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.

Photo by Melissa Olson, chosen for this article by our dear friend, Phoebe

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).

My fascination with death seemed to be a premonition of what was to come. As a teenager, I had a nine-year-old cousin who was hit by an eighteen-wheeler while riding her bike, a five-year-old cousin who was struck by a car while crossing the street, several peers in high school who were killed in drunk driving accidents, and a few who took their own lives. I also had an uncle who drank himself to death after losing his job. A poorly timed visit to see him in the hospital was how I learned what the death rattle sounds like. And my aunt and uncle died in a plane crash, which is when their son (a few years younger than me) came to live with us.

If there’s one positive lesson all these deaths have taught me, it’s that we never know how long we have left to live. While this truth could paralyze us with fear, we can also allow it to motivate us to make the most of our lives by recognizing that we are limited in our time here. By admitting that we don’t have forever, we can plan for what is most important for us to accomplish while we still have time to do it.

It’s been fifty-one years since my grandfather died, and I’m still fascinated with the effect death has on human beings. One aspect that perplexes me is how most people refuse to think about it even though we’ll all meet with death one day. Humans seem to have a built-in mechanism to believe we will live forever. Even though we know forever is impossible, we always feel we have “at least a few more years.”

What intrigues me the most about death today is that the one certainty we all have in life is commonly the most unobserved. And what deficit does our refusal to think about death have on our lives? It prevents us from living intentionally because we always think we’ll have more time.

Most of us know what it’s like to go on vacation. What’s remarkable about vacationing is how much we can accomplish in the week before we leave. We achieve more in a week than we often do in twice that time during regular working hours. We get so much done in such a short period because we plan for our departure, so we think about everything we want to accomplish before we leave.

Imagine if we did this around dying. What if we put equal effort and planning into determining what we wish to accomplish in our lives before our demise? How much more satisfied might we be upon facing death? How much regret might we avoid? Might we be more likely to feel that we’ve lived a full and satisfied life if we took the time to plan for death in the way we prepare for vacation?

There’s so much more to this concept than just thinking about what we wish to accomplish. This also involves thinking about our legacy. How do we want to be remembered? What qualities or attributes do we hope to be remembered for? What might we do to feel fulfilled and even proud of our lives? Imagine looking back at your life on the day of your passing, feeling fulfilled, proud, or even pleased with your legacy. How might that improve your transition or even the days, months, or years leading up to your death?

In the same way that planning what we need to do before a vacation changes our relationship to time (or at least how much we can achieve in the same amount of time), we can do this when planning for that everlasting vacation we call death. It has a different appearance because it might be years before we go, and our “vacation” is eternal, but the concept is the same.

Here are a few questions that might help you get started:

1.    Are there any people with whom I wish to spend time, make amends, visit, or reunite while I am able?

2.    Are there any places I wish to see or activities I want to do while I can?

3.    Are there any projects I want to complete, like books I want to write, artwork I have yet to create, or home renovations I want to make?

4.    Is there anything I want to learn, a class I want to take, or an experience I want to have?

5.    Are there patterns I wish to change, resentments I want to release, or growth I hope to gain?

6.    How do I want to be remembered, and what might I do to be remembered in that way?

These are merely a few random examples. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Consider thinking about what you want to accomplish in your lifetime regarding your personal growth, relationships, career, finances, philanthropy, and creativity.

Don’t confuse this with a list of ways to prepare for death, such as creating a will, planning your funeral, or writing your obituary. That’s another subject altogether and a valuable exercise in itself. This is an exercise in planning what you want to do, be, and experience while you are alive, knowing you have a finite amount of time to accomplish it.

I am also speaking to myself as I write this. Even though I think about the varied aspects of death regularly, I have not created a formal blueprint as if I were planning for a vacation. When I had my TIA in December, I thought about the places I wanted to see with Melissa, the books I wanted to write, and the things I wanted to experience and achieve before my death, but I never wrote a to-do list to make those desires happen. And that’s because I, too, fall into the abyss of thinking that I will always have more time. Even following a health crisis, I quickly fell back into the procrastination built into our human defense systems.

I’ve written you today to get you thinking about life by acknowledging that death is inevitable and unpredictable. I’m sure I’m not the first person to recommend asking yourself what you might do if you only had a year left to live, but I may be the first person to warn you that the human mind has a built-in defense mechanism that prevents you from maintaining this thought.

We’re like the dogs in the Up movie who are continuously distracted by passing squirrels. Mid-sentence, during a conversation, they yell, “Squirrel!” and forget everything because of their diversion of chasing squirrels.

That’s us with life. We begin to ponder our mortality and think about all we want to experience in life until a text pings on our iPhones, the doorbell rings, the news announces a shortage of toilet paper, or the dog starts barking at the UPS guy such that we can’t hear ourselves think anymore. Suddenly, the distraction subsides, yet we do not remember what we were pondering. And it doesn’t matter anyhow because our death never feels real, so we procrastinate the planning as if we have plenty of time for it later.

Even if we cannot fulfill our desires in life before we die, at least there’s one thing that’s true: people are sure to remember us as some of the nicest folks who ever lived. Even better, we might eventually reach sainthood as time passes after our deaths.

Thanks for reading. As always, I would love to hear what this piece brought up for you. See you in the comments.

Love,
Bob

I’d love to hear from you in the comments ♥️

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics, mediums, animal communicators, and intuitive practitioners, BestPsychicDirectory.com. This is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read his articles before they become books.

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