It is a bit comforting that, as the supposed great equalizer, death comes for us all in the end. Hamlet tells us that “your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table.” Similarly, climate change, pandemics, and eventual societal collapse are existential, planetary threats that could force us as humanity to truly band together. Why then is our psychological response to death, in this current global-capitalist-industrial era, to draw further within ourselves instead of to reach out and connect? I would like to think that shifting our cultural mindset towards a collective, selfless responsibility to each other would mitigate both the threats that face us and our approach towards them.

Solomon, Greenburg, and Pyszczynski write about terror management theory in their book The Worm at the Core as a potential pathway to this shift in mindset. We take comfort in cultural worldviews that “imbue our sense of reality with meaning,” and we tether ourselves to the self-esteem that comes with participating in that worldview. They claim that it is instinctive human nature. My question then becomes, how do we expand our tent of “us” to include the entire living system? I agree with their thesis that death awareness, both conscious and subconscious, is significant to how we carry ourselves through this life. I want to explore using that awareness to build something bigger than ourselves.

To make this shift, to find stability and meaning in an ultimately unstable and meaningless world, I think we might take our cues from Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.” She emphasizes the precious potential in our individuality – “each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular.” But just as beautiful is the community we build – “a brotherhood and a sisterhood” – and the passing on of the gift to the next generation. The Worm discusses symbolic immortality as a form of terror management, and James K. Rowe writes about how capitalism instructs us to pursue wealth as an immortality project, but if we rejected capital accumulation in favor of relationship building – if we considered ourselves wealthy in care and support – I imagine that death would not be so ominous. Sad, yes – leaving behind those you love – but not scary, as one would hope that those bonds will stand the tests of the great beyond.

Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. A quintessential symbol of the pain of death surrounded by the beauty of life, but not love or empathy.

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski (2015) The worm at the core: on the role of death in life, New York: Random House.

James K. Rowe (2016) Is a fear of death at the heart of capitalism? The Arrow.

Mary Oliver (2017) Devotions: the selected poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Books.

Millais, John Everett (1851) Ophelia, Tate Britain.