We push thoughts of our legacy from our minds because we don’t want to face our mortality. There is an evocative Haitian saying that captures our ability to avoid thinking about the grim reaper: “We are all walking with coffins under our arms. Some of us know it and some of us don’t.” Most of us don’t live fully in the moment because we’re ignoring that coffin. We’ve convinced ourselves that we can postpone facing what really matters until some future point in time. If we accepted that our eventual death accompanies our every living moment, we might live with more intensity and give more thought to the kind of imprint we’ll be leaving on the earth.
On certain occasions, we’re more likely to feel the weight of our coffin. Maybe we have a near-death experience, or someone close to us dies. Sometimes, great art helps us feel the heft of our mortality. During those moments when we accept that our beautiful lives are only on loan, we savour life’s sweetness and maybe even squeeze more juice from its fruit. But it’s hard to keep that awareness front and centre.
After KS died, I’m certain those of us close to her lived more fully and more consciously—for a while. There were powerful lessons in her death if we chose to learn them. The way she died screamed the alert that it’s risky business to postpone living until some future date. She had zero forewarning of her death, so we have to hope that she had already realized her dreams.
And we learned from the way she died that minimizing risk is no safeguard. KS was killed walking her dog on a weekend afternoon on a safe sidewalk in one of the safest neighbourhoods in one of the safest cities in the world. Her stroll and her life ended when a car driven by a drunk driver careened over the curb. And just to belabour the point: this man was already incapacitated by four o’clock in the afternoon when the accident happened—not a normal hour for drunk driving.
When a memorial fund was established in her honour, I wrote our friends to tell them. “I think she would be pleased if I were to pass along as her bequest this parting wish for us all,” I wrote. “Don’t take it [your life] for granted.” Maybe if KS’s death caused us to wake up to our own mortality, it wouldn’t have been in vain. Maybe this would be some sliver of consolation—a consolation I was longing to find.
We know that some people have a harder time than others thinking about their death. Over half of adult Canadians don’t have a will, a statistic that gives us one measure of death avoidance. There are several reasons people don’t preplan for their departure that I’ll explore later, but some of it is certainly magical thinking: “If I don’t think about my death, it won’t happen.” Or “Writing down my last wishes will trigger my death.” People laugh with embarrassment when they confess these thoughts to me. They’re afraid of appearing ignorant and superstitious. They needn’t worry. When it comes to fear of death, they’re in good company.
The award-winning writer Julian Barnes wrote a brilliant book about death called Nothing to Be Frightened Of, in which he admits that, contrary to the book’s title, he is deathly afraid of death. In his case, the fear is visceral and he describes its manifestations: “. . . from skin-puncturing prod to mind-blanking terror, from the brute alarm bell in the unfamiliar hotel room to klaxons shrieking over the city.”1 Barnes is content with his sense of death and calls it “proportionate.” He feels that you cannot begin to understand what life is about unless you are constantly aware of death. “Unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever—including the jug—there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.”2
While religion and its institutions have always given people opportunities to contemplate death, the secularization of society has left a void. Try discussing mortality at a dinner party and someone is sure to say, “Can’t we find a more cheerful topic?” Several ventures have sprung up to fill the gap, including Death Cafés, which offer venues for group-directed chats about death. There is no agenda for these discussions beyond the broad objective “to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.” Since 2011, over four thousand Death Cafés have been set up in forty-nine countries across Europe, North America and Australasia. People of all ages attend.3
We know from having seen pictures of observances of the Mexican Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) that cemeteries can be lively places for helping the living cozy up to their mortality and celebrate being alive. The holiday is held during the Feast of All Souls over the first two days of November. Mexicans of all ages dress up as skeletons in fancy dress, festoon graves with flowers and fruits, and feast amidst the tombstones—both to honour their deceased loved ones and to have a great party. Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver, BC, has launched its own annual All Souls event, complete with candlelit shrines, poetry readings and musical performances. The week-long event is curated by Paula Jardine, the cemetery’s artist-in-residence. Cemetery manager Glen Hodges appointed Jardine because he wanted to make the cemetery a place where they did more than just bury the deceased. “This place is about remembering life,” he said, “not just about honouring the dead.”4
Jardine explains why the All Souls event has become a favourite tradition, bringing out crowds. “A lot of young families come here. It’s a good way for families to introduce the idea of mortality to children, and a way to remember our ancestors: our grandparents, our great-grandparents.”5 Activities have included lessons on making sugar skulls, workshops on how to create your own personal shrine, and ceremonial processions led by brass bands.6
Some universities are expanding their offerings to include “death classes,” courses that explore death from a range of perspectives. The journalist Erika Hayasaki wrote about one of them in her book The Death Class: A True Story about Life. The course, Death in Perspective, was taught by Dr. Norma Bowe at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, and had a three-year waiting list. The course included lectures on the biology of dying and field trips to prisons, funeral homes, hospice care centres, mental hospitals and morgues. After watching a dead body being dissected in an autopsy, Bowe often told her students, “It’s good to be alive, right? Did you notice how fragile we are? We have no business taking our lives for granted.”7
One assignment in Bowe’s course was for students to focus on their own funeral, including writing their own eulogy, providing detailed instructions to the funeral director regarding disposal of their body, detailing the format of their service and identifying recipients for donations in their memory. Another assignment was to discuss the question “How do the stories of who we are survive our death?” and then write a goodbye letter.
Does all this awareness about death help us focus on our legacy? Dmitri Shostakovich thought so. The composer and pianist suffered from chronic health conditions in his later years, and his final compositions reflect his preoccupation with his own mortality. He concluded that the fear of death is probably the deepest feeling we have and that it galvanizes us to perform with an eye to our posterity. “The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear [of death] people create poetry, prose and music; that is, they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them,” he wrote.8
We are surrounded by examples of the extraordinary things people achieve when they know their lives will be foreshortened. By the time brain cancer cut short Gord Downie’s life in 2017 when he was fifty-three, he had left a remarkable legacy. The composer and lead singer for the Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip devoted the last years of his life to telling the story of Chanie Wenjack, a twelve-year-old Ojibwe boy who, in 1966, ran away from a residential school in northern Ontario and died of exposure while trying to walk six hundred kilometres home to his family. Downie created the multimedia project Secret Path for people to learn about Wenjack’s heart-rending fate and to help them understand the terrible legacy of the residential school system. The project included an album, which Downie and his band performed in sell-out concerts across Canada, a graphic novel, and an animated film broadcast on TV and shared in community screenings across the country.
Downie knew his death was imminent and this mission galvanized him. As his brother Mike Downie said, “It’s filling him up. He’s not looking back. He’s looking forward and he’s busy living right now.”9 The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund has been established to remember Wenjack and continue Downie’s commitment to improving the lives of indigenous people.10
Our lives are our legacies, and we will be remembered for the way we lived. Catastrophic illness or injury, as in the case of Gord Downie, can propel people to accomplish their goals in a foreshortened time frame. But what about the rest of us—we who also will die but have not been given the end date? The next chapter tells the stories of people who were going about their daily business when something pushed them in a new direction. Their stories are a reminder that while we are breathing, we are shaping our legacy, and it is wise to keep taking our own measure to ensure we are who we want to be.