New York Manhattan mother jumps eight stories to her death with her infant son strapped to her chest; baby survives with minor injuries
Sources say Harlem lawyer Cynthia Wachenheim penned a 13-page, handwritten suicide note before jumping out of an eighth-story window, taking her son, Keston, with her. The baby was saved from the impact when the woman landed on her back on the pavement.
By Rocco Parascandola , Joe Kemp AND Vera Chinese / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 4:46 PM
Updated: Thursday, March 14, 2013, 8:11 AM
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A Manhattan lawyer strapped her 10-month-old son to her chest and leaped to her death from an eighth-story window in Harlem on Wednesday — and the baby miraculously survived with little more than scratches, police sources said.
Cynthia Wachenheim, 44, who left a suicide note castigating herself for being a bad mother, landed on her back after taking the fatal plunge. Baby Keston was in a harness. He bounced off his mom on impact and then rolled away from her motionless arms.
“I heard a small scream when she was in the air,” said witness Steven Dominguez, 18. “I noticed something falling, but I didn’t want to believe it was a person.”
Dominguez, who teared up as he spoke, said the landing made a horrifying sound.
“It was a loud bang,” he said outside the woman’s building on Bradhurst Ave. near W. 147th St. “It sounded like a big piece of wood hitting the floor.”
“When I got closer, I saw the baby crying,” he said.
Cynthia Wachenheim and her 10-month-old son Keston plummeted eight stories from a Harlem building near W. 147th St. The baby was in stable condition Wednesday night at Harlem Hospital, hours after his mother’s 3:30 p.m. jump.
Sources said Wachenheim left a rambling 13-page, handwritten suicide note on small pages of notebook paper.
“The note said she was not happy and she talked about what she planned to do,” a source said. In the note, Wachenheim is “saying to her husband, ‘I love you. I’m making you suffer. You’re going to think I’m evil,’” a source said.
“She thinks she’s a failing mother. On the last page, she refers to postpartum depression. She was supposed to see a therapist, but she blew him off.
“As the note goes on, you get the idea she’s explaining why she’s going to do it,” the source added.
The note, which mentions little Keston having a physical handicap, was unsigned — but cops compared it to handwriting samples and determined that it was written by Wachenheim, the source said.
Wachenheim died, but her son Keston survived with minor injuries. He was in stable condition at Harlem Hospital. Police learned — not from the note — that Wachenheim was convinced her baby had cerebral palsy, although doctors said there was nothing wrong with him, said the source.
Wachenheim’s husband, Hal Bacharach, 48, was at work when his wife jumped, the source said. He was spotted on surveillance video leaving the upscale building at 12:55 p.m., less than three hours before the leap. Neighbors said he stormed out of their two-bedroom condo after a loud argument. Shouting echoed through the halls.
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“He was yelling at her today,” said Christian Johnson, 37. “It made me stop and listen. He was asking her why she wouldn’t pick up the phone. He kept repeating it. Then, the baby started crying.”
A police source said Wachenheim was taking antidepressants and that pills were found in the apartment.
A different police source said Wednesday was the first time police were ever called to the apartment. The couple had lived at The Sutton — where similar apartments run about $325,000 — for about three years.
Wachenheim, a high school valedictorian in Albany and a Columbia Law grad, was on maternity leave from her $118,000-a-year job in the city court system. She worked there for more than 15 years doing research and writing for judges.
Wachenheim, whose lifeless body lay on the street covered with a whire sheet, wrote a 13-page suicide note where she talked about not being happy and what she planned to do, a source said. She also said in the note to her husband that she loved him and was making him 'suffer.' “She was wonderful — very devoted to the court (and) wonderful with everyone she worked with,” said her boss, John Werner, chief court clerk. “It’s a tragedy.”
“We are deeply saddened by this tragic incident,” said David Bookstaver, spokesman for the city’s Office of Court Administration. “Our thoughts are with her family.”
Two NYPD narcotics detectives were parking a car nearby and were the first to respond after they saw the tragic fall.
Cops took the boy, who appeared to only have scratches and minor injuries, to Harlem Hospital. He was listed in stable condition and was expected to survive. A source said he underwent a CT scan.
Neighbors were shocked that Wachenheim, who officials said worked as an associate court attorney with the New York County Law Office, took her only child with her in the fatal leap.
“She was very friendly,” said Yaa Dwamena, 32. “She always greeted you when you came in and out of the building. She didn’t seem like she was going through anything.”
Neighbor Christian Johnson said he heard Wachenheim and her husband, Hal Bacharach, yelling at each other, but didn’t think it was anything more than a typical squabble until he saw Wachenheim dead. A building worker described Wachenheim as a devoted mom.
“She was always holding him in her arms,” the worker said. “She was always with the baby. She loved that baby.”
Johnson, who has known the couple since they moved into the building, said he never saw signs of trouble.
“I saw her a little while ago,” he said. “She seemed stressed out — but what mother of a 10-month-old isn’t stressed out?”
Johnson also thought that Wednesday’s argument was just a typical squabble between parents, until he saw Wachenheim’s body on the sidewalk.
“I saw her on the ground and I lost it,” Johnson said.
With Barbara Ross, Kerry Burke and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
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Indiana girl’s public suicide and heartbreaking note sparks anti-bullying legislation in the state
Angel Green hanged herself and left a note to her mother that said, ‘It’s bullying that killed me. Please get justice.’
By Sasha Goldstein / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, April 4, 2013, 5:07 PM
Angel Green in happier times. The 14-year-old hanged herself outside and left and heartbreaking suicide note pointing her finger at bullying as her cause of death.=pic
By the bus stop, they found their Angel hanging from a tree.
On her bed at home, for her stricken mother to find, the 14-year-old Indiana girl left a note that read, in part, “Why did I deserve this pain?”
The heartbreaking suicide last month of West Lafayette’s Angel Green has now led to anti-bullying legislation at the state’s capital.
Green was an 8th-grader, who hanged herself March 5. The note she left behind — penned in a careful hand and addressed to her classmates — pointed clearly to the growing menace of bullying.
Indiana mother Danielle Green took her daughter’s plea “to get justice” straight to the legislature. =Pic
“Have you ever thought about what you said to me? huh... maybe not! because you killed me everyday,” she wrote, leaving the note beside her bed for her mother.
“P.S.,” the note ends, “it’s bullying that killed me. Please get justice.”
The girl’s devastated mother, Danielle Green, took her daughter’s plea straight to the state legislature.
Angel Green’s suicide note points the finger at bullying to which she was subjected. =pic
She’s pushing for passage of House Bill 1423, targeted at making school’s accountable for bullying. It would require them to note and report such incidents in an annual report, WRTV-TV reported.
The bill would further require training for all school staff and employees on bullying prevention. Any incident of bullying would be reported to the students and their parents.
The bill has passed the state’s House and will go before the Senate for a vote.
Angel Green said her suicide was from bullying.=pic
"I want the schools to have more training and I want the kids and everybody to have support and resources for how to handle it," Green said as she visited the statehouse in support of the bill.
Such legislation, Green believes, could prevent further suicides. Her daughter had long been bullied by her classmates.
"They called her whore, slut and countless names, and told her she was worthless," Green said. "She did this before the bus was going to be there so her bullies would see her."
Green was joined Wednesday by other mothers, including Lana Swoape, who lost her daughter Tori, 15, to suicide in May.
In Angel Green’s case, still just a month after her death, her final note speaks volumes to the bullying she faced as a middle-school student.
“You told me so much that I started believing it,” she wrote on a piece of notebook paper. “And I was stupid for doing that. Every morning, day, night I look in the mirror and cry, and replay the harmful words in my head.”
Mom talks about why anti-bullying bill is importan...: Danielle Green's 14-year-old daughter killed herself on March 5, unable to endure continued bullying. Green hopes a bill advancing in Indiana's legislature will help other children.=video
INDIANAPOLIS - — Danielle Green didn’t cry Wednesday as she told lawmakers about how her teenage daughter, Angelina, killed herself on March 5 after two years of being bullied.
The tears welled, instead, when the Senate Education Committee voted 8-2 to approve an anti-bullying measure that better defines just what bullying is, and helps schools know how to identify it and react.
“My daughter’s story is now heard,” the West Lafayette mother said after the vote. “It gives my Angel wings.”
House Bill 1423 now goes to the full Senate for debate and a vote, which supporters hope sends it to Gov. Mike Pence to be signed into law.
The bill easily passed the House, 77-17, on Feb. 25 — when Angelina, 14, was still an eighth-grader at Battle Ground Middle School in West Lafayette.
The pictures Green brought with her to the Statehouse show a red-haired smiling girl. The story Green told, though, was of a child who hung herself after two years of being harassed.
Her hair. Her freckles. Her weight. All were targets of teasing by other children. And, perhaps worst of all, an assault by her father. After his arrest became public, the crime committed against her became just one more thing with which to taunt her.
Wednesday, after waiting more than four hours at the Statehouse for the Senate Education Committee to work its way to HB 1423, Green became the only one who had the chance to tell her story to the full committee.
With time growing short, and legislators beginning to leave, Chairman Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, urged supporters of the bill to cut their testimony short. While he pledged to stay and hear personally everyone who wanted to share their stories, and show their pictures, Kruse warned them that if a vote wasn’t taken soon, there would no longer be a quorum to take a vote.
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Failure of the bill then would have meant it died in the Senate.
The group chose Green, who with a trembling and nervous voice that grew stronger as she spoke, told the lawmakers her daughter endured endless bullying in school that continued online after school.
“They called her names. They pushed her. They tripped her in school. They have thrown food and trash at her during school,” Green said.
Holding her daughter’s photo so the senators could look in her eyes, Green told them: “This could be any one of your children. She is just like anybody else. Beautiful. She’s intelligent. And now she’s gone.”
She didn’t tell the senators how her older daughter found Angelina missing on the morning of March 5. Or how she drove to look for her daughter, and discovered that someone had been found hanging from a tree. She didn’t describe how she kept telling herself her daughter would show up, all the time fearing that the body that police had found was Angelina.
Instead, she read to the senators the letter she found later.
“Dear eighth grade,” Angelina wrote. “To all the bullies that have called me names, (you) are the reason why I am feeling the way I am now. . . . I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to be saved from the pain.”
Green said she repeatedly talked to the school, but the seriousness of what was happening to her daughter was dismissed.
Wednesday, Sen. Pete Miller, the Avon Republican who sponsored HB 1423, told the committee that bullying is different now than it was when they were children.
This isn’t teasing, he said, and it isn’t something that schools can just brush off. Instead, Miller said, it is repeated humiliation that doesn’t end with the school day, but instead continues via the Internet, cellphones and social media.
A law passed in 2005, he said, is insufficient. It is too vague on just what is bullying, with inconsistent application of the law from district to district.
Under the bill approved Wednesday, bullying is defined as overt, repeated acts or gestures — made in any manner, whether verbally or electronically — that create for the targeted student a hostile school environment that places the student in reasonable fear of harm, has a substantially detrimental effect on his or her physical or mental health, and substantially interferes with the student’s academic performance or ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s services and activities.
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In addition, the bill lays out procedures for schools, including provisions for anonymous reporting of bullying incidents; timetables to report incidents to parents, school officials and, if necessary, law enforcement; and discipline procedures for schools that fail to investigate and also for false reporting of bullying.
The bill, which applies only to traditional public schools, also requires schools to provide training for its employees on bullying, and requires schools to give age-appropriate lessons on bullying prevention for all students in grades one through 12 by Oct. 15 of each school year.
James Todd, a retired Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department sergeant, told senators he worked in the department’s education unit, spending time in every school system in Marion County.
“Bullying was a problem in every system that we worked in,” Todd said. “Some districts tried to deal with it directly. And some just let it go until it erupted into violence.
“I wish that we had had House Bill 1423 in those days,” Todd said, saying it would have given schools a clear definition of bullying while requiring administrators to confront bullying as a serious impediment to education.
“There has been much talk lately about making our schools safe,” Todd said, referring to efforts in Indiana and other states to deal with the threat of gun violence. “Talk is cheap. This bill in its original form would actually help create safer schools.”
Todd referred to “its original form” because supporters Wednesday were alarmed that an amendment, offered by Kruse and backed by conservative activists, would render the bill meaningless.
Tracie Wells, director of Bully Safe Indiana, said, in fact, that supporters might rather see the bill die than become law with changes that would water down the definition of bullying and the provisions that spell out how schools must respond.
Wednesday, no one testified against the bill. But former Marion County Prosecutor Scott Newman, who was among those who helped draft the bill using language that already is law in 35 other states, said conservative groups expressed concerns that it infringed on First Amendment rights of free speech and religion.
Newman said the concerns were unfounded.
“It was such a modest bill that identifies bullying problems and allows for prevention and training,” Newman said. “That’s it. But people decided to take that on, and they said their concerns are the First Amendment.”
To combat those fears, the supporters had their own amendment drafted, spelling out that nothing in the anti-bullying language interferes with participation in religious events, or the exercising of First Amendment rights.
The committee adopted that amendment, while rejecting the one, offered by Kruse, that supporters felt would have diluted the bill.
Newman said his world changed the day of the Columbine High School killings 14 years ago.
“I realized the whole bullying phenomenon . . . was much more lethal than anything I was used to,” he said.
Newman said he began looking more deeply into what was happening in the schools, and how they were responding.
We're all going to die and we all know it. This can be both a burden and a blessing.
Julie Beck May 28, 2015 the Atlantic
In the heart of every parent lives the tightly coiled nightmare that his child will die. It might spring at logical times―when a toddler runs into the street, say―or it might sneak up in quieter moments. The fear is a helpful evolutionary motivation for parents to protect their children, but it's haunting nonetheless.
The ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus advised parents to indulge that fear. “What harm is it, just when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?” he wrote in his Discourses.
Some might say Epictetus was an asshole. William Irvine thinks he was on to something.
“The Stoics had the insight that the prospect of death can actually make our lives much happier than they would otherwise be,” he says. “You’re supposed to allow yourself to have a flickering thought that someday you’re going to die, and someday the people you love are going to die. I’ve tried it, and it’s incredibly powerful. Well, I am a 21st-century practicing Stoic.”
He’s a little late to the party. Stoicism as a school of philosophy rose to prominence in the 3rd century B.C. in Greece, then migrated to the Roman Empire, and hung around there through the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 A.D. “That Stoicism has seen better days is obvious,” Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University, writes in his book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. He stumbled across the philosophy when researching a book on Zen Buddhism―“I thought I wanted to be a Zen Buddhist,” he says, “but Stoicism just had a much more rational approach.”
Though the word “stoic” in modern parlance is associated with a lack of feeling, in his book, Irvine argues that the philosophy offers a recipe for happiness, in part by thinking about bad things that might happen to you. The big one, obviously, is death―both yours and that of people you love.
“We can do it on a daily basis, simply by imagining how things can be worse than they are,” he says. “Then when they aren’t that way, isn’t that just wonderful? Isn’t it simply wonderful that I get another day to get this right?”
For Irvine and the Stoics, thoughts of death inspire gratitude. For many others, thinking about The End inspires fear or anxiety. In fact, the latter may be the natural human condition.
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“We are different from other animals in that we are uniquely aware of our own mortality,” says Ken Vail, an assistant professor of psychology at Cleveland State University. “Certainly other animals recognize they can die―if a cheetah chases an impala, or chases us, both us and the impala are going to run away. We recognize that as an immediate threat of mortality. But the impala doesn’t sit in the safety of its office aware of the fact that it will eventually die. And we do.”
This is the price we pay for the nice things consciousness has given us―self-reflection, art, engineering, long-term planning, cooking our food and adding spices to it instead of just chomping raw meat straight off the bones of another animal, etc. We’re all going to die and we all know it.
But we’re not always actively thinking about it. When people are reminded of death, they employ a variety of strategies to cope―not all of which are as well-adjusted as Stoic gratitude. That many kinds of human behavior stem from a fear of death is the basis of one of the most prominent theories in modern social psychology―terror-management theory.
It’s the hope of symbolic immortality that calms the frightened rabbits of death-fearing hearts―the idea that people are a part of something that will last longer than they do.
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Terror-management theory exists because one day, some 30-odd years ago, Sheldon Solomon was perusing the library at Skidmore College, where he’s a professor of psychology, and he happened to pick up The Birth and Death of Meaning, by Ernest Becker. “This is nothing to be proud of, but the cover is white with green splotches on it, and I was like ‘Ooh, what an interesting color,’” Solomon says. “Then I liked that it was a short book with big print. Again, nothing to be proud of, but true. And that’s why I reached for it.”
Once he opened the book, though, Solomon was taken by its central question―Why do people do what they do?―and how it was presented, without “turgid academic jargon,” he says. Becker offered an answer to that question: People do a lot of the things that they do to quell their fear of death. So Solomon and two of his friends from grad school, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, set out to test that idea empirically.
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The only antidote to death is immortality. And so, terror-management theory holds, when faced with the idea of death, people turn to things they believe will give them immortality, literal or otherwise. The hope of true immortality can be found in religion’s promises of heaven or reincarnation, or in some of science’s more dubious life-extension promises (Just freeze your dead body! They’ll wake it up later!).
More often though, it’s the hope of symbolic immortality that calms the frightened rabbits of death-fearing hearts―the idea that people are a part of something that will last longer than they do. Their culture, their country, their family, their work. When thinking of death, people cling more intensely to the institutions they're a part of, and the worldviews they hold.
What that actually means in terms of behavior, is trickier. The research shows that what people do when they’re feeling aware of their mortality depends on the person, the situation she’s in, and whether she’s focusing on death or it’s just in the back of her mind. (The TMT literature, which details a wide range of effects, is now fairly substantial. A 2010 metareview found 238 TMT studies, and this page on the University of Missouri website lists nearly 600, though it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012).
When death is in the front of your mind―when you pass by a cemetery, when someone you know is sick (or when, in a lab, a researcher has just asked you about it)―the tendency, according to TMT, is to want to push those thoughts away. You might suppress the thoughts, distract yourself with something else, or comfort yourself with the idea that your death is a long way away, and anyway, you’re definitely going to go to the gym tomorrow.
A couple of studies have shown that conscious thoughts of death do increase health intentions, for exercise and medical screenings, though whether people actually follow through on those intentions is unclear. Promising yourself you’ll eat better may just be a strategy to get death off your mind.
When death is on people’s conscious minds, “they can wield logic to deal with it,” Vail says. “This would be similar to your mom saying, ‘Put on your seatbelt, you don’t want to die.’ So you think about that and recognize, yes, she’s right, you don’t want to bite it on the way to the grocery store, so you put on your seatbelt.”
According to Solomon, even young children use versions of these same strategies. His new book, written with Greenberg and Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, cites the story of 5-year-old Richard, from a series of interviews the psychologist Sylvia Anthony conducted in the 60s and 70s:
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“He swam up and down in his bath [and] he played with the possibility of never dying: ‘I don’t want to be dead, ever; I don’t want to die.’ … After his mother told 5-year-old Richard that he wouldn’t die for a long time, the little boy smiled and said, ‘That’s all right. I’ve been worried, and now I can get happy.’ Then he said he would like to dream about ‘going shopping and buying things.’”
Classic distraction move, Richard. Though at times, our own coping mechanisms may not be much more sophisticated. “Americans are arguably the best in the world at burying existential anxieties under a mound of French fries and a trip to Walmart to save a nickel on a lemon and a flamethrower,” Solomon says.
But shopping excursions can only distract you so much. Even once you stop actively thinking about it, death is still prominent in your nonconscious mind. “One metaphor is the file drawer,” Vail says. “You pull out a file and read it, then you get distracted, now you’re thinking about dinner. You put [the file] back in the drawer, you pull out dinner, now you’re looking it dinner, but whatever you were thinking about previously is now on the top of the file. It’s the closest thing to your conscious awareness.”
This is when, the research shows, people's attitudes and behaviors are most affected―when you’ve recently been reminded of death, but it’s moved to the back of your mind.
Unfortunately, a lot of what death brings out when it's sitting at the top of the file drawer is not humanity’s most sterling qualities. If people feel motivated to uphold their own cultures and worldviews in the face of death, it stands to reason that they might be less friendly toward other worldviews and the people who hold them.
“Americans are the best in the world at burying existential anxieties under a mound of French fries and a trip to Walmart to save a nickel on a lemon and a flamethrower.”
The very first terror-management study involved “22 municipal-court judges in Tucson, Arizona,” according to The Worm at the Core. The judges were tasked with setting bail for alleged prostitutes, but first they were asked to take a survey. Some of them just answered personality questions, but some were also asked two questions about death: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.” The standard bail at the time was $50, set by judges who didn’t take the survey. The ones who did take the survey set the bail an average of nine times higher.
“The results showed that the judges who thought about their own mortality reacted by trying to do the right thing as prescribed by their culture,” the book reads. “Accordingly, they upheld the law more vigorously than their colleagues who were not reminded of death.”
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But, Solomon says, the researchers later repeated that study with students, and found that only those who thought prostitution was “morally reprehensible” opted to set a harsher bail. The logic goes that those students wanted to uphold their values, and punish transgressors. Since then, more studies have shown this tendency: When mortality's on their minds, people prefer others in their (cultural/racial/national/religious) group to those outside it. This dynamic has manifested in silly ways―in one study liberals were more likely to make conservatives eat a gross hot sauce after a death reminder and vice versa―and in more serious ones―reminders of mortality have been shown to make people more likely to stereotype others.
While wanting to promote your own worldviews can mean putting others' down, that isn't the only way people seek to feel like part of something greater than themselves―searching for that symbolic immortality. Looming mortality can also lead people to help others, donate to charity, and want to invest in caring families and relationships. (And studies have backed up that people do these things when reminded of death.)
These reactions have also been observed outside the lab, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when death was likely top of mind for many Americans for quite a while. Comparisons of survey answers before and two months after 9/11 found increases in kindness, love, hope, spirituality, gratitude, leadership, and teamwork, which persisted (though to a slightly lesser degree) 10 months after the attacks. But Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski point out in their book that there was also a lot of fear and derogation by Americans of the “other” after 9/11, specifically Muslim and Arab others.
“It’s not the case that awareness of mortality and the ensuing terror-management process is an inherently negative one that causes prejudice and closed-mindedness and hostility but instead it appears to be simply rather a neutral process,” Vail says. “It’s one that motivates people to indiscriminately uphold and defend their cultural worldviews.”
How you manage your terror, then, depends on what’s already important to you―and that’s what you’ll turn to when confronted with mortality. In one study, empathetic people were more likely to forgive transgressions after a death reminder; in another, fundamentalist religious people were more compassionate after thinking of their own mortality―but only when compassionate values were framed in a religious context, such as excerpts from the Bible or Koran.
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Terror-management theory contends that there’s something different about our fear of death, compared to other fears. Every other threat is survivable, after all. And in research, thinking about death has produced just as strong of an effect whether the alternative was something neutral, or another threat like rejection or pain. So a fear of death is not just like a fear of rejection, except more.
Except Steven Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, doesn’t think death is necessarily such a unique threat. In 2006, he and fellow researchers Travis Proulx and Kathleen Vohs developed the Meaning Maintenance Model, which says yes, thinking about death can inspire these attitudes and behaviors, but for a different reason. Death, according to their theory, is a threat to the way we understand the world, similar to uncertainty, being rejected by a friend, or even―Heine’s example―finding a red queen of spades in a deck of cards. All these things interrupt what Heine calls “meaning frameworks―understandings of how the world works. When we think about the fact that we’re going to die, it calls all of those assumptions into question. All these things I’m trying to do, I won’t be able to succeed, my relationships will be severed, the way I think I fit into the world, ultimately I no longer will. This is bothersome.”
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But perhaps not more bothersome than other threats to meaning. Heine says Meaning Maintenance Model studies have found that thinking about death does not have a noticeably larger effect on people's attitudes and behaviors than, say, watching a surreal movie. A metareview of TMT studies also notes that the effects of thinking about death are less significant when compared with thinking about something else that threatens someone's sense of meaning.
Thoughts of death still lead people to uphold their worldviews according to this theory, but it’s because, when faced with an idea as confounding as one's own mortality, people turn to the other things in their lives that still make sense to them. While the two theories have a lot in common, Heine says MMM can explain one thing that TMT cannot: suicide.
“TMT would argue that while we want to have a sense of meaning as a way of keeping away thoughts of death, one of the key motivators of suicide is feeling that your life isn’t very meaningful, wanting death when you feel like you don’t have sufficient meaning in your life," he says.
The thing that makes death different, Heine says, is that it’s not solvable. With other meaning threats, you can try to fix the problem, or adjust your worldview to accommodate the new information. “The fact that we’re going to die is a problem that we can never fully resolve throughout our lives,” he says.
But maybe that’s for the best.
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“I know we’re supposed to be super afraid of death. But it’s good, isn’t it?” asks Laura King, curator’s professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “If life never ended, think about it, right? Isn’t that like every vampire story or sci-fi movie? If you live too long, after a while, you just lose it. Life no longer has any meaning, because it’s commonplace.”
King did a study in 2009 that offers an alternative, economical perspective on death and meaning. She showed that after reminders of death, people valued life more highly―and conversely, reading a passage that placed a high monetary value on the human body increased people’s number of death thoughts. This is the scarcity principle, plain and simple―the less you have of something, the more you value it.
But “most of us don’t live like we’re aware that life is a finite commodity,” King says. She describes an exercise she has her students do, in which they write down their life goals, and then write what they’d do if they only had three weeks to live. “Then you say, ‘Why aren’t you doing those things?’ They say, ‘Get real, hello, we have a future to plan for.’”
“Everybody always says life is too short, but it's really long. It's really, really long.”
“Live every day as though it’s your last” is nice but profoundly unhelpful advice, when you know that today is probably not your last day. I’m not sure what I’d do if I was going to die tomorrow―round up all my loved ones and fly them to Paris? Or maybe just throw them a really nice dinner party, the kind where everyone ends up sprawled out on couches, overstuffed and warm from the wine.
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Either way, I can’t do that today. I have to go to work.
“Everybody always says life is too short,” King says, “but it’s really long. It’s really, really long.”
Once people’s days truly are numbered, their priorities do seem to shift. According to research done on socioemotional selectivity theory, older people are more present-oriented than younger people, and are more selective in who they spend time with, sticking mostly with family and old, close friends. Other studies have shown them to also be more forgiving, and to care more for others, and less about enhancing themselves.
This all fits in well with Irvine’s Stoic philosophy. Rather than pulling curtains over the darkness on the other side of the window, you stare straight into it, so when you turn away you’re thankful for the light.
Irvine gives the mundane example of buying a lawn mower. “As I’m doing it, I have the realization that this is conceivably the last lawn mower I will ever buy,” he says. “I don’t like mowing the lawn, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve only got X number of times it’s going to happen. Some day, this moment, right now, is going to count as the good old days."
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Unfortunately, Western culture isn’t exactly death-friendly. Death is kept largely out of sight, out of mind, the details left to hospitals and funeral parlors. Though most Americans say they want to die at home, few actually do―only about 25 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most other people die in hospitals, nursing homes, or other facilities.
This is why, in 2011, the mortician Caitlin Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death, a self-described “group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death-phobic culture for inevitable mortality.” She’s also written a book about working in a crematory, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and hosts the “Ask a Mortician” webseries.
“Death doesn't go away just because we hide it,” Doughty wrote to me in an email. “Hiding life's truths doesn't mean they disappear. It means they are forced into darker parts of our consciousness … Death is the most natural thing in the world, and treating it as deviant isn't doing our culture any favors … We don't control nature. We aren't higher-ranking than nature.”
This is terror management writ large, a culture that pushes death away as best it can. Even though, ultimately, it can’t.
More people are coming around to Doughty’s way of thinking. “Death salons” and “death cafes,” where people gather to talk about their mortality have sprung up across the U.S., and many doctors, like the Being Mortal author Atul Gawande, are working to advance the conversation around end-of-life care, getting patients involved in planning for their deaths.
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But the research shows the effects of thinking about death aren't all grace and gratitude ―so would bringing death out into the open ultimately help or hurt humanity?
“At first, thinking about death regularly made me move up and down and way up and way down the emotional spectrum,” Doughty writes. “But over time thinking about death moves you closer to magnanimity. You realize that you will have to give your body, your atoms and molecules, back to the universe when you're done with them.”
She also points out that TMT studies are isolated instances, and don't look at what happens when people think about death regularly, over time.
Maybe the key, then, is being deliberate. Not letting thoughts of death sneak up on you, but actively engaging with them, even if it’s hard. In one 2010 study, people who were more mindful were less defensive of their worldviews after being reminded of death, suggesting that “mindfulness can potentially disrupt some of these kinds of processes that go into terror management,” says Vail, the Cleveland State University psychologist.
Solomon, too, is hopeful. “I like to think there comes a moment where sustained efforts to come to terms with death pay off.” Vail suggests that freeing oneself from the psychological reactions to death might get rid of the good effects along with the bad, but Solomon’s willing to take the trade. “If you look at the problems that currently befall humanity―we can’t get along with each other, we’re pissing on the environment, [there’s] rampant economic instability by virtue of mindless conspicuous consumption―they’re all malignant manifestations of death anxiety running amok.”
It’s probably not possible to erase all fear of death―animals have a drive to survive, and we are animals, even with all that consciousness. Even if being mindful about death means getting rid of the good along with the bad consequences of death anxiety, people can be generous and love each other without being scared into it.
"Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him," E.M. Forster once wrote. I don't know if there's really any salvation, but if we accept death, maybe we can just live.
About the Author:
Julie Beck is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees the Health Channel.
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