How has Becker shaped the way in which you approach your work as a forensic pathologist?

In terms of talking to families, for example, it’s important to recognize that everyone’s so-called “immortality project” is different. So, when I address a family, I can understand that they are going to have some motivation, urgency even, to cling to or want an immortality project to think of their loved one, and that the death is not meaningless. Everybody wants meaning, and I do try to give them some meaning the best I can.

In general people want the truth. As Becker says in The Birth and Death of Meaning, having a coherent story is important. One of the problems that causes difficulty when a loved one dies is not knowing the truth. People then construct a story around something that’s not true or something they don’t know. They don’t have a way of incorporating the loss. They don’t have a coherent story. Everybody wants to make it a story about the life and death. They would prefer it to be a heroic story, one that instills meaning in the life lost.

How have you seen people react to, and make meaning from, the death of their loved one?

Oftentimes a person will try to use a tragic event as a basis for some type of action or behavior. For example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving was created by mothers who lost children to drunk driving. We see people get very activated from that tragedy. I don’t know a good word for that. I’ve tried to use the word “redemption.” Basically taking something and trying to make something better from that tragedy. Being able to say, “I have a mission, my life has meaning and I’m fulfilling, or redeeming, the death of my loved one.”

People either incorporate the death in a functional way that will let them go on with your life, such as developing a mission, or they may become dysfunctional, go into a depression, become an alcoholic or a drug addict, etc. Dysfunctional is sort of the generic term for the opposite of incorporating trauma and experience productively or functionally, or developing a mission.

Everybody wants to make it a story about the life and death. They would prefer it to be a heroic story, one that instills meaning in the life lost.

Do you educate your employees and colleagues about Becker and/or death anxiety? If so, what does that look like? If not, why not?

Rather than saying “Becker says that…,” I use some of his language in expressing thoughts. Something like, “Yep there’s another immortality project.” But you know, we’re in medicine. And doctors think they already know everything, right? Just to keep up in medicine is enough of a challenge. Being busy and driven by practicality, many doctors may not go for deep philosophical thought.

If you could change something about your work, or the systems in which you conduct your work, to lessens the impacts of death anxiety, what would that be?

That’s a good question. Gun deaths are absolutely the most common homicide. If you think about one characteristic of American culture, it is just how much we love our guns. We are victims of our advertising industry. They have been so successful in feeding on our fears, our patriotism, our love of violence, our desire to protect our families…everything has been wrapped up in the advertising on guns. The gun industry has exploited it to just a wonderful degree using advertising and entertainment.

I think education is probably the only way that I can conceive of that has a chance of countering this. Becker probably should be taught at some level in our educational system, to help us understand how we think and react to things. We do have this death anxiety and it manifests in a lot of dysfunctional ways. And if we confronted it, if we were more aware of it, perhaps our responses would be less dysfunctional. And this sort of goes with the Buddhist philosophy (I’m also a practicing Buddhist). One of your daily meditations is supposed to be on death. With a meditation on death every day, we recognize that we are going to die and that should motivate us to recognize the more important things, and to also recognize that some of our escape mechanisms are counter-productive to true happiness.