Mortality as a Motivator
Mortality as a Motivator
Embracing death as a catalyst for living fully.
Bob Olson is a former skeptic and private eye who has investigated life after death for 27 years. He shares meaningful stories to expand minds, comfort grief, and uplift souls. He’s the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and founder of BestPsychicDirectory.com.
As a boy, I knew there was something powerfully transformative about the subject of death. I first recognized it when my paternal grandfather died. I was ten. Gramps was living with us at the time. He’d move around from house to house because he had five adult children. Each family would take him in for a couple of months at a time.
I heard a few relatives say that my grandfather could be difficult. I enjoyed his company, but my mother said he was an instigator with a twisted sense of humor. I understood the latter part after he told me he could blow smoke out of his ears. He puffed his Camel cigarette as I stared intensely at his ears, and then he slowly inched his cigarette below my vision toward my hand. I recoiled upon feeling the heat from the cigarette, which left him in hysterics.
I surmised that he was bored and entertained himself at the expense of others. Shortly before he died, he told my mother something about me that wasn’t true. It led her to slap my face when she confronted me with this and believed I was lying. The timing was unfortunate for her, as I was on my way to swimming lessons, and now I had a big red handprint on my cheek. She eventually learned that I was, in fact, telling the truth and Gramps was lying. This led her to call him a litany of names I wasn’t old enough to repeat.
To my surprise, my grandfather died about a week later, and that’s when it happened. Overnight, my grandfather’s character elevated several levels when my mother talked about him. Everyone in the family seemed to be in on the charade. Once Gramps had gone to Heaven, people referred to him as one of the nicest guys who ever lived. As each year passed, he eventually reached sainthood. My young mind grappled with this transformation in my grandfather’s character. One thing I knew was true: the simple act of dying improved one’s reputation.
This wasn’t the only clue I’d gained that death was an intriguing subject. I asked the adults in my life the many questions I had about death, and their answers varied. Some quoted scripture. Others became philosophical. Still, others avoided answering directly, saying things like, “If we only knew,” or “That’s the million-dollar question, Bobby.”
How is it, I wondered, the adults know how I should act and live my life, but they know so little about death? This sparked my curiosity so much that I talked about death a lot. When I was fourteen, Melissa bought me a book titled Don’t Be Afraid to Die. She didn’t think I was afraid of death. She had noticed my curiosity about the subject, and this was the first book she came across when her mother hosted a home book party (similar to Tupperware parties but with books).