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Why thinking about death helps you live a better life
为什么思考死亡可以帮助你过上更好的生活

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Alua Arthur | 阿鲁亚·亚瑟 |

TED2023

• April 2023 • 2023 年 4 月

As a death doula, or someone who supports dying people and their loved ones, Alua Arthur spends a lot of time thinking about the end of life. In a profound talk that examines our brief, perfectly human time on this planet, she asks us to look at our lives through the lens of our deaths in seeking to answer the question: "What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully?"
作为死亡导乐，或者支持垂死的人及其亲人的人，Alua Arthur 花了很多时间思考生命的终结。在一次深刻的演讲中，她审视了我们在这个星球上短暂而完美的人类时间，她要求我们通过死亡的镜头来看待我们的生活，以寻求回答这个问题：“我必须做些什么才能与自己和平相处，这样我才能活在当下，优雅地死去？

As a death doula, or someone who supports dying people and their loved ones, Alua Arthur spends a lot of time thinking about the end of life. In a profound talk that examines our brief, perfectly human time on this planet, she asks us to look at our lives through the lens of our deaths in seeking to answer the question: "What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully?"

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Read our curation guidelines.

Visit Going with Grace to embrace your mortality, become a death doula or seek end-of-life support.

Explore how you think about death with Alua Arthur's book, Briefly Perfectly Human.

About the speaker 关于演讲者

Alua Arthur

Alua Arthur 阿鲁亚·亚瑟

Death doula 死亡导乐

See speaker profile 查看演讲者简介

Alua Arthur is the founder of Going with Grace, an organization focused on redefining what it means to die gracefully.
Alua Arthur 是 Going with Grace 的创始人，该组织致力于重新定义优雅地死去的意义。

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Read our curation guidelines.
这个演讲是在TED官方会议上发表的。阅读我们的策展指南。

Visit Going with Grace to embrace your mortality, become a death doula or seek end-of-life support.
访问与恩典同行，拥抱你的死亡，成为死亡导乐或寻求临终支持。

Explore how you think about death with Alua Arthur's book, Briefly Perfectly Human.
通过 Alua Arthur 的书《Briefly Perfectly Human》探索您对死亡的看法。

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Transcript (12 Languages)
文字记录（12种语言）

I want to die at sunset.

I want to watch the sky change and turn orange and pink and purple

as day dies into night.

I want to hear the wind fluttering through the leaves

and smell very faintly, nag champa amber incense,

but very faintly, because scent can be tough on a dying body.

I want to die with socks on my feet because I get cold.

And if I die with a bra on, I'm coming to haunt everybody.

我想在日落时分死去。我想看着天空变化，变成橙色、粉红色和紫色，白天变成黑夜。我想听到风吹过树叶，闻起来很淡，唠叨着占婆琥珀香，但很淡，因为香味对垂死的身体来说很难。我想穿着袜子死去，因为我感冒了。如果我戴着胸罩死去，我就会困扰所有人。

(Laughter) （笑声）

I will terrorize you and that is a threat, OK?
我会恐吓你，这是一种威胁，好吗？

I want to die in my own bed, at my own home,

with my loved ones nearby

who are talking amongst themselves and comforting each other

for this very big thing that's about to happen in their lives.

I want to die with all my affairs in order

so my loved ones have nothing to worry about

but their grief after I die.

I want to die empty,

devoid of all of the skill, gift,

talent and light that I carry in this body

and satiated, full of the richness of this one unique human ride.

And when my loved ones notice that I have released my last breath,

I want them to clap.

I want them to clap because I died well,

but I died well only because I lived well.

我想死在我自己的床上，在我自己的家里，和我所爱的人一起死在附近，他们正在互相交谈，互相安慰，因为他们生命中即将发生的这件大事。我想把我所有的事情都安排得井井有条地死去，这样我所爱的人就没有什么可担心的了，除了我死后的悲伤。我想空虚地死去，没有我在这个身体里携带的所有技能、天赋、才华和光明，并满足于这个独特的人类旅程的丰富性。当我所爱的人注意到我已经释放了最后一口气时，我希望他们鼓掌。我希望他们鼓掌，因为我死得好，但我死得好只是因为我活得好。

Now, will it happen this way?

Probably not.

Realistically, I mean, even with all this rah-rah death talk I talk,

I'm probably going to go kicking and screaming.

现在，它会以这种方式发生吗？可能不是。实际上，我的意思是，即使我说了所有这些拉拉死亡谈话，我可能会去踢和尖叫。

(Laughter) （笑声）

Unless we choose, the date, place,

manner and time of our death will remain a mystery.

Then why think about it at all?

Death creates context for our lives.

My entire life is leading up until that point.

How we die creates the period at the end of the sentence,

but it is the period that makes it a sentence at all.

除非我们选择，否则我们死亡的日期、地点、方式和时间将仍然是个谜。那为什么要考虑呢？死亡为我们的生活创造了背景。直到那一刻，我的整个生活都在走向。我们如何死亡在句子的末尾创造了句号，但正是句号使它成为一个句子。

Imagine for a moment your 847th birthday.

OK, try.

I mean, you're probably pushing 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 in this room.

Imagine 847 of them.

So you’re sitting there and your body is raggedy.

Because unless they cure aging,

I promise you, you do not want to be immortal.

I promise, you're going to be begging for death.

So it's your 847th birthday.

Here they come with a cake.

No candles on it, because it would burn the house down.

And now here they come, singing that same tired song.

"Happy birthday to you," you would be so over it.

And if it was a Stevie Wonder version, that song is already 45 minutes long,

you'd be extra over it.

想象一下你的 847 岁生日。好的，试试。我的意思是，你可能在这个房间里推动了 30、40、50、60、70。想象一下其中的 847 个。所以你坐在那里，你的身体破烂不堪。因为除非他们治愈衰老，否则我向你保证，你不想长生不老。我保证，你会乞求死亡的。今天是你的847岁生日。在这里，他们带着蛋糕来了。上面没有蜡烛，因为它会烧毁房子。现在他们来了，唱着同样疲惫的歌。祝你生日快乐，“你会如此。如果是史蒂夫·汪达的版本，那首歌已经有 45 分钟长了，你会特别喜欢它。

(Laughter) （笑声）

Nobody wants that.

We count birthdays now because they're finite.

They're special.

They mark the passage of time, and one day, we won't have any more time.

And I find that to be a really useful fact.

I think it's healthy for us to think about our death.

没有人想要那样。我们现在计算生日，因为它们是有限的。他们很特别。它们标志着时间的流逝，总有一天，我们将没有更多的时间。我发现这是一个非常有用的事实。我认为我们思考我们的死亡是健康的。

And you might say, of course I do, because I'm a death doula.

I wanted us to embrace thinking about our mortality.

I spend a lot of time thinking about, talking about, helping people prepare

and teaching death doulas.

Death doulas offer non-medical and holistic care for the dying person,

the circle of support and the community through the process.

你可能会说，我当然知道，因为我是死亡导乐。我希望我们拥抱思考我们的死亡。我花了很多时间思考、谈论、帮助人们准备和教授死亡导乐。死亡导乐在整个过程中为临终者、支持圈和社区提供非医疗和整体护理。

I want to acknowledge first what a privilege it is

for people to be able to know about and afford and hire a death doula.

We're working on it.

And next, what a privilege it is for me

to even be able to imagine my own death.

It says that I have a sense of safety.

My basic bodily needs are met.

And I have safety in my body, my mind and in my life,

even despite the skin I wear.

首先，我想承认，人们能够了解、负担得起和雇用死亡导乐是多么荣幸。我们正在努力。接下来，我甚至能够想象自己的死亡是多么荣幸。它说我有安全感。我的基本身体需求得到了满足。我的身体、思想和生活都有安全感，即使我穿着皮肤。

That wasn't always the case.

I came to this work by serendipity,

by circumstance, but mostly by necessity.

A little over ten years ago,

I was practicing law at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles,

and I grew depressed.

Not like, "Oh my God, I'm so depressed,"

but like, for real depressed, like, "can't get out of bed" depressed,

"can't shower" depressed, can't find hope,

"can find a smile, but can't really find joy,"

type of depressed.

I took a medical leave of absence, so I went to Cuba,

and I met a woman there,

a fellow traveler on the bus, who had uterine cancer.

We spent the 14-hour bus ride talking about her life and also her death.

And it was a highly illuminating conversation.

I heard firsthand how hard it was for her

to even be able to talk about her fears around mortality and her disease

because people censored their own discomfort with mortality

rather than make space for her.

I took the invitation, however, to think about my mortality

and looked at my life from the perspective of my death for the very first time.

And it was grim, I did not like what I saw.

I noticed then

that I had to live life on my own terms

because I was the only one who was going to have to contend with all the choices

that I'd made at my death.

但情况并非总是如此。我从事这项工作是偶然的，偶然的，但主要是迫不得已。十多年前，我在洛杉矶法律援助基金会从事法律工作，我变得抑郁。不是说，“天哪，我好郁闷”，而是像，对于真正的郁闷，比如，“下不了床”郁闷，“不能洗澡”郁闷，找不到希望，“能找到微笑，却找不到快乐”的郁闷类型。我请了病假，所以我去了古巴，在那里我遇到了一个女人，一个在公共汽车上的同路人，她得了子宫癌。我们花了14个小时的巴士，谈论她的生活和她的死亡。这是一次非常有启发性的对话。我亲耳听到她甚至能够谈论她对死亡和疾病的恐惧是多么困难，因为人们审查了自己对死亡的不适，而不是为她腾出空间。然而，我接受了邀请，思考我的死亡，并第一次从我的死亡的角度看待我的生活。这很严峻，我不喜欢我所看到的。那时我注意到我必须按照自己的方式生活，因为我是唯一一个必须面对我死后做出的所有选择的人。

Not long after I came back from Cuba,

my brother-in-law, Peter Saint John, became ill.

And not too long after that, they couldn't cure him anymore.

So I went to New York,

where he and my sister and my niece were,

and along with Peter's family and my family and his friends,

we ushered him to the end of his life.

我从古巴回来后不久，我的姐夫彼得·圣约翰就病了，不久之后，他们就再也治不好了他。于是我去了纽约，他、我姐姐和侄女都在那里，我和彼得的家人、我的家人和朋友一起，把他带到了生命的尽头。

Being present for Peter's death

is one of the greatest gifts I've ever been given.

Not only did I get to care for somebody who I loved so dearly,

but it also grew my capacity for compassion.

I knew, intellectually, that there were thousands of other people

that were walking through the same thing at the same time.

And it also hinted at the things that I've been talking about in Cuba.

Everybody was uncomfortable with the fact that he was going to die,

even the medical care team.

I knew that there should be somebody,

somebody who was there, somebody who could be with us

to walk alongside us.

Somebody who could listen to us, offer resources,

hold our hands, hold our hearts,

bear witness to our pain, help us sort through information,

tell us that we were doing the best that we could

with the worst that we were dealt.

But I couldn't find anybody.

So I became that someone for other people.

出席彼得的死是我得到的最伟大的礼物之一。我不仅能够照顾我深爱的人，而且还提高了我的同情心。我知道，在理智上，还有成千上万的人同时经历着同样的事情。这也暗示了我在古巴谈论的事情，每个人都对他将要死去的事实感到不舒服，甚至医疗团队也是如此。我知道应该有人，有人在那里，有人可以和我们一起走在我们身边。有人可以倾听我们的声音，提供资源，握住我们的手，握住我们的心，见证我们的痛苦，帮助我们整理信息，告诉我们我们正在尽我们所能，而我们遇到了最坏的情况。但是我找不到任何人。于是我成了别人的那个人。

I sit deep in the trench with folks as they prepare for death.

There's no fixing or saving anything

because there's no fixing or saving grief or death.

It just is, I meet people where they are at.

My goal is to help them answer the question:

"What must I do to be at peace with myself

so that I may live presently and die gracefully,

holding both at the same time?"

我和人们一起坐在战壕深处，为死亡做准备。没有修复或拯救任何东西，因为没有修复或拯救悲伤或死亡。就是这样，我在人们所在的地方遇到他们。我的目标是帮助他们回答这个问题：“我必须做些什么才能与自己和平相处，这样我才能活在当下，优雅地死去，同时拥有两者？

When I'm thinking about my present life

from the vantage point of my graceful death,

I can see very clearly who I want to be,

how I want to spend my time

and what of me I'll leave behind.

It allows me to consciously curate my life right now

and also figure out my little "whys" right now.

Because what are we waiting for, anyway?

Like, death?

当我从优雅死亡的有利位置思考我现在的生活时，我可以非常清楚地看到我想成为什么样的人，我想如何度过我的时间以及我将留下什么样的我。它让我能够有意识地策划我现在的生活，也弄清楚我现在的小“为什么”。因为无论如何，我们还在等什么？比如，死亡？

I used to think dying people had it all figured out, though.

I used to think that they'd lay there with their hands like this

because we all know this is like, universal dying person pose.

So they'd lay there with their hands like this,

and there'd be a little glimmer in their eye,

they'd be like, "Oh, yes, finally, it all makes sense."

Turns out it's not like that at all, it doesn't look like that.

Hollywood has lied to us, we know that already.

Cinderella was unconscionable, but this is just flagrant.

It's not like that at all.

It's way too much work to be doing while you're dying.

So it doesn't look like that, there's no secret,

there's nothing magically you'll find out then.

This is it, there's nothing to figure out, no big secret at all.

Many of my clients also reached the end of their lives

wishing that they had more time.

But I'm always curious, more time for what?

What else would they do with the time that they had?

It's rarely to go see Machu Picchu, OK, I'll tell you that.

不过，我曾经认为垂死的人已经想通了一切。我曾经以为他们会像这样双手躺在那里，因为我们都知道这就像是普遍的垂死人的姿势。所以他们会像这样双手躺在那里，他们的眼睛里会闪过一丝光芒，他们会说，“哦，是的，终于，一切都有意义了。原来根本不是那样的，看起来不是那样的。好莱坞对我们撒谎了，我们已经知道了。灰姑娘是不合情理的，但这只是明目张胆。根本不是那样的。在你快死的时候，要做的工作太多了。所以它看起来不是那样的，没有什么秘密，没有什么神奇的你会发现。就是这样，没有什么可弄清楚的，根本没有什么大秘密。我的许多客户也走到了生命的尽头，希望他们有更多的时间。但我总是很好奇，更多的时间做什么？他们还能用他们所拥有的时间做什么？很少去看马丘比丘，好吧，我会告诉你的。

Can I tell you a story?

OK, so this client is a composite,

very many clients shoved together because as juicy as their stories are,

it's not my responsibility or job to tell them.

So this is many clients together,

and I find that it's an easy composite to make

because it's universally applicable.

This applies whether or not somebody has worked their entire life

or sits on a big trust fund or works three jobs to keep the lights on.

You might find bits of yourself in this story.

This client is somebody who had a decent amount of privilege,

but not without adversity, of course, because she's human.

She had a great job, great career, had been a real trailblazer.

Kids who she loved, who she was proud of,

good friends, traveled a bunch,

did a bunch of great things in her life, had plenty of romance and love.

She was doing OK.

The girl who had everything.

And then came a plot twist.

That plot twist was an aggressive bone cancer

that was likely going to kill her.

And with that plot twist came a sense of pointlessness to her life.

She couldn’t figure out what she’d been doing for the past 60-odd years

because she'd been so busy doing.

While she was healthy,

it was about the next career milestone or what's happening with the kids next

or the next trip.

When she was sick, more of the same.

Next doctor's appointment, next scan, next medication.

She was so busy distracting herself from like, the difficulty

that she found in her life,

staying out of her body

so that she didn't have to be present with what was going on.

It was always out there, she was always looking out there.

But death was coming to remind her that she had no more "out theres."

That it was always only right here,

where there is nothing at all to do

but simply to be.

We zoomed out on her life to look at what she enjoyed,

to see where she placed value,

because from there we can figure out where we place meaning.

And it turns out it wasn't about the kids or the work or the money.

It was about the little things.

Her hands in the soil.

Her garden.

Building a fire, reading books and food.

She loved to eat,

but she had dieted most of her adult life.

The sound at all familiar to anybody?

OK, if it does, this is for you, OK?

If you take nothing away, hear this:

you are going to die, so please eat the cake.

Eat the cake, order the dessert,

eat the french fries, eat the brownies.

Eat everything you want to, just eat it, because you're going to die.

One day, you won't be able to anymore.

At this point in her disease process, chemotherapy had ravaged her taste buds,

so she had to rely on her sense of smell to get pleasure out of eating.

And she ate.

She did it as much as she could

because she knew she wouldn't be able to for much longer.

She ate as much as cancer would allow,

and when her body could no longer process food,

we placed her favorite passion fruit soufflé right on her lip,

and she would lick it and smile.

She lived more in the last eight months or so of her life

with the help of hospice than she had before.

She was finally present, at home in her body,

delighting in the richness of the sensory experience we have

by virtue of these fantastical bodies that we will die in.

These bodies that we will die in.

She was also really curious about her legacy.

What, if anything, she'd leave behind.

But leaving a legacy isn't optional.

We're doing it every single day.

You're doing it with every smile, every word, every kind word,

every harsh word,

every action, every inaction, every dollar you spend.

You're telling the people who are paying attention

exactly who you are,

and that is what they'll tell of you when you are gone.

At her funeral,

despite all of her career accomplishments, nobody talked about any of that.

They talked about who she was, nobody cared about what she'd done.

When we focus on our productivity,

we highlight what we have to do to feel worthy,

rather than who we get to be,

where worthiness is our birthright

and we are human.

(Applause)

We're human.

Messily, magically, fantastically,

beautifully, briefly,

perfectly human.

Now humans are meaning-making machines.

We can make a story out of anything and make it sound good.

So why not then make meaning out of the magic of the mundane?

And absolve ourselves of the responsibility

of trying to have some grand life purpose?

Why not just give ourselves permission to be fully human,

to be fallible, to be messy, to be here while we're here?

I mean, is nobody else tripping out over the fact

that we're on a giant blue rock spinning through space?

Y'all don't trip about that, because I do regularly.

(Laughter)

And then what really trips me out is that while that's going on,

we're getting bent out of shape over traffic.

Please let the cars merge, OK?

Can we agree universally we're going to let people merge?

Let them merge, let them merge.

Let them merge.

It requires nothing of you, just to give them a little bit of time.

And in fact, it's probably taking more time off your life

by all the high blood pressure when you don't want to let them merge.

Just let them in, it'll be fine, everybody's fine, it's OK.

Hold life lightly.

We've got to hold life really, really lightly.

We are all dying.

We're all dying.

Now I can understand why people maybe don't want to talk about death

or think about it.

It's uncomfortable.

It's sad, it's scary, icky.

Acknowledging your death means that you are not the center of the story,

and that is disquieting to the very fragile human ego.

Acknowledging your mortality also means acknowledging our powerlessness

and lack of control we have in life.

Also icky.

It also means surrendering to the big "I don't knows" of life

and also the really big "I don't knows"

of "what, if anything, happens after we die?"

But since we don't know,

why not imagine something absurd,

something glorious, something huge?

A vision that actually serves you

rather than makes you want to recoil in fear.

We could.

You want to hear my working theory?

It's absurd, OK?

And please remember, even though I might kind of look like Miss Cleo,

I don't know anything about what happens after we die, alright?

This is just an idea, OK.

So I'm on my deathbed.

On the outside, they are clapping.

On the inside -- well, I've hit my death pose, all right?

I'm in my death pose.

On the inside,

I'm starting to feel everything I ever felt in this body,

all at the same time.

It's all starting to gather up in my body all at the same time.

Like that one time I was 11 and I stepped on a frog.

I mean, poor frog, and I felt so bad,

but I was barefoot, ew,

like, I can still feel it squishing up between my toes.

Yuck.

(Laughter)

When you bite into an orange and the juice squirts into your mouth,

and then there's the little bite in your jaw,

there's a little bite in your jaw because it's sour.

Or when you first bite into a fried plantain.

Or getting into clean sheets, that feeling gathering in my body,

all the feelings, getting into a hot shower,

listening to a song that you love for the very first time,

I'm hearing Stevie Wonder "As" playing,

how I feel my spirit when I see the color yellow.

Just all these feelings are starting to roll up in my body.

My niece’s laughter, my nephew trying to teach me how to Dougie.

It did not go well.

It didn't go well, I still don't know how to do it.

How I can look into my partner's eyes

and just by looking into his eyes, I can feel love in my body.

All these feelings are starting to gather up in my body.

At the same time, I'm also feeling every little bit of pain I've ever felt

physically and emotionally.

I'm feeling all the sensations, I'm feeling anger, feeling rage,

feeling frustration, feeling grief, feeling sadness,

feeling all those things gathering up in my body.

I'm feeling despair, desperation, sadness.

I'm feeling insecurity.

All the crippling doubt,

I'm feeling all the failures, all the disappointments.

Every single time I thought I couldn't make it through the day,

It's all starting to gather up in my body.

I'm also remembering every single time I did get up.

So I'm also feeling all the hope,

all the joy, all the awe, all the mystery,

all the freedom that I feel in this body.

But most of all, I'm also feeling all of the love,

all the aching love that underwrites it all.

And when I cannot take it anymore,

I am saturated with this experience that I've had,

poof, I explode into a cosmic orgasm.

Audience: Yes!

AA: Yes.

And like a pinata that's broken open,

pieces of glitter start to fall from the sky.

Glitter confetti, falling, falling.

Orange, pink, purple, yellow, turquoise, everything.

Gold, silver, falling, falling, falling, like a really soft snow shower.

Falling everywhere.

In larger concentrations on the people who loved me.

And in lesser concentration on those people whose lives I touched.

And then the rest of it just gets reabsorbed

into a big undulating glitter wave

that goes on all around as far as I can see,

for all of eternity that envelops and encompasses us all.

Maybe it's just glitter.

Could it be?

It could be anything.

All I know is at that point, all I believe is at that point,

when the glitter, all the pieces of me have been reencompassed,

the I that I think of myself as,

Alua Adwoba Arthur,

having this one single solitary human experience,

has been reenveloped into all that ever was

and all that ever will be,

And it is complete.

And I am safe.

I am still far from where I was in Cuba.

At that point, my death would have come as a relief.

An ending to my pain and to my suffering

and a way out of this life that I couldn't quite figure out how to get into.

If I'm to die today,

I know that my death will come as a celebration.

As a culmination of a life lived in and loved.

A life that's worth dying from.

After the last decade spent supporting people

as they think through their lives and prepare for their death,

I know,

I trust that the real gift in being with our mortality

is the sheer wonder that we live at all.

That's all I got.

Thank you.

(Cheers and applause)

Alua Arthur: Why thinking about death helps you live a better life | TED Talk