Why You Should Spend Time Thinking About Your Own Death

Envisioning your funeral sounds morbid, but research suggests that contemplating your mortality has real psychological benefits

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I driving my kids to school, trying my best to block out the intermittent screams from the backseat as they squabble over snacks, when a scene from my own funeral flashes into my mind.

“I loved my mom because she was so generous,” says my older son, who is somehow a well-dressed adult with his same freckled, five-year-old face, which is wet with tears. My other son nods in agreement from the pew, thinking back to all the times I bowed out of plans with friends or rearranged my work schedule so I could tuck him in at night.

It sounds kind of morbid, but I regularly catch myself thinking about my death — not really the act of dying, but what comes afterward. What my world looks like without me around. It’s not that I think I’m going to die sometime soon, or that I want to. I’m just keenly aware that, at some point in the near or distant future, I won’t exist anymore.

To be honest, coming face-to-face with my own transience on this planet mostly makes me uncomfortable. For most people, death is too mysterious to make us feel anything else — none of us have died…