Meaning & Mortality - Reflections On Series 4

We pull together the strongest takeaways from months of conversations on death, grief, and loss, and we share why these topics reach so many people despite how easy they are to avoid. We explore how facing finitude can sharpen our values, deepen our love of life, and help us become more grounded and emotionally mature. 

• why death and grief conversations feel taboo and why they matter 
• how chasing immortality can be a way to avoid finitude 
• Katherine Mannix’s question about mortality as threat or catalyst 
• learning to sit with sorrow instead of suppressing it 
• what end-of-life “life audits” reveal about buried regret 
• B.J. Miller’s view of grief as a metabolic force 
• how loss can distort into blame when we do not process it 
• grief and death as teachers that clarify values and purpose 
• living and grieving at the same time without being overwhelmed 
• growing up past Peter Pan patterns toward grounded elderhood 
Please do reach out. Stay up to date on Substack, where I've published periodic newsletters. That's at this examine life. Links are in the show notes. 

Transcript

Why Talk About Death

SPEAKER_04 0:00

When we see people who are really highly emotionally transcendentally evolved, when we meet elders and very wise people, and elders may not be very old, but they've worked out what matters. They have a sense of being, a groundedness in the now that is the thing that we notice about them. That is the thing that makes them elders.

Kenny Primrose 0:32

Welcome to the Examine Life podcast with me, Kenny Primrose. I've been meaning to create this episode for some time, and here it finally is. What you're about to listen to is a kind of summary of reflections and clips from the last series of podcasts I've done, the ones I've been releasing over the last six or seven months. If you have listened to those conversations, you'll recognise that they are on a particular theme. They've been talking about death and grief and loss, not crowd pleasers. In fact, if you start talking about that stuff generally, people will avoid you. They don't want to be brought into those leaden conversations that are about gloomy things. I know this to be true because historically I've been one of the people who would avoid you if you started talking about death and grief and that kind of thing. Then yet, of all the episodes that I've done, these have had the widest reach and they've also given me the most kind of warm and heartfelt feedback. That tells me that I'm speaking into a gap. That these big themes about death and grief and loss are really human stuff that we don't really have often the vocabulary or the space to think about and talk about, but it affects us all. One

The Immortality Detour

Kenny Primrose 1:46

of the reasons I decided to do series on death was because it's something I'd avoided. Obviously, death had barreled into my life from time to time and it floored me at the time, though I would quickly find ways of suppressing the emotion or running away from it, that I'd athletically change subject when it came up. So as part of my own personal development, my journey into wisdom, I thought this is something I need to confront. Though perhaps in slightly typical style for me, I tried to confront it without actually confronting it. As in, my initial intention in doing a series on death was to find people who'd had near-death experiences. You know, experiences that were utterly extraordinary, where their heart stopped and they'd gone to some other place and they could come back and tell us all about it, and we'd have nothing to fear and everything to hope for. But you know, I still find those experiences fascinating. I'd love to speak to people who had them, but it was a way of not really having conversations about death and loss. It was a way of skipping over that stuff and just having, you know, something sunny on the other side. And I realize now that that's exactly what I was doing. My avoidance of talking about death or my desire to talk about immortality was to do with a fear of finitude, a fear of limit and death. I have no small amount of Peter Pan in me. And to be honest, I actually don't think I'm entirely to blame for that. Stephen Jenkinson, the writer on death, points out that we have a death phobic culture. We do our best to avoid thinking about it. People like Brian Johnson and the whole transhumanist movement are actively trying to beat death. That's their stated aim. Though I don't think this is a route to healthy, mature adulthood. In Martin Shaw's beautiful book, Liturgies of the Wild, he writes that it may be that this wrestling with death finally, testingly, brings us most profoundly into adulthood. When I spoke to the philosopher and expert on death, Stephen Cave, this is something he pointed out.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

I think the urge to immortality is often not motivated by a genuine conception of what happy forever would look like. It's rather motivated by the fear of death. And so it's quite possible that we long for immortality but don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. That you know, we want a bigger portion, even though we think the fruit is terrible. Because what's motivating us is the fear of this absence of this negativity rather than joy in what lies before us.

Kenny Primrose 4:23

I felt the truth of what Stephen Cave was saying there, that much of my desire to think about immortality comes from a fear of death. Though as fate would have it, none of the people I wanted to speak to about having near death experiences wanted to speak to me, or at least they didn't reply to the letters I sent. And so I ended up having conversations with some utterly compelling individuals, some really wise souls, about death and grief and loss, and I'm so glad I have. In fact, I think it's been probably one of the best personal development projects that I've ever willingly engaged in. It's forced me to confront things that I think are deeply important, but I've also found deeply hard and things that I've, as I say, avoided thinking about and talking about. Out of those conversations there emerged certain insights or themes that I think maybe want to speak to each other. So what follows is me pulling together clips from some different episodes and kind of summarising what my takeaways are from them.

Threat Or Catalyst Question

Kenny Primrose 5:28

But I think what follows could best be framed by a question that Catherine Mannix offered me when I spoke to her. Do we see our mortality as a threat or as a catalyst? It's a brilliant question, I think. And Catherine Mannix is a brilliant person to be voicing it. She has helped more than 10,000 people die. That sounds wrong. She was a palliative care doctor, so she has cared for more than 10,000 people in the dying. She's written about it. She's a deep soul and a wise kind of village elder. And this idea that death can be a real threat, and is a real threat for lots of us, is really profound and worth exploring. What happens if you if you look that threat square in the face? And how might we turn that threat into a kind of catalyst for life? And that's what I find lots of the conversations have helped me to do. To think about finitude and how it can be turned into something that helps me to appreciate the life I have more.

Learning To Sit With Grief

Kenny Primrose 6:36

Though to get to the kind of deepening of your soul, to the benefits that come with confronting the fact that you're going to die and that we're going to experience losses, we have to become okay, sitting with hard emotions. And this is something that I really do recall from Lucy Hoon was a wonderful person to speak to about this tendency. She is a resilient researcher, and she also tragically lost her daughter at far, far too young an age. And part of her experience is, as she shared with me in our conversation, about learning how to accept losses and to live alongside them.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

We have to somehow learn how to handle and sit with all of our emotions. And this is not easy for lots of people because people can be terrified of grief and sorrow and sadness and crying. But actually, you know, birth and death, they're all part of life. And we need to be able to just find our own individual ways of sitting with the misery and not avoiding it.

Kenny Primrose 7:53

In Catherine Mannix's experience, many of us don't do that work, not until we are actually facing and cannot avoid our own demise. And as she sat beside the bedside of many people, and she says she does this kind of life audit with them where they review their lives, the regrets and things that weren't dealt with begin to surface.

SPEAKER_04 8:16

But many times meeting people towards the end of life, because that was my job, you find that things resurface that were never dealt with at the time that they were sharp and raw and difficult, and somehow they got wrapped up and bundled around with busyness and distraction and other things. And now here at the end of life where there isn't a way of escaping them, they turn up in the audit and they're still as raw as they were because the work wasn't done.

Kenny Primrose 8:50

To try and avoid hard feelings, grief, loss seems, in Catherine's reckoning, a false economy. It's going to come back, and it's going to sit in you until it comes back and resurfaces. The palliative care doctor, B.J. Miller, is absolutely passionate about us finding ways to express our grief to process it. And when we don't, he points out that it doesn't go away. It just resurfaces in kind of distorted and perverted and damaging forms.

BJ Miller 9:18

Grief and us re-engaging with this ancient force of being alive, for one, will help us actually really feel alive. And for two, it will help us unpack some of our wayward meaning-making efforts. The blame, the scapegoating, the externalizing, the otherizing, etc. All this is fallout from us trying to keep hard, unpleasant feelings away. Um, and so one way or another, we've got to come around to learning how to feel these feelings and pause before acting on them. I couldn't believe this more strongly.

Kenny Primrose 9:56

Let those things surface. Grieve, feel the losses, learn to live alongside them. And Catherine, I think wisely suggests that the sooner you do this kind of thing, the better.

SPEAKER_04 10:08

Because grief cuts through many, many of these things. The loss of the hoped-for thing, the loss of the beloved thing or person. And until we've gone through that kind of dark night of the soul of the reality of the loss, we can't start to come out the other side of it living alongside the loss. So, in my storm metaphor, that will be, you know, if you're out in the sea of emotions, you you might have lost your mast or you might have a huge hole in the side of your boat because of that loss. But it will become one of the repairs that keeps you afloat, that allows you to get to your safe harbour of regret at the other end of your life, or hopefully earlier than that, by recognizing early that with finite. Why store up all that difficult work for the last bit of life?

Kenny Primrose 11:12

Stephen Jenkinson, who is a writer on death and grief, said seeing the end of your life is the birth of your ability to love being alive. It is the cradle of your love of life. When I spoke to BJ Miller, we talked about grief as a metabolic force, something that we need to process. And bad things happen when we suppress it, when we don't process it. And grief is something that we can't really avoid. The wiring, he said, is not about death and bereavement particularly, it's about loss. And loss is something that all of us experience from the day that we are born. And so he said grief, grief, when we allow ourselves to feel it, when we allow ourselves to metabolize that, it can really highlight what's precious about the lives that we do have.

BJ Miller 11:59

That grief can be this very beautiful thing. So, yes, there are those hard feelings of loss, but if you really let yourself be with that loss, you begin to see how amazing it is that you're alive at all to have experienced loving something or someone so much that the loss of that person or whatever is agonizing. It's tricky, but it does tell you how alive you are, and how amazing it is that we get to feel these love connections at all, and that they're so powerful that they hurt when they end or seem to end. So, so it can if you let it, if you keep rolling with the feeling, it will tell you that you are very much alive, and that that life, by virtue of learning how to lose things, you realize it is precious, it doesn't stick around forever as such. So it can help as a quickening force, it can kind of wake you up to your aliveness.

Loss Reveals Values And Purpose

Kenny Primrose 13:06

What BJ said there is a perspective that's shared by the other people I spoke to as well. This is Lucy Hoon on talking about death as a teacher.

SPEAKER_03 13:15

So I think that grief and loss are a portal to a more meaningful, in-tune life, and I truly think that they are our greatest teachers.

Kenny Primrose 13:31

This was something very much echoed by Victor Schrecker, the behavior scientist who I spoke to about developing a sense of purpose connected to your values, and his values, his sense of purpose came through the tragic loss of his daughter. He's written about this being something that highlights what life is.

Victor Strecher 13:51

In my graphic novel, I bring in the grim reaper to my class, and the grim reaper says, you know, I the shadow that I bring to life, it it highlights what life really is. It's like when you put a shadow on some, you know, text that you're writing and you say, Oh, yeah, I want that drop shadow. Suddenly the text stands out more. And that's what death does. It provides that background to say, oh, this is life, because that's death, as opposed to this middle point we're always in, or we're in so often when we're just kind of sleepwalking through life.

Kenny Primrose 14:29

I find that such a helpful image, so clarifying. And I loved speaking to Victor about how he recognized what his values were through being confronted with death, with loss, with grief. He says, and I can totally echo this, when we think about our limit, we think about our affinitude, we realize what the things are that matter most to us.

Victor Strecher 14:54

What are the things that matter most to me? What are the things that I value? And also what are the things I don't really value that don't matter the most to me? Um, once you start making that delineation, you're able to make decisions about how to spend this brief period of time. We're on this planet. And Julia taught me that. You know, she lived 19 years, but she lived 19 big years. She taught me to live every day as if it may be my last day. Um Marcus Aurelius once said, Don't live your life as if you're going to live 10,000 years. You know, I mean, death is life's change agent. It's a really important component to life. And so it helps you focus on who am I, what matters most to me, and how do I devote my energy, this very important resource that we have, our energy and vitality toward those purposes that we have in these different domains that we have in our lives.

Making Moments Feel Precious

Kenny Primrose 15:58

I wonder if you've ever had an experience or a loss that has brought your values into sharp relief. I once had a near-miss canoeing down a weir. It was foolish, and I came really close, I think, to not being here today. And when I think about that experience, I kind of shudder. The experience made me acutely aware of what I valued and how much I love my family and friends, and how much I loved actually being alive and what I wanted to spend my time doing, given that it is inherently limited. This is a learning that Catherine Manning seems to have internalized from her life as a palliative care doctor.

SPEAKER_04 16:34

Recognizing our finitude, recognizing our impermanence makes every moment count. And so everybody who's been longing for their holiday, and then they've got their five days, seven days, ten days in the place they've wanted to be, has experienced the kind of pointy end of this, haven't they? That every moment is precious. Every day I get up and I open the curtain and I look on a view that I wouldn't normally see. Um, or I'm with people who are precious to me who I know I'm not going to see again for a very long time. Or I'm experiencing weather that I never get at home. I've got friends who are cross-country skiing in Norway at the moment, and I've got other friends who are somewhere where it's sunny and beautiful, and and every moment of that is precious. And my friends out in the snow are marvelling at the reflection of the sky on the snow. They're marveling at the texture of the snow and the weird squeaky noises that it makes when they're snowshoeing across it. They're not just in a snowscape. All of their senses are involved in being here now in that way.

Kenny Primrose 17:51

I think part of the fear around grief is that we'll be overwhelmed by it, annihilated by it. I worry that I'll never recover or smile again if I go down that alley, if I allow myself to feel the feels. This hasn't been my experience in opening the door to hard feelings, nor the experience of anyone I've spoken to for the series. In fact, quite the opposite. It opened them up to a larger register of feeling. When you try and mute hard feelings, you also end up insensible to life's deepest joys. Here's a really helpful reflection from Lucy Hoon on living with grief.

SPEAKER_03 18:26

So I think the number one lesson for me was that you can live and grieve at the same time, which is just what you have described, isn't it? And life is wild and precious, you know, it is both things. It is unpredictable. So drink in the good bits, because you never know what's around the corner. And it yeah, it really has taught me to value it's taught me, yeah, who and what I love, what to really value the time I have, the short time I have on this planet. But I really didn't know beforehand that you could live and grieve at the same time.

Growing Up Into Elderhood

Kenny Primrose 19:14

At the start of this episode, I mentioned that I had something that might be described as Peter Pan syndrome, where I I like fun and enjoyment and so on, and I run away from the harder stuff in life. And this series has forced me to confront that. Martin Scholl says it's part of growing up, it's part of becoming an adult of maturity, and you see it written through all mythology that people go through, you know, the dark woods, the challenges, the facing and confronting things that you are scared of. And that is how you become an adult, that's how you become mature, it's how you become, in a sense, a village elder. Catherine Mannix speaks about those people that you meet who are emotionally evolved, and they're the kind of people that we want to be around.

SPEAKER_04 19:58

When we see people who are really highly emotionally transcendentally evolved, when we meet elders and very wise people, and elders may not be very old, but they've worked out what matters. They have a sense of being a groundedness in them now that is the thing that we notice about them. That is the thing that makes them elders. And some people take a lifetime to get to that, and some people learn it early in life through great hardship or through being recognized despite their own sense of unworthiness. I mean, and some people, yeah, just you know, they are they don't get there.

Kenny Primrose 20:52

I guess part of what I get from these conversations is that there's agency in how we choose to deal with loss, grief, and our own mortality. We can bury our heads, we can run away from it, and sometimes, at least in the short term, this is not a bad measure. But at some point we do need to confront our mortality, our grief and our losses, and it can become a tremendous catalyst for how we live, more closely aligned to our values, more appreciative of the good and the beautiful. A few days ago, I went to visit my 102-year-old grandmother. She is a shrunken and fragile version of herself, quite bird-like and surely close to the end. I've struggled in the past to sit beside people who are ill or dying, to be present with them. But I think confronting death and loss, talking about it, has helped me to become more present in that kind of situation. Perhaps it's beginning to allow grief to have it say, to integrate and metabolize hard emotions that allows us to really connect, to appreciate, to value what we really value. If I had done a series on near-death experiences or the afterlife like I kind of wanted, I'm not sure that it would have deepened me or made me any less of a Peter Pan type character. There are, of course, other bits of conversation that stood out to me in the series and loads of other people I would have loved to have spoken to, but time was limited. And perhaps it will be an ongoing theme that's woven into future conversations.

How To Stay In Touch

Kenny Primrose 22:24

I hope you, as a listener, have found it helpful in some way. Please do reach out. Stay up to date on Substack, where I've published periodic newsletters. That's at this examine life. Links are in the show notes. And there will be more episodes to release on various themes in the coming months and a new series that I'm going to begin creating. In the meantime, a massive thanks to the guests who contributed and to me for listening.