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Someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it; and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed. —ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY, FROM HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY
“Someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star,” writes the author and artificial intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky in a work of Harry Potter fanfiction, “they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it; and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed.”
Various studies have shown that when we feel mortally threatened, we become jingoistic, hostile to outsiders, biased against out-groups.
So if immortality frees us from our fear of death, goes the thinking, we’ll grow more harmonious, less nationalistic, and more open to outsiders.
…and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. —MARY OLIVER, “IN BLACKWATER WOODS”
Our difficulty accepting impermanence is the heart of human suffering.
How are we supposed to live, knowing that we and everyone we love will die? Issa offers his own bittersweet answer. You don’t have to accept impermanence, I believe he’s telling us. It’s enough to be aware of it, and to feel its sting.
But by the 1930s, the deathbed had moved from the family home, where people once expired in their bedrooms of childbirth, flu, and cancer, to hospitals, where they died safely out of view. Thus began the century-long collusion, with which we still live, to pretend that death happens only to other people.
the pain of goodbye is part of life; that everyone feels it; that they would feel it again.
we’ve unwittingly taught them a delusion—that things are supposed to be whole; that real life is when things are going well; that disappointment, illness, and flies at the picnic are detours from the main road.
the news of transience comes to children, as well as to adults, as a relief, as the end of the gaslighting.
philosophers, who have come up with all kinds of ways (such as keeping skulls on their writing tables) to remind themselves of death.
Carstensen’s studies showed that the important variable is not how many years since you were born—but how few good years you feel you have left.
If you’re a naturally bittersweet type, you have a head start; you’re constitutionally primed to feel the tug of impermanence. Another way to get there is simply to wait for middle age, which seems to carry some of the psychological benefits of aging without the downsides of your body falling apart.
“Future Time Perspective” scale, which you can find on her website lifespan.stanford.edu,
Carstensen believes that there are other ways to access the wisdom of the aged. She advises—surprise!—listening to bittersweet, minor key music (I
She also recommends meditating on death. Notice impermanence in nature—the splendor of autumn, the baby sparrow fallen on your driveway. Spend time with older people in your family; ask if you can record their life stories. It’s hard to believe that they won’t always be there to tell them. Realize that one day those stories will live only in digitized form.
encourages Christians to live as if they might die at any time. This is similar to the wisdom of the Stoic philosophers, who advised us to remember death at exactly the moments we feel most invincible.
Seneca suggested that each night we tell ourselves that “You may not wake up tomorrow,” and that we greet every morning with the reminder that “You may not sleep again.” All of these practices are meant to help us treat our lives, and each other, as the precious gifts they are.
sometimes I remind myself that they could disappear tomorrow, or I could.
“Nonattachment is not against love, as is commonly conceived,” says the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “It is a higher form of love.” Rather, it advises loving in a nonattached way.
Even the overwhelming love you feel for your child comes in an attached or nonattached version. Loving your child for what he is, is one thing. And loving your child because he is yours, is another. Love without attachment is your love for your son because of what he is. Loving your son because he is yours is love with attachment.”
“You should love many more children as your own,” he’d said, “just as you love your sons. When you expand your attachment, then detachment happens. A broader sense of wisdom comes into your life.”
our bodies can’t live forever, and when they die, that soul moves on and finds a new body to live in. And that soul goes on and on. It never dies. Eventually that soul breaks the cycle of birth and death and can be one with the universe. That’s the idea of OM.”
Things happen for a reason. If this is our time, this is our time.”
“It’s like a cracked mirror now,” Lois says. “Something is always missing. The mirror doesn’t get put back the way it was, but if you work, you can get a piece of it back.”[*]
No matter how much your culture tells you to smile, it’s not human to simply move on.
TED Talk given by author Nora McInerny,
“What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal?” she continues. “We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you’ll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath. We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again….They’re going to move forward. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve moved on.”
What is silenced in the first generation, the second generation carries in the body. —FRANÇOISE DOLTO
Dr. Simcha Raphael,
between this world and the next is a window, not a wall, and that our “death-phobic” society stops us from seeing this.
I can either be an individual, or feel loved, but I can’t be both.”
“It’s hard for you to know what’s yours, and what belongs to other people. To the people who came before you.
On Being, interview Dr. Rachel Yehuda,
distress can affect our bodies at a cellular level that passes from one generation to the next.
the environmental influence has been so overwhelming that it has forced a major constitutional change, an enduring transformation. And epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking that.”
The survivors’ children were three times more likely to suffer from PTSD, if they’d been exposed to traumatic events, compared with demographically similar Jews whose parents weren’t survivors. They were more vulnerable to clinical depression and anxiety. And their blood tests showed the same neuroendocrine and hormonal abnormalities as the survivors themselves.
“preconception parental trauma” might be passed from one generation to the next.
it validates one of our deepest intuitions, the one that Simcha shared with me that day at the bereavement seminar: that not only can pain last a lifetime; it can last many lifetimes.
evidence started to accumulate that trauma could cause long-lasting bodily change, including to brain neurocircuitry, the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
The descendants of the traumatized mice showed the same erratic behavior as their forefathers.
2018 study of African American women, led by Dr. Veronica Barcelona di Mendoza, a professor at Yale School of Nursing, suggested that racial discrimination can cause epigenetic changes to genes affecting schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and asthma.
if pain endures transgenerationally, then so, too, could healing.
Maybe there really is a way, even generations later, to transform sorrow into beauty—to turn bitter into sweet.
Transgenerational healing takes many forms, all of them involving the creation of healthy connections with our ancestors.
traumatized mice raised in cages enriched with running wheels and mazes didn’t pass the symptoms of distress to their descendants.
help us to notice our own patterns—and to make space for them.
We can also undertake—whether through psychotherapy or our own truth-finding mission—to see our ancestors: to really see them, and love them, and thereby to love ourselves.
Dar Williams’s masterpiece “After All,”
