I’ve watched rock climbers in Yosemite challenge the life/death boundary by free climbing the vertical mountain wall of El Capitan without using safety gear and leaping for fingerholds in the rock, knowing that if their fingers miss, they will fall 2000 feet and be dead. They want to push themselves to the edge of their abilities so that when they die, whenever this happens, they will know by the fast beating of their hearts, that they have lived. My wife Evelyn loved to be scared on looping, gut-clenching roller coaster rides. I choose to challenge death by hiking alone in the wilderness to see its wonders, being cautious not to disturb the bears and mountain lions that live there.

Why do we do these things? Do we secretly have a death wish, or are we unsatisfied with the sameness of our everyday life and want to spice things up?

Perhaps we grew up wanting to die young for a cause because we could see where the world was broken and we were willing to put our body on the protest line to fix it, facing teargas and the heavy, black truncheons of the police. Maybe we want to do something that is heroic enough to be found worthy of death. Some among us are willing to suffer for our art like musicians, painters, and writers who push on the limits of alcohol and drugs as they try to stay in touch with the peregrinations of their creative muse, believing that truth and beauty only come out of intense suffering.

What zaps us in our kips and knickers and won’t let go is the feeling that by taking these risks we are poking Death in the chest. We are flicking our noses and flexing our pecs at the Dark Specter. We are Buster Keaton sneaking up behind the bully, whacking him with a 2x4, and running away. Yet, when someone we love dies in a horrific accident or has a terminal illness, we clam up. Is it the sudden presence of death that unnerves us or is our own vulnerability what we fear the most?

Some people say that talking about death is morbid, so we don’t. I looked up the word “morbid” in the dictionary. One definition indicates an unusual interest in death. The Urban Dictionary references the phrase “morbidly beautiful” which intrigues me, although I don’t know what it means. Maybe it refers to someone who looks gorgeous in death, or a person who has killer looks and people swoon to the ground when they walk by. Every morning Maira Kalman reads the obituaries. “This is not morbid,” she says. “Just epic.”

When death changed from being a communal event of mourning to being something that was intensely private, we lost touch with the social and religious rituals that bound us to each other and released our pent-up tensions and fears and provided us with guidelines for how we could help each other grieve. The hands-on caregiving that our ancestors provided to family members has been reduced to the safe distance of benign sympathy cards with prepacked sentiments that we buy in the store, and slow, sad pats on the back to convey emotions we can’t verbalize because we have lost the language for doing so. We do not take the time to sit with the grieving and listen to them. We do not sit down and write long letters to friends with serious illnesses who need support. What would reduce our anxiety about death is if we actually talked to each other about our concerns about dying because then we could work through our fears and expectations before our final hours came.

For most of our life we aren’t exposed to dead bodies. People don’t die as often from the everyday mishaps and diseases that plagued our grandparents’ generation because we have antibiotics and vaccines. Older family members seldom live in our homes, so we don’t watch them grow old and brittle. They go to assisted living facilities, and when they die, the funeral home picks their bodies up and prepares them for burial or cremation. We do not sing to our loved ones in their last hour, nor wash their limp, cooling bodies in a final act of devotion. We no longer see the gaunt realities of aging or death up close, and we forget that this is part of reality. 

For people in Europe during the Late Middle Ages, death was a daily preoccupation because scores of their neighbors were suddenly, painfully, and inexplicably dying from the Black Death, the cause of which wasn’t understood for a long time. The Danse Macabre, or “Dance of Death,” from this time was an allegory used by priests and pastors to prod their followers to live righteously so that they would be ready to die at any time, which many of them did. Macabre is a synonym for, as you might have guessed, morbid.

In 1874, Camille Saint-Saëns composed a classical music piece called “The Danse Macabre” that was based on the French superstition that harkened back to this time when plague, famines, and the Hundred Years’ War were killing a lot of people. In the music, a solo violin begins playing eerie, dissonant tritones as skeletons dance. The music has been used in a number of movies and video games, including the 2014 gothic horror film Stonehearst Asylum. Danse Macabre is also the title of a book by Stephen King that explores our attraction to horror movies and books, the long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, books like Stoker’s Dracula, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Maurice Sendak’s depictions of our childhood nightmares of cold, slimy creatures grabbing our ankles from underneath the bed.

In nature, we see beauty in dead things, although we don’t think of them as being dead, like the empty, white seashells on the beach, and the renewal of green shoots of young trees rising from the blackened soil after a fire has burned down a forest that we loved to hike through. Then someone we love dies, and every image of beauty that once made us smile now pierces our heart because it reminds us of our loss. 

In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is the belief that a perfect moon is even more beautiful when it’s partially obscured by a cloud, an earthen tea bowl when its surface is slightly marred, or the blossoms of cherry trees when they are just past their peak and petals are beginning to drop on the ground in death. It’s the celebration of beauty while acknowledging the transitory nature of life. When I watch older people walk slowly with the depredations of age yet smiling and offering kind words to people they meet on the street, I see the beauty of the human heart.

Some cultures try to deflect Death’s personal interest in them by honoring its rightful place in life by attending annual death festivals and visiting the cemeteries of their ancestors, like the annual Japanese Obon celebration. Other cultural traditions include the Mexican Day of the Dead that is celebrated with skeletons and skulls, and the Celtic Samhain when the barrier between worlds thins to a gossamer veil on All Hallows Eve (Halloween) each year and we can dimly see and talk with our departed. In Kyoto, Buddhist monks will sit with a corpse and meditate on it as it decomposes to mush to help them accept the reality of death for all living beings.

I don’t think I’m addicted to the adrenaline, but I do get a rush seeing how close to death I can get without actually dying. I realized this was possible the first time I hiked an icy trail up the canyon wall in winter. I was standing at the top of Yosemite Falls at 6500 feet, in snow up to my knees, on the edge of the cliff, and staring at the frozen, slate-blue mountains around me, when I realized that the mountains didn’t care whether I lived or died. I could be forever dead in the next moment with one wrong step because I was standing on the actual edge and toeing the line. This scared me, but I was also exhilarated by the wonder of nature on display around me. I knew that I would take risks like this again. And I have.

Dying is traumatic and grief is messy. Whatever illusions I had about most everyone living a long life ended when my wife Evelyn died unexpectedly in her 40s from an undiagnosed heart problem. In the movies, our favorite characters almost always survive because of some heroic or miraculous intervention. In real life, miracles don’t happen enough, and people we love die and stay dead.

I don’t often watch horror movies. Real life is scary enough. The poet Charles Simic grew up in Belgrade when there was indiscriminate warfare throughout the city, and he saw the viciousness and stupidity of humanity up close. Life and death became arbitrary as bullies and territorial henchmen tortured and killed people and animals for revenge or because they were bored. 

We fight dying, especially if it’s from a terminal disease, hoping that the doctor made a mistake or that something else can be done, because we fear what comes next. “Terminal” sounds like we’re coming into a railroad station where we either return to the place we were before we were born, or we change trains for the next destination on the Existential Line. 

Is this life the entire play or merely the second act, and with death the curtain rises on Act Three? 

Doctors keep fighting, too, hoping that a new procedure, an experimental drug, will work. Death to them means defeat, and they take it personally. They do not want to tell their patients that they have three to five months to live because some people beat the odds and live longer for reasons that they can’t explain, while others unexpectedly die sooner. Where everyone gets off the page they need to be on is when doctors focus only on the disease, patients focus only on not dying, and neither party sits down, figures out what the patient values and desires the most about life, and helps them choose the option that would give them more time for this. Too often, we do an emotional bypass on our heart.

Rather than fighting until the bitter end or just giving up and crumpling away, there’s a third option. We do what is medically prudent, but we also get our affairs in order. We tell the stories of our lives to our children and talk about the family traditions that have been passed down for generations. It’s the Hindu tradition of “retiring into the forest” (Vānaprastha) where we set aside our list of endless tasks and begin sharing our lifetime of stories and our accumulation of wisdom. We should be doing this anyway, throughout the regular course of our life, but we’re always busy and think that we’ll have time to do it later. We often don’t.

In her work as a hospice chaplain, Kerry Egan listened to people who were dying and helped them talk about what had long troubled them. Some came to understand aspects of their lives that they hadn’t seen clearly before and began to deal with matters that they wish they had taken care of earlier, like reconciling with an estranged brother. Egan shares some of their stories in her book On Living. The message she kept hearing from them was not to wait until you are dying to talk about your regrets or do what you had always wanted to try. One woman said, “If only I had known, I would have danced more.” Another woman said, “I would have eaten more cake.”

Even when no one is dying, someone will think ahead and mention that they are making out their will, planning their funeral service, writing their obituary, or signing up to be an organ donor, just in case the unexpected should happen. Which it does, and far more often than we think it should. But no one else will want to talk about this, walls go up, and a lot of us still die not talking about death.

At funerals, while many of us don’t care to be near an open casket, some of us gravitate over and stare too long at the deceased person’s face trying to discern what they felt when they crossed over the life/death threshold, took the next spin on the eternal wheel of reincarnation, or plunged into the cosmic abyss of the eternal dark nothingness. Is that a little smile we see on their face, or a hint of horror? Those who knew the person well may see only the empty shell of who they were. 

When someone has a near-death experience, I eagerly read about it. Did they see the white light? Did dead relatives or angels with flaming swords show up at the gate and beckon them on into heaven or deny them entrance? I want reassurance that when my time comes, after all the whooshing, flashing lights, and the speeding, rocking vehicle of the transition slows down, I will be okay. 

When we come to the hour of our death, we will bring every dream we had that rose with the dawn and everything that has broken in our hearts. We will remember everyone who came and patched us back together as well as those who didn’t. We will bring everything said as well as the unspoken, the forgiven and the forgotten, all the people we loved and the few that we couldn’t. No matter how many items remain on our bucket list, no matter how many friends we’ve lost over the years, we will think that we understand what life and death are about, but we won’t, not until the moment when our love and fear unite.