How to Be Cool About Death

And other acts of defiance in spiritual fitness. Lorca poem. New tunes.

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My six-year-old daughter asked me if we could take a field trip to a graveyard this weekend because she wanted to dig up her grandfather to see if he was a skeleton. Perhaps sensing my concern with this question and activity, she smiled brightly and asked a follow-up. “Does he still have red muscles and stuff attached to him?”

She is at a hyper-curious age, constantly bombarding my wife and me with questions that leave one or both of us completely stumped. (“Daddy, who invented windows?”)

But, like our other son did at about this age, she’s become very blithe about death in a way that I sometimes find upsetting, like the digging up my dead dad thing. Still, I gave her the facts about grandpa—he’s not in a graveyard and he is no longer a skeleton. “He’s dust, actually.”

She took a beat to process this new info. “Oh, so he’s in the sky. In heaven?”

As with our oldest, I try not to evade these difficult and uncomfortable questions. I don’t want to scare my children, but I also don’t want to pretend I have answers to things I don't have answers to. However, I got twisted up with this one.

“Well, could be in the sky, I guess? I mean, parts of his dust had to float up there.”

The truth is, most of his cremated dust is still in a bag stuffed in a drawer somewhere in my mother’s apartment in Jupiter, Fla., but I didn’t want to confuse her.

“I hope we get to see him in heaven.”

“If you want!”

It was with this exchange that I realized I’m doing both of us a disservice here, but that maybe there are no good answers. It’s less about where we go or what happens after we die, but I should have some clarity here, right? Especially since I’m so goddamn sober now. Like, what do I truly believe?

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are answers, but I just haven’t asked the right people yet. Today’s as good a day as any to learn about death, so I asked Maura McInerney-Rowley from one of my favorite Substacks, “Hello, Mortal,” to help me get started.

TSB: What happens when we die?

MMR: Short answer: I don’t know.

Longer answer: It depends on who you ask…

If you ask a doctor, they’d probably tell you that death is a clinical process, defined by the cessation of vital bodily functions.

But if you ask…