We Talk About Death to Enjoy Life: Why T&E Lawyers and Professors are the Happiest of the Lot

Trusts & Estates profs may enjoy this book review over at the New Statesman written by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams reviews four popular press books, three of which have been published in the last six weeks:

• Kathryn Mannix, With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial (Little, Brown and Company, 2018)
• Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017)
• Sue Black, All that Remains: A Life in Death (Doubleday, 2018)
• Richard Holloway, Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death (Canongate Books, 2018).

Here is an excerpt from Williams' review:

Odd as it may sound, these books are heartening and anything but morbid. ... [T]hey leave you thinking about what kind of human qualities you value, what kinds of people you actually want to be with. The answer these writers encourage is “mortal people,” people who are not afraid or ashamed of their bodies, those bundles of rather unlikely material somehow galvanised into action for a fixed period, and wearing out under the stress of such a rich variety of encounter and exchange with the environment. * * *

The most important contribution these books make is to keep us thinking about what exactly we believe to be central to our human condition. It is not a question to answer in terms simply of biological or neurological facts but one that should nag away at our imagination. How do we want to be? And if these writers are to be trusted, deciding that we want to be mortal is a way of deciding that we want to be in solidarity with one another and with our material world, rather than struggling for some sort of illusory release.

The full review, under the headline How Dying Offers us a Chance to Live the Fullest Life, is available here. 

I myself have always believed that when one is in the business of talking about death for a living, whether as a funeral director or as an estate planner, one develops a certain realistic view that ... it could be me next (immediately followed in my brain by, "Does my nominated executor know where to find my will? If my students think I died intestate, I would be so embarrassed!") 

Alas, the books reviewed by Williams are not about Trusts & Estates attorneys and professors, or why (in my anecdotal experience), this cohort tends to be a reasonably happy bunch, as lawyers go (although let's acknowledge that alcoholism and depression are rampant in our profession). But the review is a good reminder that talking about death tends to make one appreciate life.

To life!

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

For more titles to guide one's reading and talking about death and dying, there is a bibliography on my Academia page (to which I added the titles in the post) that is broken down into the following sections:
• Hinduism
• Buddhism
• Confucianism
• Daoism
• Judaism
• Christianity
• Islam
• Philosophy, Science & Medicine
• Miscellany
The bulk of titles fall under the last two headings.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

I am not entirely sure why we need Wills, Trusts and Estates. The Hell with the dead. Money is for the living.