How writing prepares us to die

“Now that I’ve done this, I feel like I could die tomorrow and it would be ok.”

A writer I worked with, a woman in her late 30s, shared this with me months ago with tears in her eyes. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head ever since.

What she’d done was write a memoir. It had been a long, grueling (and occasionally euphoric) process over nearly two years, and she had often doubted herself. But she finished. The book turned out beautifully, and as her editor, I was proud of what she’d created and everything it had taken to get there.

What she said made immediate sense to me. But I also wanted to understand it: What exactly was she describing? Why does writing your story make you feel ready to die? It wasn’t so much that she had accomplished something (although of course she had) but more that she had completed a deeply significant internal process.

She was expressing, in some sense, I’ve done the work of a life: I’ve made meaning of my experiences; I’ve looked back, remembered, and taken stock; I’ve brought forth what was buried deep inside of me; I’ve seen the bigger picture of my life; and I’ve left something of myself behind for others.

As someone who helps people write books for a living, I’ve witnessed and guided people for over a decade as they’ve wrestled with the processes of inner excavation and meaning-making that personal writing demands. I’ve seen the deep struggle and the joyful relief and completion of telling one’s story or sharing a deep truth. This process often culminates in a deep sense of I’ve done the work I came here to do.

If the process is engaged fully, something essential gets finished—some “unfinished business” within the psyche.

This is true not only of memoir, but any writing that probes one’s own experience in order to pass on wisdom to others. I’ve heard it from people writing books that capture their life’s work—ideas rooted in their own lived experience that they’d spent years developing, refining, testing in real time, and contemplating. So long as they were expressing something that was significant to them, deeply felt, and most importantly—rooted in their own experience—there was inevitably a powerful and transformative psychological effect. The person who finishes the book is not the same person as the one who started writing it. The feelings of lightness and peace once the process is complete are near-universal.

Meaning-making happens naturally in the creative process, and also at the end of life. Research shows that at the time of death, meaning-making becomes a central psychological task. At the end of life, we have the widest vantage point to reflect on the whole of our lives. Even just thinking about the end of our lives—contemplating death—allows us to see our lives through a wider lens and gain clarity on what really matters.

Writing prepares us for death because writing is a lifelong practice of meaning-making. It asks us to do, in advance and over many years, the very work that psychologists say becomes essential at the end of life: shaping experience into story and significance, finding meaning in our suffering, deciding what mattered, and developing a coherent narrative arc for our lives.

In this way, writing is a rehearsal for the retrospective perspective of death.

When we write about our lives, we do something out of the ordinary. We temporarily step outside of our lives, halting the flow of experience, and look back on our lives as if they were already complete. We ask ourselves:

• What were the important experiences of my life?

• What shaped the person I’ve become? Who is that person, anyway?

• What was it all for?

• What was the larger story that was unfolding?

• What did I learn through it all?

Those are fundamentally the same questions mortality eventually asks of everyone, and this is probably why people feel such deep relief after writing a book. They’ve answered those questions, however imperfectly.

They feel more ready to die only because they’ve brought forth something buried inside of themselves, but because they’ve already done some of the most important psycho-spiritual work that death itself demands.

At the end of life, this work of life review and reflection tend to happen naturally, helping the dying person let go and embrace the fact that this life is coming to an end.

A psychotherapeutic intervention known as Dignity Therapy supports this natural process in palliative care patients, helping them to die with dignity by inviting them to reflect on the life they lived and what has mattered most to them. At its heart, it is strikingly similar to the work of personal essay and memoir writing: shaping experience into narrative, finding meaning, capturing and recording memories, and leaving behind a record of what they experienced and learned. I’ve included some questions from the Dignity Therapy Protocol at the end of this post for anyone interested in sitting with some of this reflective work themselves.

The craft of memoir uses the self as a site of inquiry: Who are you? What matters to you? Why do you do the things you do? What experiences have shaped you? Through writing what we’ve lived, we realize that the idiosyncrasies of our own phenomenological experience is interesting and worthy of attention. The writer Margo Steines, in a course I took with her on hybrid memoir writing, advised: “Don’t avoid spending time in the banal truth of your own experience.”

It is also the work of pattern-finding. As is often the case, the story of one chapter of her life really ended up being a fractal of the story of our whole life. My client writing about recovering from burnout and stepping away from hustle culture was also writing about her childhood, her adolescence, her ancestral legacy. She saw roots of her own experience in her mother’s life and the experiences of her ancestors. And this is what death asks of us: to see ourselves, and our lives, as a totality. Not just the highlight reel, but the whole picture. As she looked back, zooming in and out on different relationships, experiences and chapters of her life, certain moments found new significance, certain themes showed up again and again, and every important experience found its right place.

Deeper themes and lessons run through our lives, woven into our work, our relationships, our struggles and our wounds. Writing our life helps to surface these hidden meanings, allowing us to dump the puzzle pieces out on the table, and then to see how they all fit together. It asks us to widen the aperture not only to see the forest through the trees, but to spot the deer trail that we were following all along, even when we couldn’t see it.

These meanings are revealed, not premeditated—which means that the book you set out to write is rarely the one you end up writing. Something emerges in the process, through interpreting, contemplating and reliving your own experiences. What first captured your attention leads to something with a deeper salience. As Vivian Gornick puts it, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

It’s in the search for meaning in our own experience that something happens. And often, something emerges in the process that we do not expect. This is the meaning-making function at work: Through the investigation, we find the golden thread, the organizing principle that has always held our diverse experiences together.

Meaning-making—our capacity to understand, interpret and find purpose and value in the events and experiences of our lives—is a core creative function. And mortality demands meaning. As Ernest Becker said: “It’s not death we’re afraid of. It’s living a life without meaning.”

And once we create that meaning, our fear of death loses its grip.

As a writer and book coach, I fear that the meaning-making function of writing is what’s becoming endangered in our increasingly AI-saturated content and publishing landscape. This past year alone, I’ve seen a huge spike of book inquiries and draft submissions from writers who have not stayed with their material long enough to source and communicate real meaning—and this is a huge loss.

The first time someone asked for my thoughts on what AI does to writing, my answer was immediate and reflexive: The words are there, but the meaning is gone.

In this way, I think AI has unexpectedly clarified what writing was for all along. Writing was never primarily about stringing words together or even providing information. Writing, at its essence, is the alchemical process through which humans transform experience into meaning.

The emerging research on AI and writing backs this up. A recent study analyzing over 370,000 college essays found that the use of AI in the writing process constricts original thinking even as it produces more polished and colorful prose. The study’s authors found that when students stopped doing the work of making meaning from their own experience, true creativity was lost. Meaning can only come from humans grappling with their reality, fueled by the awareness of their mortality (whether conscious or unconscious) to make something of worth while they still can.

Steines, author of the memoir Brutalities: A Love Story, describes writing as first a conversation with the self, then a conversation with the world. To enter into that conversation is, I am convinced, one of the most powerful acts of agency we have in the face of our mortality.

And the second part of the conversation is important. We are not just writing for ourselves.

Writing for the self alone is a beautiful and often healing practice; writing to share becomes a part of our legacy.

While I am a huge fan of journaling, it’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. Research shows that expressive writing is a highly effective way to process trauma and grief, restore a sense of order and coherence in the wake of adversity and disruption, and boost resilience. But to fully experience the existential benefits of writing, we also need to share what we’ve written.

The act of creating something to leave behind has been shown to ease existential anxiety and fear of death. That’s because human creativity, as Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank describes it, has always been an attempt to defeat death symbolically. Our creative works function as “immortality projects” that allow us to transcend our finitude—if only through the pieces of ourselves that will outlive our physical bodies. Memoir is particularly powerful in this respect because what we are leaving behind is a record of our lives, offering something to others of what it all meant and what we learned.

You don’t have to write an entire memoir to benefit from this kind of reflective personal writing. Writing a memoir is a massive undertaking, and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not for everyone. If you don’t currently have the time or interest, this is a great place to use creative constraints: What if you tried writing your life story in one page? Or one paragraph? Try writing it in three sentences. Write it in a haiku. Sometimes, the most powerful insights emerge when we challenge ourselves to bring the macro down into the micro level.

Another approach is to zoom in and start writing the small, mundane experiences that add up to a life. Write about one moment of your day, one notable experience from the past year, one meaningful object in your home, or one lesson learned during one particularly difficult chapter of your life. If it felt important, if it had any salience for you, then I can guarantee it holds something essential of what your life is about. As the memoirist Mary Karr advises: “If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.”

And of course, prompts are always helpful. These five questions, adapted from the Dignity Therapy Question Protocol, are a great way to start exploring your life through a wide-angle lens. Try journaling on them and seeing what emerges in the process, and then consider sharing your reflections with a close friend or family member:

• Share a little about your life history, particularly the parts that you either remember most, or think are the most important. When did you feel most alive?

• Are there specific things that you would want your family to know about you, and are there particular things you would want them to remember?

• What are the most important roles you have played in life (in your job, family, community)? Why were they so important to you, and what do you think you accomplished in those roles?

• What are your most important accomplishments, and what do you feel most proud of?

• What have you learned about life that you would want to pass along to others?

If you or a loved one is looking to engage in a more formal end-of-life review process, consider working with a death doula or finding a Dignity Therapy practitioner.

I hope this provides some value. If writing has helped you find meaning in your life or confront your mortality, I’d love to hear about it. And for those who are interested, we may host a workshop on existential writing—let us know if you’re interested, and stay tuned for updates!

Carolyn