Jigsaw puzzle by Nina Torr
Buy online
Sooner or Later We All Face Death Sooner or Later We All Face Death
i
Illustration by Tomek Kozłowski
Wellbeing, Opinions

Sooner or Later We All Face Death

Will a Sense of Meaning Help Us?
Warren Ward
Reading
time 5 minutes
Warren Ward:
A writer, psychiatrist and psychotherapist.

We will all die one day, no matter who we are, or what we believe. An awareness of death can have a positive impact on our daily lives.

“Despite all our medical advances,” my friend Jason used to quip, “the mortality rate has remained constant—one per person.”

Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memorizing everything that could go wrong with the human body. We diligently worked our way through a textbook called Pathologic Basis of Disease that described, in detail, every single ailment that could befall a human being. It’s no wonder medical students become hypochondriacal, attributing sinister causes to any lump, bump or rash they find on their own person.

Jason’s oft-repeated observation

Information

You’ve reached your free article’s limit this month. You can get unlimited access to all our articles and audio content with our digital subscription. If you have an active subscription, please log in.

Subscribe
Warren Ward:
A writer, psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
Publish date: 11.12.2020

Also read:

We’ll Always Have Ourselves We’ll Always Have Ourselves
Fiction

We’ll Always Have Ourselves

Paulina Wilk
Paulina Wilk:
used be an editor of the Culture & Society section. She is a writer and journalist focusing on global development.

On the excess of fear and shortages of hope that become more severe in the latter part of the year, counterbalanced with mostly optimistic observations.

Which day of the illness was it? The 12th, or maybe 14th. The illness whose name we don’t want to say aloud despite it being everywhere around us. Even calling a friend becomes scary, everyone keeps talking about the same thing. Or about politics, and it’s hard to tell which is worse.

Continue reading