Death Coach
I want a death coach.
Here in my town, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some twentysomething couch surfer teaching yoga and pitching themself as a life coach. You’ll know these people because they post an unrelenting stream of Instagram videos with them sitting on a bench or in the passenger seat of someone else’s car, dispensing pithy, unsolicited advice on things like self-care and authenticity. And for a fee, you can bring your myriad, complex life problems to your new guru, who will summon everything they learned from the first couple of chapters of The Four Agreements (they stopped reading once they got the gist of it), along with all of the enduring wisdom gleaned from their six months in yoga teacher training.
Look, I realize that I’ve cast a fairly wide net here and the reality is that someone’s age or occupation doesn’t have a bearing on their innate wisdom or their ability to give new perspectives to a familiar situation. And yes, there are plenty of experienced and accredited coaches who can enrich your life with structured programs that offer a logical path to your goal. My point is simply that because every single person is wholly distinct in their makeup, experience, psyche and goals, the input of a coach is limited to either a point in time or a field of expertise.
But what about death? Next to birth, it’s the only other experience that’s guaranteed for every human being. And we’re afraid to talk about it. It’s considered morbid - a topic reserved only for close friends and family at certain temporal junctures. Picture a young family having breakfast on a Tuesday morning, loudly chomping spoonfuls of Captain Crunch while chattering about the unpredictability of death, the passage of the soul and what realms might lie beyond this world. It doesn’t happen.
It’s not in the mainstream, either. In popular culture, death is defeat - it’s a tragic theme in dramas and the ultimate payback for villains in action movies. It’s literally the worst thing that can happen to a character. And nearly all clothing, technological and lifestyle companies hitch their marketing wagon to the illusory promise that using their products will make you look and feel younger — further away from death. What about a laptop whose slogan was - “A Laptop To Enhance Your Fleeting Time On Planet Earth.” You’ll never see it.
The world needs death coaches. People who will help you focus on what matters. People who will challenge your material goals and point you towards themes of substance and growth. We need programs that begin with the assumption that death awaits, so what are you going to do about it. Sure, you might be here ten years from now, but what if you’re not? How would that change what you do today?
Healthcare systems could benefit immeasurably from specially-trained professionals who would meet with everybody at say, age 40, and help them to plan for death, regardless of their health. What will you do when you get sick? What’s most important to you? What are you doing today to create a peaceful exit?
If people embraced the idea of a death coach, would we really see people teeing off on baristas for getting an order wrong? Hopefully. not. That’s certainly not what I want to spend my fleeting time obsessing over. And maybe that’s where the biggest value of a death coach lies — the closer that I feel the approach of death, the greater the meaning that I create in my life.