Confronting Mortality: How Writing Obituaries Helped Me Face My Fear of Death
I used to think I had a decent relationship with death. Or at least, it didn’t register in my anxiety’s greatest hits. But when the pandemic hit and death was suddenly everywhere—awaiting all of us in an unsettlingly immediate way—I became obsessed with chicken breasts.
The quantity of poultry I could stuff into my freezer was directly proportional to how safe I felt, a bizarre buffer against illness and death. Why? Who knows. I needed to find a way to control this uncontrollable, existential threat, and my brain decided to hoard bird flesh. At least it was somewhat practical and made meal-planning easier, but the approach had its limits. For instance, any time I pulled one out of the freezer, I would burst into tears. Not ideal for someone who eats a lot of chicken.
And if the global miasma of death wasn’t enough, in October 2020, my mother-in-law, who used a wheelchair and lived alone, had an accident and ended up bedridden in a nursing home. Because of the pandemic, my husband, my sister-in-law, and I could not visit or help or effectively advocate for her care. By the time we were allowed inside, her physical health had deteriorated profoundly from neglect, lack of centralized communication, and the general chaos that the COVID-19 crisis wrought on an already broken elder care system. She entered a painfully long spiral toward death. There was very little we could do about it.
To cope with this new uncontrollable situation, I became obsessed with cooking dinner (you might be sensing a theme). I had moved past my chicken-specific anxiety only to fixate more generally on food prep. My whole day revolved around planning, shopping, recipe selection, and cooking because I felt that my food choices were what held our lives together.
This wasn’t my first rodeo with death. I had grieved the untimely deaths of friends and family members, and even survived a dramatic car accident that belonged in a cautionary driver’s ed video, where our car went off a steep embankment and flipped (my friends and I managed to walk away with minor injuries).
But those events were just that—events. Moments to grieve, but still moments. This new threat of death felt more like a narrative shift, grueling and endless. Once death was thrown into my life in a visceral, relentless way, I discovered that I was actually pretty bad at dealing with it.
Despite being one of the only truly universal human experiences, death is strangely difficult to understand and accept. For many of us, for most of our lives, death is present only in an abstract way. We know, even as children, that death is a fact of life. But it’s so easy for it to feel like something that happens to other people—preferably people we don’t know. Death can stay safely out of the realm of possibility for us, until, suddenly, it can’t.
Throughout history, humans have developed traditions to toe the tightrope between terror of death and denial of it. It’s been said that in ancient Rome, it was the job of an enslaved person to whisper in a general’s ear that victory was fleeting and his own death was inevitable. The traditions of memento mori—Latin for “remember you will die”—are nearly as old as the religion of Christianity. Dutch vanitas paintings from the 17th century prominently featured skulls, rotting fruit, and hourglasses to remind viewers of the fleeting nature of life.
It appeared there were components to the death-coping equation: First, we must see death (or be a close witness) to believe it; second, we must meditate on it to accept it. We have to accept that it happens to people we love and that it will happen to us, with very little control over its timeline. Some find this acceptance through religious belief and prayer, but in general, modern death-coping traditions are anemic at best. It became clear to me that I needed to find my own way through my fear of death, as it wasn’t going away.
By Eden Robins. Sourcebooks Landmark.
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My personal death meditation tradition began when I stumbled across a documentary called Obit, about the New York Times’ obituary desk. In the documentary, I learned that most mornings, obit writers would receive a short brief about a deceased person, with a few phone numbers of loved ones to call. They were expected to research, write, and file a complete obituary by the end of the workday. One day, one life.
There was something poignant about this undertaking—devoting a full day, but no more, to learning everything you could about a stranger and the responsibility of narrating their life in print. It felt painful, but also heroic.
Though I’m not an obit writer, I am a novelist. So I decided to write obituaries of fake people. I wrote one every day for months. My first obit was about a woman who died of neglect in a nursing home. This wasn’t a conscious choice, but in retrospect, it was perhaps a way to process what my mother-in-law was going through. After writing the first obit, I became interested in a mention I had made about a daughter the woman had placed for adoption. The next day I wrote the daughter’s obit, which came many years later. Every day, I woke up and sat quietly until something sparked my interest, then developed a life and death out of it. It was calming to look back on these imagined lives and write what made them special.
During meditation, we focus on our breath, bringing this autonomic function into consciousness—not to control the breath, but to participate in it. This attention affects systems of the body we can’t consciously access. In this way, meditation acts like a magic trick, a secret portal to your mysterious insides.
By writing obituaries of imaginary people and allowing myself access to grief without the constraints of reality, I created my own method of meditating on death—a sandbox for exploring my grief without trying to control or be controlled by it. Fiction can be its own magic trick, a secret portal to the mysterious world.
And after weeks of writing fake obituaries, I found I could breathe more easily.
In the 1980s, psychologists developed “terror management theory,” hypothesizing that reminders of mortality lead us to seek comfort in certainty, making us more polarized in our opinions. On the flip side, research shows that in the face of existential threats, such as the pandemic, we may channel this fear into acts of creation, fostering curiosity, flexibility, and a sense of connectivity amidst uncertainty. Hence, the third step in my equation—after seeing and accepting death, we can strive to create something beautiful from it.
It was January 2021—during peak chicken-breast-in-freezer anxiety, as well as the attack on the Capitol—when I began writing daily obituaries that eventually became my new novel, Remember You Will Die, released on Oct. 22.
Remember You Will Die is told through linked obituaries and a few news briefs, lacking a traditional narrative. I finished the final draft the day my mother-in-law died, in July 2023.
Her death, even though we knew it was imminent, was still shocking and awful. To mourn her, my husband and sister-in-law decided to watch her favorite movie, Murphy’s Romance, and cook a family favorite meal: potato boats (no chicken involved).
With my extensive experience in fake obit writing, my husband asked me to help write his mother’s real obituary. It became a task I dreaded, as knowing her personally made it harder to distill her life from a helpful distance.
This relationship to death remains a work in progress. Channeling my fears into writerly habit hasn’t resulted in triumph over grief, but it has started to shape a healthier acceptance of mortality. While we cannot escape death, we can build a life that includes and respects it.
This article engages the reader not just through the narrative but also invites them to reflect on their relationship with death and how creative expression can serve as a means to cope. Feel free to suggest to readers that they share their own experiences in the comments, fostering community dialogue around this profound topic.