How I embraced my inner corpse
Lessons from inside a coffin
My time had finally come.
I laid in my coffin and watched as the cover rapidly descended, cutting off all light in the room along with any sense of human connection. My heart and mind, both racing from the moment I had entered the box, slammed on the accelerator as darkness enveloped me.
But, as soon as the light disappeared completely, the coffin cover only inches from my nose and the sides pressing into my shoulders, something strange happened: I felt calm.
Cozy, even. It was much warmer with the lid on.
I quickly adapted to my new reality, aided by the soothing guidance of death educator and counselor Gina Colombatto and end-of-life doula Meredith Hays.
The exercise was part of The Ultimate Shavasana, a workshop I attended during the Reimagine End of Life festival in New York City, a weeklong gathering meant to foster cultural, philosophical, and health care conversations about death, life, and our interrelated approaches to both. Shavasana, also known as “the corpse pose” in yoga practice, is typically done at the end of a class to relax both body and mind. In the workshop, we took this mortal-remains mimicking posture a bit more literally and practiced Shavasana inside of cardboard coffins and cotton burial shrouds.
Lessons from inside and outside the box
As I settled into my new digs, with my eyes closed and hands folded on my stomach, I relaxed enough to reach a near-meditative state. My thoughts unsurprisingly drifted to my mortality and its meaning, and I found myself mouthing the mantra I repeat to myself every morning during my meditation or shower:
“I will die, and I could become severely ill and/or disabled. One or more of these state changes could happen or start happening right now, 60 or more years from now, or at any moment in between. So I will make the most of whatever time I have left while I’m still healthy and breathing.”
(Why do I see “60 or more years from now” as the high end of my potential age range? Based on my general lifelong healthiness and family history, I think I have an above-average chance of becoming a centenarian: I’m a healthy 42, my…
