entering a new state of awareness, in the immediate aftermath of my separation from my husband and encumbered by a grief so immense, it felt like my entire world was folding in on me. I hung my head as I walked along the trail near my apartment, barely taking in the leaves decomposing beneath my feet, until one caught my eye. I carefully lifted the delicate skeleton of interconnected veins when I realized, in a moment of morbid clarity, One day, my face and my eyes will decay and rot.

The thought stunned me. The pillars that had supported me my entire life—the “right path” of college-career-partner—were already crumbling, and the weight of this realization leveled me. I began crying so hard, I had to sit down. I felt like I had been tricked. All this, actually gone? As the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande put it in his treatise on aging, Being Mortal, “I had a white coat on; they had a hospital gown. I couldn’t quite picture it the other way around.”

Like Gawande, I had spent my entire life busying myself with the stuff of being a person—sharing sweaty dance floor kisses, navigating the New York subway in cute flats that pinched my feet, pitching and writing thousands of articles—my immediate responsibilities keeping the end at bay. I never felt truly present, and fantasized about the day my efforts would pay off and I could finally rest, but regardless of how much I accomplished, the reality of pausing filled me with a dread I couldn’t fully explain.

It wasn’t until I had that sudden, and irreversible, thought on the hike that everything changed..