No, Thinking About Death Isn't Morbid - Here's What It Actually Is

I want to talk to the part of you that read the title of this post and felt a small but distinct resistance.

Maybe not fear, exactly. More like a reflexive pulling back. A "yes, but" or a "I know, I know, but not right now" or even just a quick pivot to checking something on your phone. That response is so normal I could set a clock by it. And it's also, I'd argue, exactly why this post is worth reading.

Because the resistance isn't random. It's telling you something.

I've been writing and talking about mortality awareness for years - what it is, why it works, what it actually does when you let yourself practice it. If you haven't read those posts yet, this one is where I'd start, and this one is what it looks like in practice. But this post is specifically for the gap between understanding something intellectually and actually being willing to go there.

So let's name some of what gets in the way.

"Thinking about death will make me anxious or depressed."

This is the most common one, and it makes complete sense as a starting assumption. We've been culturally trained to treat death as the thing you deal with when you have to, not something you'd voluntarily sit with on a random Thursday at lunch. So of course the initial instinct is that inviting it in will make things heavier.

What I've found - and what the women I work with tend to find - is almost the opposite. There's something that releases when you stop spending energy avoiding a truth that's already there. The anxiety often lives in the avoidance, not the awareness. I wrote about this more specifically here - using my own dread about summer heat as an unexpected illustration of what mortality awareness actually does for runaway anxiety - if that framing is useful.

"I'll deal with that when I'm older."

Here's the honest thing about this one: it assumes a version of "older" that's guaranteed, and it assumes that future you will somehow find it easier than present you does. Neither of those is a sure thing. What I've noticed in my own life is that the women who find their way to this work rarely arrive thinking "I've got plenty of time." They arrive because something - a loss, a birthday, a quiet and persistent sense that time is moving faster than they'd like - has already started telling them otherwise.

"I'm not ready."

This one I have the most tenderness for, because it's the most honest. Not ready is real. Not ready is allowed. What I'd gently push back on is the assumption that ready is a destination you'll arrive at someday, like a train pulling into a station. In my experience, you don't get ready for this kind of work and then do it. You do it, and readiness arrives somewhere in the middle.

"This is for people who are dying, or grieving. Not for me."

Mortality awareness as I practice and teach it isn't end-of-life care. It's not grief work, though it can hold grief. It's not for people who are in crisis - it's for people who are living and want to do it with more intention. The women who resonate most deeply with this work are usually mid-life, functional, often objectively fine, and quietly aware that something in them is circling something important. That's the ideal entry point, not the last resort.

"It feels self-indulgent to think about my own death when other people are actually suffering."

I want to name this one because it comes up more than you'd think, especially among women who have spent a long time being very good at putting their own interior life last. The short answer is: clarity about your own mortality doesn't take anything away from anyone. It tends to do the opposite - people who work with this practice often find themselves more present, more generous, more genuinely available to the people they love. Not because they've solved anything, but because they've stopped performing a kind of okayness that was costing them something.

The resistance to mortality awareness almost always makes sense when you look at it closely. It's not irrationality - it's protection. The question worth sitting with is whether the protection is still serving you, or whether it's quietly keeping you from something you actually want.

You don't have to answer that right now. But you're here, which tells me something.

Maybe stick around and hear more over time?

~angel

This is the third post in a series on mortality awareness. Start with what it actually does, then read what it looks like in practice.