Transcript of Why It’s So Important To Talk About Death | Mel Robbins Clips

I watched your TED Talk, and it is 1 of the most beautiful, profound, and just kinda jaw dropping 20 minute talks I have ever seen in my entire life. I was absolutely captivated, and that led me to your book, Briefly Perfectly Human. And I have to say, first of all, before you even crack this book open, this is 1 of the most gorgeous books I've ever seen in my entire life. And I cannot wait for you as you're listening to us to hold this book in your hands because it's gonna make you think completely differently about your life. And where I wanted to start is there's so many passages in your book that just had me gasp and reread.

And I wanna open up to page 10 and have you read to the person listening from your beautiful book.

Thank you. Okay. Ready? Mhmm. Looking out the window toward the cirrocumulus clouds blanketing the countryside, I think about what I want for my life and who I want to be at my death.

It's the first time I'm asking myself these questions. I'm 34 years old. I realized that the elua I want to be on my deathbed is a woman who has filled her life cup all the way up and has built a life she feels comfortable leaving. On that bus in Cuba, I feel far off from being that elua. I'm a shell of a human with the mere pinprick of light left inside my body.

I feel the heat of shame for not knowing I've been living dead for so long. My insides tighten. Looking around the bus, I take stock of the individuals aboard and wonder what end they will meet. These people are currently distracted by the daily business of living. 1 day, they will die.

If they sensed the immediacy of life, the preciousness of it, the insignificant significance of it, what would they be doing differently now? How many unwritten books, undeclared loves and unfulfilled dreams lie dormant here in these seeds and in these bodies, would they be content dying from the lives they live or do they hunger for more?

Beautiful. Beautiful. This book begins where you start to talk about how death brings you back to life. What does that mean? And can you tell the person listening where you are in your life right now just personally?

Because you're 34 years old and you're not facing death. You're just contemplating it. So what does this passage mean?

This passage means that I'd spent 10 or so years in a career that didn't really fit me, doing work that while very important and noble, wasn't really working for me. Mhmm. I'd put on somebody else's life. It felt like I was wearing somebody else's skin pretending I was in somebody else's life, but I was in my own. And at 34, at this moment, I was finally noticing that I was not in my life.

I wasn't living it. I was surprised to find out that this was my life, even though I'd very carefully created all of it. And when I look back on my life, I saw somebody who hadn't lived the way that she'd wanted to. I saw somebody who was living out of alignment with who she was, but yet kept going and just kept putting 1 foot in front of the other. That's not the death I wanted to meet.

So something had to change. Have you always been this deep? I don't find myself to be very deep. What? You should ask my mom, maybe.

Well, the reason why I say that is because I think almost everybody has the experience of feeling stuck. And boy, oh, boy, did I relate to that sentence that you said that you felt like you had put on someone else's life. That even though you had carefully created it, now that you're in it, you're thinking, well, this doesn't feel like I thought it would feel. And what's interesting to me is you're the first person that I've ever talked to who in that very normal, real human experience of waking up and being unsatisfied with your life or having the courage to recognize this isn't what I wanted to feel like, that you immediately jumped to your death. Why is that an important leap, and how did it help you to access something within you to truly change?

In full reality, our deaths are practically begging us to live. My death is my best adviser. It's my greatest teacher. It's my greatest motivator. It's the 1 that tells me all the time that this life is brief and it's precious and it's short.

And so when I'm thinking about my death, I can see very clearly who I wanna be. I can see how I'm spending my time. I can see if I'm pleased with what it is that I'm doing. And if I'm not, well, my death is asking me to change it all the time. I'm gonna be the 1 who has to meet myself on my deathbed.

I wanna make sure that I've been happy with what it was that I did while I was here.

Wow. Can you tell the person that's listening how their life might change if they take to heart absolutely everything that you're about to share with us today?

Well, my hope is that when we are thinking about our deaths consistently, that we we think of our lives in context, like a big glass bubble that holds all of our hopes and our dreams and our wishes and our authenticity and our fear and our doubt and our insecurity. And when I'm thinking about my death, it allows me to see exactly who I've become. And knowing that I'm still living, I have an opportunity to change it. I think death can be a great inspiration for us to start living more authentically and be real with who we are and who we wanna be.

And you're gonna teach us how to do that?

Well, I'm gonna do my best to share what I've learned along the way.

I have a feeling you're gonna teach us how to do that, because I'm already thinking about time traveling ahead. And I, of course, create a lot of space for myself between where I am now and where I am when I'm on my deathbed. Why is it that we have such a hard time talking about death?

It scares us. It makes us uncomfortable. It brings up all of our greatest fears. It brings up our inadequacy. We feel really, really small on the face of it.

We don't know anything about it. Nobody who's ever been there all the way has been back to tell us exactly what happens. We use our human minds to try to think through something that is not part of the human experience. To die is human, but the death part, well, then it's over. And so my brain can't quite fathom what that might be like, and that makes us uncomfortable.

I hadn't even thought about the death part. I guess I'm more focused on the sadness that I feel for leaving. Yeah. Is that how is how does that also prevent us from seeing death as our greatest teacher and advisor in life?

Well, we've shown it because of the sadness and because of the pain and because of the grief and the loss. You know, we're conditioned to feel the good things all the time. I wanna feel happy and free and joyful and like I have everything I need, but to think that 1 day my life will end or that of people that I love also makes me really uncomfortable. You know, we we shy away from pain. We try to do our best to guard ourselves from pain, and that's a certain pain that's coming.

And so people don't wanna think about that too much either.

It's true. And there there's this saying that you have that I find both hilarious and comforting that talking about sex won't make you pregnant and talking about death won't make you dead. And why is it important for us to be able to talk about this?

People pretend it's not happening, and they pretend it's not happening by not talking about it. But it doesn't change the fact that it's happening. And then there's the other side of it that says, well, I can't talk about it because if I talk about it, I'm gonna bring it on myself. But it's gonna happen anyway. And so not talking about it doesn't make it not happen.

It just means that we are ill prepared, and it goes unexamined when it's time. We may as well just start talking about it. It's gonna happen anyway.

You have, made it your career to be a death doula, and a lot of people have not even heard that term before. Can you explain what a death doula is?

Sure. A death doula is a nonmedical care and support person for the dying person and their entire circle of support through the process. When I say the dying person, I mean, anybody who has come into recognition of their mortality. That means that even when people are healthy, we can help them create comprehensive end of life plans to think through their ideas about or thoughts around their death. When people know what they're gonna be dying of, which is typically what we think of a death doula doing, we can support them in creating the most ideal death for themselves under the circumstances.

And then after death occurs, we can help family members wrap up affairs of their loved one's life. And so we're doing all full scale, emotional, logistical, practical, spiritual support for the dying.

Wow. A lot of people have heard of hospice. How is this different from what hospice may provide to a family or someone who's dying?

It's collaborative. It's supportive. I like to think that we play really well together because often what happens is that I can either catch somebody much further upstream, like they're still healthy and they're starting to think about their death, or they have a serious diagnosis and they're not yet on hospice and they're trying to figure that but when somebody's on hospice, we work really well together. Like, oftentimes, a hospice nurse will come into the room and ask me what's going on with the day. How is everybody doing?

What needs paying attention to?

But it also sounds like you work with people who aren't well, I guess I should correct that. We're all dying.

We're all dying.

And we're all gonna die.

Correct.

And you work with people that don't have an acute diagnosis and aren't even that close to dying. They're just wanting to use death as a teacher and as a way to really think about and reshape their life.

And also get their plans down. Mhmm. You know, start to think practically through it. I noticed that a lot of the clients that come for end of life planning probably have parents that have died recently, or they're seeing the elders in their family die, or a friend died, and they think, what a mess. I don't wanna create that for myself.

And so what can I do right now in order to get that going?

You know when I think about end of death planning, when I'm about to get on a plane with my husband

Good call.

And I can't help but think over and over in the back of my mind, okay. Do we have our affairs in

order? Great.

Like, what happens if this plane goes down and we die? And I don't wanna think about that.

Understandable. Speaking of which, how's your planning going?

I think it's done. I mean, I we we've done some things with with with people. My husband, we've done some things with lawyers and and planning and setting things up, but I haven't looked at it in 3 or 4 years.

K.

I probably should.

Yeah. That'd be helpful.

How often should you look at this? Yearly. Yearly?

I think so. I love to do it around my birthday, and I know that sounds wild. But being able to celebrate another year reminds me that I'm still here, but 1 day I won't be like, I may not see my next 1. And so let me take some time to reflect. I think we need to look at all the practical things, but also start asking, like, the tougher questions.

Like, what kind of death do I wanna experience? Who do I want to make my decisions for me if I can't? How do I feel about life support? How do I feel about my life currently? Who do I need to say I love you too?

Who do I need to forgive? Think about it like big picture.

I love that you do this on your birthday.

Yeah. It's a nice it's a nice little ritual. It's a nice little touch.

So if you were to in fact, my birthday is coming up. Great. So what questions could I ask myself on my birthday to really invite the subject or the, I guess, I should say reality? Look at this. I'm even sanitizing the way I talk about this to create distance between me and something that is going to happen.

I will die. How do I use my death to shape my life, and what questions could I ask myself on my birthday to invite the reality of my death in and help me truly think about how I wanna live my life.

There's a lot of ways to go about this. You know, we can spend time on the practical, which I think is an easier entry point for some people, thinking about your affairs. You know? Who want who do you want to make your decisions for you? What do you think about life support?

What do you want done with your body? What services would you like? How would you like it celebrated, etcetera? Also your possessions, any dependents, all your important information and stuff. But I also suggest that we think about the life that we've lived so far.

If folks are interested, there's a little exercise that I like to do, which is to think of my life as a line. Think of my lifespan as a long line and place myself somewhere on that line, my birth being 1 end and my death being the other. So if I place myself someplace on that line at that current birthday, how far do I think I am? How much further do I have to go? And what do I want to experience in the time that I have remaining?

It allows me to conceptualize my life in terms of a lifespan and then see visually where else I still have to go, hopefully.

How old are you?

I'm 46.

How long do you think you have?

I would like to live another 40, 45 years. I don't wanna be, like, a 100 and something.

I'm thinking about it right now because I'm gonna turn 56, and I'd like to be a hundred.

You would.

Well, I I I mean, when I pull out the line and I visualize what I want because I get to say that might not be what happens, but I get to say what I want, I want to be vibrant and active and engaged and connected to my family.

Great. So what you just said is you listed also some core values, which is really helpful when we start thinking about how we wanna experience the rest of our life. If we have a serious illness or if there's treatment or something coming, you can think about your values. You said engaged and with your family and all those things that can be helpful when you're starting to think about what is remaining of your time and how you're gonna spend it.

I love that. How the heck did you get into this?

Into death work? Yes. I you know, I'm still wondering that myself. I mean, I know some events happened that made it so, but big picture, sometimes I'm like, now how do we pick this 1? But I really don't think that we choose death work.

I think death work chooses us.

I was just gonna say, do you think you picked this?

No. Not at all. I mean, when I look back, I can see how perfectly set up everything was so that this is what I'm doing with my time right now. I am a attorney by trade. I worked at legal aid for about 8 years.

And while I was doing so, I grew a very, very thick depression. And I say thick, because it was heavy. It was dense, but I was incredibly thin. My my body was a hollow shell. I wasn't living in it anymore.

And during that depression, I took a medical leave of absence, by my psychiatrist who was like, girl, you can't work anymore. And I said, I think you're probably right. So I took a leave of absence. And during that leave of absence, I went to Cuba where I met a fellow traveler on the bus, and her and I talked a lot about life. And we talked a lot about death because she had uterine cancer, and that's how the ideas around being with mortality really started.

Can you share more about that story?

Yeah.

Of meeting this woman on the bus and how that impacted you?

Yeah. So through all this beautiful serendipity, I ended up in Cuba. And as I was heading to the bus stop to go get on the bus to go to Santiago on the other side of the island, a car almost hit me along the way. And I slammed my hands on the hood and thought, don't die on these streets, please. Like, your parents will kill you.

Well, you'd be dead. So, like yeah.

Right. I would be mortified also with roots and death, but I'd be mortified that this occurred. And I as after the almost car accident happened, I was just kinda, like, shocked back into myself. I did what I had to do and raced out to the bus stop where I met a woman in line, and we started chatting. She offered to hold the bus for me so that I could get on it because I was in the wrong line and I was running late.

She did hold the bus for me in a really interesting way. And when I got on the bus, we started chatting. She told me that she was in Cuba to see the top 6 places in the world she wanted to see before she died because she had uterine cancer. And it was jarring to me. I didn't know anybody my age who had died.

She was 36. I was 34. And we started talking a lot about her mortality. I asked her questions that I still don't know where I got the hubris to ask, but I asked her about herself on her deathbed. I asked her what meaning her life's work had had up until that point.

And it created a really fertile ground for us to get into the thick, thick, thick bits about how we're living and ultimately how we're dying. During that bus ride, I thought there should be somebody that people can talk to about death because she hadn't been talking about it. Because when she would, her friends and family would tell her to focus on hope and healing and said, don't think about that. Oh, you're gonna get better. Don't worry about it.

Oh, think about now. But the reality is that she is dying. We are all dying, and we should be talking about death. And the fact that we'd had an opportunity to do so together, it seemed to create some value for her, and I also felt totally in my pocket talking to her about death. Like, I could ask all the weirdo curious questions I have anyway, and somebody finally answered them.

So it made it really a right place to begin talking about mortality.

Do you remember the first question you asked her about death?

I think I asked what would happen. Well, she was telling me about uterine cancer, and she said she was sick. And she said I might die. And I said, well, what would happen then? And she said, well, I guess I'll be dead.

And it was the beginning of, like, well, what happens if this is it? Like, what what does that mean? What does that mean? So we started talking about the afterlife. We talked about herself on her deathbed.

I asked her to look at herself on her deathbed and tell me what she saw. And while she did that, I started to think of myself on my own deathbed, and I didn't like what I saw. I didn't like what I saw, which is where that passage came from. I wanted somebody who was really full of her life. You know?

Somebody who, like, enjoyed it, somebody who was present for it, and I wasn't.

And that's what you meant when you said talk of death is starting to bring me back to life.

Yeah. I finally felt signs of life in my body again. I finally felt like myself. I felt like a version of myself. I really liked somebody who was curious and engaged and connected and present.

Like I was really present for that conversation. You know, I was leaning forward and maintained eye contact and wasn't thinking about what a mess I've made in my life. Rather, I was almost hopeful that I could feel myself again.

Well, it's interesting because if you do time travel forward, it creates this space that allows hope and something different to come into your consciousness. And there so many of us have this experience in our day to day life of just going through the motions. Yep. And it is true that when you allow yourself to push through the fear and the sadness and truly think about that moment on your deathbed, that it forces you to think about how you wanna feel about your life and, ironically, creates an opening to change. We're all dying, and we're all gonna die.

Correct. We are all dying, and we should be talking about death. When I'm thinking about my death, it allows me to see exactly who I've become, and knowing that allows me to see exactly who I've become, and knowing that I'm still living, I have an opportunity to change it. I think death can be a great inspiration for us to start living more authentically and be real with who we are and who we wanna be.