How Do You Feel About Death?
I asked 89 people to tell me about their relationship with mortality.
Over a decade ago, I had an unusual opportunity: conducting my own small exploratory study, over the course of the entire semester, using rigorous methods, at a community college. I say “unusual” because this kind of challenge was not at all in step with my other community college class experiences. The professor, though, was not your average professor. And on the first day of class, she told us in a very matter-of-fact way that she had cancer, and that she wasn’t going to get better. She was quite forthcoming with laying out her approach to our semester together: she would teach this research methods class like a graduate seminar because time—especially hers—was short.
Some students dropped. I stayed. Her class ended up being the beginning of a journey that I am still on, over 10 years later, voraciously investigating how and why human beings think and act the way they do. (Spoiler: to me, death anxiety and the search for meani…
