Publish or Perish

It always amazes me how uncomfortable people are with the idea of death.

HippieHusband and I have been away for more than a week. We are >25% of the post-docs and thus when we are absent from seminars, lab meetings etc, people notice and they ask questions. Thus, most if not all in my lab group and department know about my father dying. But I'd say its about 50-50 the number of people who come up to me and say, "I'm so sorry to hear about your father," and those who don't say anything, not even 'hello', but just look at me as if I had syphillis.

Are they afraid of how I might respond. Maybe they think that I would burst into tears at the mere mention of my father. It doesn't work that way. I can tell you that grief comes in waves. So people, you don't have to worry about me getting all Edvard Munch on you.

Grief has many emotional stages (guilt, anger, sadness, etc) and physical manifestations (nightmares, nausea, loss of appetite, etc.). The intensity of the emotion is mirrored in the type of death that happens and how close you are to the person that died. The reality is that grief is a completely personal and individual experience. As is the case with many emotions, you can feel several simultaneously. Right now, in case you didn't guess, anger is my bitch.

Perhaps, the people who don't say anything are afraid of something else like their own mortality. The prospect of death has them in a hammerlock choke. Frankly, I'd prefer it if they would just say, "I can't say anything to you because you and your experience make me afraid of all that could come to pass." It's definitely better than feeling as if I was walking around with a fishbowl on my head.

Researchers at the University of Kentucky have some explanation for this behaviour. They performed a series of experiments involving 432 undergraduate volunteers. Half of the students were asked to contemplate dying and being dead, while the other half of the group was asked to think and write about dental pain. The researchers evaluated the two groups using standard psychological questionnaires (measures explicit emotional state) and word association tests (measures implicit emotional state).

They found no difference in scores between the groups on the explicit tests of emotion and affect, ie the standard psychological questionnaires, but differences were found in the tests that measure unconscious emotions. Students who were preoccupied with death tended to generate significantly more positive-emotion words and word matches than the dental-pain group. Death illicits a psychological immune response, according to Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard. Here's what he said in a Time Magazine article ,

The number of people actually confronted with death at any given time is extremely small, the number who are going to die at some point is 100%. We are all walking around, unlike every other animal, thinking, 'Oh, my God, eventually this all ends. This creates a state of existential dread. This knowledge pervades our everyday existence.

It's because we don't confront death daily or make it part of our existence that it becomes this existential dread. We spend millions of dollars trying to extend our lives and too many hours hanging onto youth. Ironically, we as a society are disconnected to death. I think this is especially true in academia where we are so focused on the 'birth processes' of research. It is no surprise that we have the mantra 'publish or perish.' Ultimately though, despite our grasp at immortality, all things perish.

I want to thank everyone who wrote on my blog, sent me an email, or called. In these 'Munchian' times, it is the small thoughts that count.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. ~Leonardo Da Vinci