Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.
—E. M. FORSTER
Paul Watkins was a man on a mission. Having called the meeting with his business partners, he arrived at the office dressed in a shirt and tie, his dark hair neatly combed to the side, apprehension concealed behind the strength of newfound conviction. “Gentlemen,” he started, placing his briefcase on the conference table, “it’s been a great pleasure working with you, but I’ve decided to leave the company.”
Mouths agape, his business partners sat stunned and silent. What was going to happen to the company? Over the years, Paul had grown it into a regional powerhouse. His plan had been to lead it to the next level, beyond Louisiana to the national market. He was the majority shareholder. All told, he was worth millions. What about his shares?
“I want you to buy me out for a song,” he said to his bewildered investors. He’d promised them a great return, but selling his shares to them for a fraction of their value was utterly insane. Paul would be throwing away millions.
At his high-end apartment in New Orleans’ prestigious St. Charles Avenue neighborhood, Paul opened his kitchen cabinets and removed dish after dish. Dinner plates, saucers, soup bowls, and coffee mugs clanked into trash bags. Standing at his closet, he gazed over the pressed collars and neat hems of the garments he’d worn to business deals all over the country. He yanked shirts and pants off hangers and bagged them to be given away. He donated the Oriental area rugs, the wall art, his television, and many of his books. It had to go. All of it.
Budgeting a weekly allowance of seventy-five dollars, he left his spacious apartment and moved into a twelve-by-fourteen-foot dirty beige room, swapping his grand window vista for a view of a school parking lot partially blocked by a rickety AC unit.
But he felt calmer and more surefooted than ever. Assuming he wasn’t losing his mind, why would a sane man do this? “Yeah, I gave it up,” Paul says with a jovial laugh. “I just sort of realized life is short.” But Paul Watkins wasn’t dying, at least no more than any other healthy man in his early forties. Nonetheless, he says, “I wanted to end my life differently.”
Death is one of our society’s last great taboos. If you doubt this, try bringing up the topic at the next dinner party. If you think talking about religion or money is socially inappropriate, just wait for the baffled looks you’ll inspire when you start chatting about funeral homes and tombstones.
Most people avoid the topic—and not just in superficial ways. “About 80 percent of us will be physically dependent on others during the last months, weeks, or days of life,” writes celebrated palliative care physician Ira Byock in his foreword to The End-of-Life Handbook. “We will need help with basic daily activities, including the biological needs of eating, personal hygiene, and elimination.” For this reason, doctors almost unanimously agree that all adults should draw up a living will specifying what kind of medical care they would want if they were incapacitated and potentially nearing death. According to U.S. federal law, hospitals are obligated to ask patients if they have such documentation, presumably as a way of prompting them to consider it. Despite these facts, according to a 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, only between 18 and 36 percent of people historically have a living will. The twenty minutes it takes to fill one out could mean the difference between life and death, but people generally decline to do so.
It’s curious that we don’t talk or even think about death more. After all, it’s all around us—not in a gruesome or violent way usually, but as an inescapable fact of life. Think about it: There are seven billion people alive today; this means that there will be at least seven billion deaths within the next one hundred years. That’s about seventy million deaths per year!
But perhaps the ubiquity and inevitability of death are exactly the reasons we don’t think about the topic. Psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, and Jeff Greenberg have spent almost three decades investigating why and how people avoid thinking about death. These researchers’ complex but very interesting conclusions are captured in a set of principles known collectively as terror management theory. They start with a simple observation: We human beings are the only animals able to step back and consider ourselves, our lives, and our futures. We ask pesky questions such as “Who am I?” “What should I be doing?” and “What does life have in store for me?” As a by-product of this self-reflective tendency, we can’t help realizing that, ultimately, the future holds an end to our lives. We are mortal, and we know it. If we were logical creatures, this would terrify us. It’s an inescapable death sentence that will be executed in only a few decades, and that’s if we’re not one of the unlucky ones struck down sooner by a fatal disease or an accident. But obviously most people aren’t walking around in terror. Why not?
According to Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg, human beings have developed an elaborate set of unconscious defenses to manage the terror of death. The main defense is our cultural worldview. Christian culture, for instance, generally teaches that God created us and endowed us with the ability to choose between good and evil actions, and that if we choose the good ones, we’ll end up in heaven. If you were raised in this tradition, you were taught that, provided you live up to cultural standards of behavior, you will live forever.
It’s strange to think about, but one of the main benefits of our culture may be its ability to reassure us that we’ll live on after we die. Even secular culture—the culture of consumerism that we all share whether we like it or not—provides us with the possibility of symbolic immortality, in such forms as the legacy we leave, the businesses we build, the works of art we create, and the children we raise. So our culture can reduce death anxiety by offering us immortality, with only the caveat that we must live up to its standards. To the extent that we do what we’re supposed to do—amass accomplishments, approval, status, or money—we’ll live on, in one form or another. We’re able to say to ourselves, “I’m such a good person/I’m doing such good things/I’m leaving such a good legacy/I’m so respected by others, surely I’m not like those people who die young or die suddenly.” Yes, it’s not totally logical, but neither are human beings. Nonetheless, it has a kind of logic of the heart, which may be enough to distract us from the terror of an impending end.
According to research, this death denial can have serious consequences. For one, we become very tied to our cultural worldview. If I’m relying on my cultural belief in an afterlife, for instance, to protect me from the full emotional realization that I am destined to die, then anything that could undermine that worldview is a potential threat. This idea led researchers to hypothesize that when people are reminded of death, even in a fairly casual way, they should be more likely both to strongly endorse their own culture’s worldview and to denigrate people of other cultures. In other words, they should become more prejudiced.
In 2005, German psychologists Eva Jonas and Immo Fritsche joined forces with terror management theory creator Jeff Greenberg to publish a fascinating study addressing this issue in the Journal of Economic Psychology. In the city of Magdeburg, Germany, they randomly stopped pedestrians to ask them questions about their beliefs. Although they told participants that they were surveying people’s “consumption and television behavior,” they slipped in a number of questions about people’s belief in the superiority of German culture—questions about how much they would prefer German cars to foreign cars, to what degree they thought Germans were more handsome than foreigners, and how much they would prefer German food to foreign food, among others. Here’s the interesting part: they stopped half the study’s participants in a small shopping area and the other half directly in front of a cemetery. Presumably, standing in front of a cemetery would, on some level, remind the respondents of death—a condition that the researchers call mortality salience. There was no other difference between these two groups except the fact that one happened to be walking past a cemetery. The results showed that participants who were surveyed in the shopping area liked the German and non-German items approximately equally. Amazingly, however, those surveyed in front of the cemetery displayed greater liking for the German items as well as a decreased liking for the non-German ones.
By the way, results like these aren’t limited to Germany. Similar tendencies have been demonstrated in France, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United States, and other countries. It’s not about being German; it’s about being human. It’s also important to note that all of this seems to occur unconsciously and automatically, so most of the research participants probably weren’t aware they were showing this tendency.
Because these death-denying defenses are unconscious, you may find yourself doubting they’re real. It all sounds pretty fanciful. But ask yourself: even after reading the words foretelling your own personal doom in the last few pages, why are you not overwhelmed by terror right now?
We avoid the terror of our demise in another interesting way, says a man who knows a thing or two about the fear of death. Film director John Carpenter says we play with it.
With his vivid white hair and a stare that suggests he can peer into our hearts to find our deepest terrors, Carpenter has creatively birthed some of our most iconic bringers of death, from Halloween’s mass-murdering psychopath, Michael Myers, to The Thing’s alien shape-shifter. After directing and producing horror films for more than thirty years, he’s noticed a kind of paradox.
“We fear death and yet we love to let it entertain us,” Carpenter says, and suggests some clear reasons for this. “It’s therapeutic. The one thing we fear more than death is thinking about death. So, instead, we think about death while we’re safely removed from it. We’ve always used modern myths and stories to explain the world. Monsters are an interesting creation. They’re very ancient. In these stories, death is several things at once: the other, the beast, and the creature, the us. All of these myths and stories that we pass around help us deal with and understand it.”
He makes an interesting point. Have you ever noticed that after a big scream, theatergoers laugh? These forms of entertainment allow us to fool ourselves into thinking death is something safe and they distance us from our own mortality. This may be related to a mechanism that psychologists call, simply, nervous laughter, which happens when we encounter stress. Physician Alex Lickerman of the University of Chicago submits that nervous laughter is a defense mechanism that guards against overwhelming anxiety. “Being able to laugh at a trauma at the moment it occurs, or soon after, signals both to ourselves and others that we believe in our ability to endure it (which is perhaps what makes laughter such a universally pleasurable experience: it makes us feel that everything will be all right),” he writes in Psychology Today.
We may laugh because it gives us a sort of symbolic control over death. “Films, especially horror films, invite us to invest in the story by asking us to project ourselves onto the screen,” says John Carpenter. “But we, the viewers, always come back to our seats alive. We’ve beaten death. For most of us, death remains an abstraction.”
As long as we keep death an abstraction, we can go about confidently living our lives as though we have all the time in the world to chase opportunity, something Paul Watkins had counted on throughout his youth.
Thinking back on his late teens, Paul Watkins recalls wanting to do something meaningful with his life. What this meant, exactly, remained elusive. His interests were numerous and somewhat generic. He considered a life in academia, in management, in something entrepreneurial. At Tulane University he floated the idea of majoring in history, business administration, and public health before landing on a broad liberal arts degree. It was “essentially as noncommittal as you could get,” Paul says.
These career changes were what his friend, a pilot named David Charlebois, might call midflight course corrections. Paul would spend years studying for one career, then change his mind completely. He earned four degrees. He even flirted with the idea of becoming a priest. In fact, he took religious vows. But doubts weighed on him. An entire life surrendered to God sounded noble, but it just seemed to require too many sacrifices.
So, in 1993, Paul headed to the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Over dinner one night, he found himself examining a box of jambalaya mix. “I said to myself, these guys could use some marketing help!” The next day, he called an 800 number on the box and reached the corporate headquarters of Louisiana Gourmet Enterprises Inc. Before he knew it, he had a summer internship. In corporate culture, value was measured in terms of accomplishment and promotion. There was a straightforward path to success. Paul thrived in this environment. The internship eventually became a full-time job. Within one year, the company promoted him to vice president of marketing.
Paul opened a bank account and could now afford his own apartment. He watched with awe as opportunities expanded before him. His responsibilities grew beyond marketing and extended into distribution and manufacturing. Meanwhile, he was learning everything he could about running factories, managing technologies, and overseeing operations. His savings account grew from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Then to ten thousand dollars. Then twenty thousand.
Louisiana Gourmet Enterprises Inc. was a relatively small company, and when Paul was made CEO in his mid-thirties, he knew his growth opportunities had just about capped out. He began fantasizing about running his own food business. He initially thought it was too ambitious an idea for a young man right out of business school to take on. Then again, he thought, why not try?
Paul resigned from Louisiana Gourmet Enterprises in late 1996, and took the small amount of capital he’d saved to found Boudreaux’s Foods. “The name was purely a marketing decision. I chose it because it’s the most common Cajun surname I could think of at the time,” he says. “I only had three products: shrimp and crab gumbo, shrimp étouffée, and shrimp Creole. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I had a good head on my shoulders.” His doubts disappeared when he calculated his first-year revenue at a half million dollars. “But if I was going to ever make real money, I needed more products. I made a resolution to scale up the next year. I started looking for opportunities to expand.”
He didn’t have to go far. He was wandering the grocery store aisles one day, admiring his products on the shelves, when he came across a small self-published diet book called Sugar Busters. The authors were a group of local medical doctors and a businessman. Paul approached them with an offer to develop, market, and sell a whole line of food products under a licensing arrangement and to bring them on as partners, to which they agreed.
Years passed. Paul went from producing just three products to producing forty-seven—everything from mayonnaise and salad dressings, to bread, sports drinks, and pastas. He was happy, rich, and successful. Paul Watkins had everything that, externally at least, should have made him happy.
Although each of us is unique, we all exist in cultural contexts that tell us what’s valuable. Pervasive messages that come across our television and computer screens, through our radio speakers, and on roadside billboards convey very clearly what is valued—the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the status of our jobs, the size of our homes and of our waistlines. Even those of us who actively resist such messages can’t help but feel, on some level, that these external trappings measure our value. There is no dearth of people who, in fact, judge us in this way. Of course, all these trappings cost money.
In his book Escape from Evil, the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker writes that money “buys bodyguards, bullet-proof glass, and better medical care. Most of all it can be passed on, and so radiates its powers even after death, giving one a semblance of immortality.” Money is one of the most obvious external measures of how we live up to our culture’s standards. According to terror management theorists Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg, the accumulation of wealth should thus serve a key role in distracting and protecting us from the fear of our impending death.
If this sounds fanciful, consider the message that President George W. Bush delivered after the events of September 11, 2001, perhaps the American people’s most significant reminder of their fragile mortality since the nation’s founding. You might expect the president to urge people to care for one another, for their families and neighbors, and to keep faith in their government and the power of justice. Without an understanding of terror management theory, however, you might have found it surprising that he urged Americans to shop. “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t do business, where people don’t shop,” President Bush urged. “Mrs. Bush and I want to encourage Americans to go out shopping.” And that’s exactly what Americans did during the next three months. The U.S. Commerce Department reported an increase in consumer spending of more than 6 percent from October to December of 2001, the strongest pace in four years.
Research by psychologists Tim Kasser of Knox College and Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri provides data supporting these observations. The researchers asked college students to imagine what their financial standing would be in fifteen years, including their salary; the value of their homes, cars, and investments; and the amount of money they would spend on entertainment, leisure activities, and clothing. But before they answered these questions, they asked half the participants to ponder their mortality by writing a paragraph or two about their thoughts and feelings regarding their deaths. By now you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the students who wrote about their deaths said they planned to be worth more financially and spend more money on luxury items than did those who hadn’t pondered their mortality.
Although none of these students knew it, they may have been using expectations of their material wealth to defend against the unpleasant emotions generated by writing about their mortality. The unconscious logic goes something like “If I’m rich, I don’t have to worry about it.” It’s comforting and distracting to think about one’s material wealth and future status, and this may have served to reassure these students that there was no danger of their dying—at least not for a very long time.
Viewed through this lens, financial success such as that Paul Watkins experienced during much of his life exerts a powerful draw upon people because it allows us to feel special, as if we’re going to live forever. But such fragile logic may have limits, particularly when we are reminded of death in a way that defies all our mechanisms of denial and defense. Ultimately, death isn’t a two-paragraph essay; nor is it a television report of tragedy at a distance—even when that tragedy is as terrible as 9/11. Sometimes death strikes much closer to home.
On a Tuesday morning in September of 2001, Paul was startled awake by a phone call. His head felt heavy, his body sluggish, as he answered the phone. “Paul, turn on the TV,” boomed the voice of his office manager.
He stumbled out of bed and rubbed his eyes. “Which channel?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Like the rest of the world, Paul tuned into an alien scene of the familiar New York City skyline obscured by dense black smoke and of the Pentagon burning in Arlington, Virginia. “People kept talking about airplanes being taken over by hijackers. Everyone was talking about the passengers and the people in the buildings. Suddenly I was thinking about the pilots.”
Not just any pilot, but a friend of his. Paul had last seen David Charlebois that past July, at a house a short bike ride from Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. David was a neat and entertaining guy a few years younger than Paul. He and Paul got together with their mutual friends whenever Paul was out east on a business trip and David wasn’t flying for American Airlines. That July evening, David had talked about a scrappy little dog he’d recently adopted named Chance.
“There were thousands of pilots in the air on 9/11. The odds were really small that David was on one of the hijacked planes,” Paul says. But when he tried David’s cell phone, it went straight to voice mail. Paul was worried. A couple of hours later, his phone rang.
It was a mutual friend, and his tone of voice said it all. Paul’s heart sank.
David was the first officer on American Airlines Flight 77. At 9:37 that morning, it had slammed into the western side of the Pentagon.
The house on Marigny Street in New Orleans reminded Candy Chang of death. Its darkened windows were busted out. The blue-tinged wood siding was peeling. Inside the house, the rafters were exposed like bones. To keep out squatters, the sides had been completely boarded up, making people inside feel as if they were encased in a coffin.
The district had seen its share of decline since the floods of Hurricane Katrina, but it was coming back with a resurgence of music venues, lively restaurants, and a wave of new artists such as Candy Chang, who had moved into the neighborhood of narrow shotgun houses in 2010. She’d discovered the eccentricities of the community: the man blowing a trumpet on a street corner, the neighbor building a mystery space machine on another. “It feels like it was drawn by a five-year-old, in the very best way,” Candy says.
Chang, a young Taiwanese American designer and urban planner, was working in Finland when she learned that a close friend and mentor of hers had died unexpectedly. “It made me think about what’s really important to me in my life,” she says. “Death is something we’re often discouraged to talk about or even think about: ‘Don’t go there. It’s too sad. You don’t need to think about it until you’re older.’ Maybe that’s why it took me so long to lean into those thoughts, but when I finally did, I found a deep comfort and clarity I didn’t expect.”
Not long after her friend’s death, she followed an unrealized dream and moved to New Orleans, home of some of the most beautiful houses and buildings she’d ever seen. But it also had one of the highest numbers of abandoned properties in America. Candy lived about a mile from the most dilapidated house in the neighborhood. “It looked like something out of a horror movie,” she remembers.
Like director John Carpenter, Candy saw an opportunity to play with death. One February morning, she pulled on a sweater and jeans, bought a big cup of coffee from a local café, and crossed town, fully prepared to do something bold. At Burgundy Street, she stopped at a corner and gazed at the abandoned, orange-roofed house with determination. Four friends were waiting for her there with buckets of black chalkboard paint, paint rollers, brushes, a stencil, metal chalk holders, and gloves. Together, they laid some butcher paper and trash bags along the sidewalk to form a tarp. The chilled morning air was warming quickly as they started painting the side of the house with primer. An old man on a bicycle stopped and chatted with Candy about the history of the block. People walking their dogs paused to ask what they were doing. The head of the neighborhood association’s anti-blight committee brought Candy and her friends a platter of tea and cookies. A guy in a pirate suit on his way to work at a pirate-themed bar in the French Quarter wandered over and told them some jokes. It was for many just another day in the neighborhood. But not for Candy.
When the primer was dry, she rolled blackboard paint along the entire side of the boarded-up house. At the top, she used stencils to paint in large, bold white letters the words “Before I Die . . .” and beneath that, in much smaller letters, she stenciled the simple phrase “Before I die, I want to _____,” roughly eighty times. At one end of the wall, she left a little tray of blue, white, and canary yellow chalk.
“The idea came to me because I felt public spaces are our shared spaces, and they have the power to snap us out of our routines and restore our profound appreciation of what it means to be alive,” says Candy.
Before she had even packed up her supplies, people walking by asked if they could write on the wall. A man wrote, “Before I die I want to see my daughter graduate.” A couple wrote, “Before I die I want to finish school” and “Before I die I want to go 200 mph.” The guy in the pirate outfit wrote, “Before I die I want to be tried for piracy.”
Candy didn’t know what effect her art project would ultimately have on people. She hoped it would at least make some people stop and think about how short and precious life was. But the street didn’t have that much foot traffic. It was more likely that her work would just get spray-painted over by gangs that night.
So Candy was blown away the next morning to see that all eighty lines had been filled in, with responses spilling into the margins. The messages were thoughtful, funny, poetic, and even heartbreaking. Before I die I want to . . . “sing for millions” . . . “hold her one more time” . . . “see my daughter graduate” . . . “abandon all insecurities” . . . “plant a tree” . . . “straddle the International Date Line” . . . “get clean” . . . “live off the grid” . . . “build a school” . . . “be completely myself” . . .
Chang erased that day’s chalk contributions only to find the wall repopulated a day later. She posted a few photos of the wall online, and they went viral. Her in-box filled up with earnest messages from students, widowers, business owners, activists, neighborhood leaders, and friends—all who wanted to make a wall in their communities. Today more than a hundred “Before I Die” walls have been created in more than ten languages and twenty-five countries, including Argentina, China, Denmark, Italy, Kazakhstan, Portugal, and South Africa.
Chang’s exploration of death had tapped a nerve. For the millions who survive a trauma in their lifetime, the writing’s on the wall: life is short. A near-death experience or, in Chang’s case, the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one has a particular way of bringing that message home.
Chang wondered if reflecting on death and mortality might lead to powerful benefits. Perhaps a nine-foot white-on-black sign begging the completion of the statement “Before I Die . . .” is the wake-up call we need to see the value in living for today. What if such a message got people to help others more, to give more to charity, to reconsider and reform their life goals, and even to experience better overall mental health?
In their honest encounter with death, more people might take on the qualities of supersurvivors.
Paul rode in a car along Maryland Interstate 95. His and David Charlebois’s good friend Michael Walker, also a pilot, was driving. It was November 2001. The snow on the ground was thawing. Overhead, big black birds were settled on the power lines. The car exited the interstate and pulled into the tiny parking lot of a flat, gray federal building. Paul buttoned his overcoat against the gloom and the cold. Inside, he and Michael passed through a security checkpoint and entered a small lobby, where an official handed Paul an urn containing the ashes of their friend David.
It was hard to believe David was really gone. “I was stunned and saddened. He was one of the nicest people you’d ever meet: friendly, popular, a genuinely good person. He had a family who loved him.” More than a decade after his death, Paul Watkins’s words still hang heavy. “It got me thinking. This young man. He was younger than I was. Gosh.”
It wasn’t that before David was killed Paul was ignorant of death. It was just that before David’s death, Paul didn’t really see death as something worth spending time thinking about. Life seemed long; certainly long enough for Paul to have made a succession of life choices. He always assumed life would just keep going. This hopping from life path to life path had paid off in remarkable ways. Eventually, after years of searching for his place in the world, he was finally happy.
Or, at least, he had been happy until now.
The drive back from the federal building to Front Royal, Virginia, was solemn. Paul and Michael turned off Highway 66 and drove to a little town on the edge of the Shenandoah River. The Blue Ridge Mountains were covered in white. Down East Criser Road, they passed a library and a grocery store and turned toward Warren Street, past small shops selling Civil War paraphernalia. They eventually arrived at the home of David’s parents and solemnly delivered his ashes.
That evening, Paul made himself a cup of coffee and took off his shoes. He didn’t sleep that night. “I thought a lot about life. How precious and tenuous life is,” he says. “Culture teaches us to expect that we’re going to live into our seventies and eighties. Sometimes that happens, sometimes that doesn’t. I think people feel they are entitled to that, that they have a right to that. That happens for a lot of people, but not to a fair number of people.” If he had been the one who died on September 11 instead of David, Paul wondered if he could honestly say he’d done everything he wanted to do in life.
We’ve seen evidence of how people clothe themselves in the armor of their cultural worldview as a defense against truly realizing they will die. In general, the participants in Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg’s studies didn’t consciously know that were marshaling such defenses. If you’d asked them, they’d likely have denied feeling much fear about death. “Yeah, I know it’ll happen eventually,” they might have said, “but I don’t have to worry about that for a long, long time.” This certainly was Paul Watkins’s refrain as he built his highly lucrative, highly respectable career. On some level, he knew that what he was doing ultimately wasn’t meaningful to him. Even though he was enjoying himself, making money, and benefiting from the respect of those around him, somehow it seemed empty. But there would always be tomorrow—after he accumulated his fortune and built his gumbo empire—to do something more meaningful. Life seemed endlessly long—until his friend David died and Paul could no longer deny that life was fragile, and shorter than any of us like to think.
What allowed Paul to confront death honestly while so many others seem to remain in denial? For that matter, why did Candy Chang’s “Before I Die” wall affect people differently from John Carpenter’s horror films? Shouldn’t both reminders of death trigger our tendency toward protective denial?
University of Minnesota psychology researcher Philip Cozzolino has some ideas about this. “The notion that human mortality provides sweetness to life—an added zest that makes living more meaningful—is certainly not the view of death espoused by typical individuals,” he writes in his 2006 article in the journal Psychological Inquiry. “The more common human response to mortality is likely to involve themes of denial, fear, and/or discomfort.” But this very book is filled with cases of people staring death in the face without flinching, and then using the experience as a springboard not into prejudice, materialism, or culturally sanctioned superficial achievements, but into an authentic life governed by their internal compasses.
Cozzolino proposes what he calls dual-existential systems. We can encounter death in two distinct ways. One is the superficial, abstract way we bump into it on a daily basis—the glorified but cartoony killing in Hollywood blockbusters and even the real but distant tragedies we see in the news. Cozzolino also thinks this superficial awareness of mortality is what participants in terror management experiments experience. “Terror management theory researchers have made mortality salient for participants by exposing them to generic, abstract representations of death such as gory video scenes, visits to funeral homes,” he writes. “Conversely, for a terminal cancer patient or for a person who believes that he or she has actually died in a car crash and come back from the other side, the subject of mortality has become a tangible, experiential fact of life that is systematically integrated into their thoughts and behaviors.” He calls this deeper, personal, undeniable encounter with mortality death reflection, and contrasts it with the more superficial, abstract, easily deniable experience of mortality salience.
To prove his point, Cozzolino, along with researchers Angela Staples, Lawrence Meyers, and Jamie Samboceti, performed a series of experiments of the sort that terror management theorists are famous for, but they asked participants to reflect upon death in a way that made it more deeply personal than in past studies. The researchers not only asked participants to imagine their deaths, but also prompted them, among other things, to reflect on the life they had led up to that point. It’s reminiscent of the way some survivors of near-death experiences say their lives flash before them, or the question Candy Chang asked passersby to consider. As a result, participants who normally were oriented toward extrinsic ends (e.g., money and fame) but who deeply reflected on their own eventual deaths became less greedy and more spiritual. Interestingly, those who considered death more superficially—those who experienced mortality salience rather than death reflection—became greedier. One of the participants in Cozzolino’s research, recalling what it was like to reflect deeply upon death, summed it up well: “I realize now that our time here is relatively short and it makes me want to live my life to the fullest. It seems like such a waste of precious time to become caught up in materialistic modes of thinking.”
Of course, life doesn’t afford us many opportunities to encounter the idea of death deeply. And when it does, these reflections are typically not pleasant—in fact, they’re often traumatic.
The morning David Charlebois was killed, people all over the world simultaneously became trauma survivors. Even though most people didn’t know someone directly who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many experienced trauma on a vicarious level.
Surveying a sample of American college students, Georg E. Matt of San Diego State University and Carmelo Vázquez of Universidad Complutense de Madrid found that between 30 and 40 percent of people reported posttraumatic stress and general psychological distress in the weeks following September 11, 2001, even though they were nowhere near the attacks. There were similar findings following the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid that resulted in the largest loss of life from a single terrorist attack in European history.
But people experienced the events of 9/11 in both of the ways explored by Phillip Cozzolino. For most, the attacks were something that happened at a distance. Though the events were very real, for this group of people the actual experience was framed by the borders of a television screen. It wasn’t truly personal in the way it was for many others—those who were standing on Church Street or Liberty Street or Vesey Street that day, those who lost someone in the smoldering ruins, or those who narrowly escaped death themselves. The first group of people may have been able to use unconscious terror management defenses to deny their own fear of death. As the theory might predict, perhaps this is why news reports from all over the country highlighted rising prejudice against foreigners as many Americans fled to their own cultural worldviews as a defense mechanism. But people in the second group, such as Paul Watkins, who personally and deeply encountered death, couldn’t reassure themselves quite so easily. Many found themselves reexamining their lives. New Yorkers will tell you that their city was transformed in the weeks and months following the attacks. People were talking to each other differently. They were more courteous, more patient, more loving, more generous.
Paul couldn’t stop thinking about the course his life had taken. For the first time in years, he wondered why he’d chosen a life in business instead of fulfilling his religious vows. It was hard to remember. Something about ambition and age. He was now forty. His friends were making money, living conventional lives—the kind of lives that had previously seemed to Paul like the right way to live. But had he found real personal meaning in this kind of life, beyond the superficial trappings that only days before had seemed so important?
Since the tragic deaths of David and so many others, Paul realized on an emotional level what he had understood only in a hypothetical way before: We have only a limited amount of time before we die, and there’s nothing to do but make the most meaningful choices possible. Society tells us what the valued life paths are, what it takes to be respected by others. Starting his company was one of them, and it seemed easy to follow this path. But things had clearly changed.
Now Paul searched his heart furiously for a more authentic path, and saw that it had been there the whole time.
So he moved out of his upscale apartment and gave away most of his possessions to live in the community at St. Anthony of Padua Priory on Canal Street in New Orleans, joining the Dominican Order of priests. He surrendered his existence to God and committed himself to the ideologies of charity, community, common prayer, study, and service for the rest of his life.
He now sees this transformation as a kind of grace, one that allows him the opportunity to help others. Paul the millionaire entrepreneur had had no way to talk about grace or about God being present in the face of the evil of 9/11. “I couldn’t help anybody,” he says. “I had silenced myself.” His true aspirations had been present all along, concealed by convention and a straightforward view of success. “I felt there was a part of me that I had ignored and hidden from all this time.”
In 2005, Paul became the parochial vicar of St. Dominic Parish in New Orleans. Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. The nearby Seventeenth Street Canal levee failed. Garbage-filled water rushed over the city. Paul’s Bible and a rosary given to him by his father were lost in the flood.
The priests of St. Dominic Parish were among the last to leave the city during the forced evacuation, and Paul was the very first of them to return. He found the church, as big as an airplane hangar, submerged in ten feet of black water. The pews and kneelers were embedded in mud, and floodwaters had toppled the altar.
The neighborhood remained empty for weeks. Every house was damaged or destroyed. Electricity remained out, and basic resources were scarce. The community was uninhabitable. Paul assessed the ruins and wondered how on earth any neighborhood could come back from this.
But it would come back, and Paul would give it a push. “Someone had to take the risk and start rebuilding first,” he says. “The priests came back, and we all started cleaning. The National Guard carried out the pews. We reopened the parish and the schools, even though no one was there to use them. It was part of the healing process for the people, to see the church getting back to working condition. To have the church make a statement that it was committed to the city and the parish gave people hope.”
But to Paul’s surprise, the neighborhoods didn’t just bounce back; in many ways they bounced forward, in supersurvivor fashion. “If you’re going to reorient your personal values after a big tragedy like this, eventually you’re going to reorient your community’s values, which is what happened,” Paul says. “There’s no doubt the storm changed the city. There’s more compassion among the people. The focus on faith changed. It got stronger. Today, people who never, ever considered coming to New Orleans are moving here, and the city welcomes them.”
And in a weird convergence of faith and synchronicity, one of those newcomers was a young artist named Candy Chang. She’d come to New Orleans mourning the death of a dear friend.
Several weeks later, she would haul buckets of chalkboard paint to a dilapidated house with orange roof trim and stencil the words “Before I Die . . .”