The Dying Project

In May of 2018, I was listening to a podcast with Kevin Kelly — one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and also an incredibly interesting human. He referenced a dying experiment of sorts and it intrigued me. I was searching for something, anything to shake me out of an existential depression that I had found myself in like I had so many times before.

I found an episode of This American Life where he delved into the story a bit more. He was traveling in Jerusalem, couldn’t find a place to stay and had fallen asleep near Jesus’s tomb. When he woke up, he felt an assignment had been impressed upon him to live like he had 6 months left.

We talk about the idea of “live like you’re dying” often, but no one actually does it. Except this guy.

For a week straight, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to take on this assignment (self-assigned), but what if I really died? Which then led me to the reminder that I am in fact going to die. After dinner with one of my best friends, I resolved to take that trip. My death day was set for December 3rd.

Ironically, this project breathed new life into me.

How often do you think about doing something, but then put it off until later? I did this often about things big and small. Having this looming date of my demise was an incredible motivator. Any time that I had the urge to do something, I did it. Conversely, I wasted little time on things that I didn’t want to do. At first, it was about knocking out the bucket list, but very quickly it morphed into radical candor and intense presence in the hum of every day life.

These six months were lonely, but not in a a depressive way — in a solitudinous way.

“I also decided that it was entirely unnatural and inhumane way to live, and that having a future is part of what being human is about, and that when you take away the future for humans, you take away a lot of their humanness. And that it’s not actually a very good thing to live entirely in the present, that one needs to have a past, and one needs to have a future to be fully human.”

— Kevin Kelly

My last day wasn’t anything spectacular, just a typical day — the days that I had come to love the most. I tucked away my will and left instructions. I made peace with my death and I wrote this:

Life is weird. I am going to die, we are all going to die. It may not mean anything, but it may mean everything. In whatever end there may be, I hope that I remember it for everything that it is; the unconditional love I felt when I looked into my daughter’s eyes for the first time, the anticipation of a new lover’s call, the pain after someone’s death, golden hour from any part of the world, the anxiety you feel when you don’t feel good enough, and a connection between two people who want nothing from one another.

The next morning I woke up and just laid in bed laughing to myself. Like Kevin Kelly said, “I was reborn into ordinariness”. What more could one ask for?

I didn’t die and the project hasn’t stopped.

When we come to the end of our life, what’s really important becomes crystal clear. For most, it’s about our relationships — the connections that we share with each other.

Did we love others and ourselves?

How could we have loved better?

Were we loved?

The most vulnerable and honest conversations that I have ever had, have been with people who were dying. The goods news is that we don’t have to wait for death beds and funerals to start sharing ourselves and the truth of our humanness.

I wonder, what would the world would look like if we started having these conversations now?

Subscribe to and listen to The Dying Project Podcast here:

Apple: https://apple.co/2HyugAv

Anchor: https://anchor.fm/dyingproject

Google Play: https://bit.ly/2IQUFLe

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2OdOL5D

Youtube: https://youtu.be/v6XdF2r1eck