Editor’s note: Bridgette Portman’s interview with The Daily Californian has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Dr. Bridgette Portman is many things: a playwright, a novelist, an instructor and an academic in death, to name a few. As part of UC Berkeley College Writing Programs, Dr. Portman regularly teaches reading and comprehension courses taken by freshmen and sophomores. These courses are offered within a number of different departments and often approach the instruction of writing through niche topics. For example, Dr. Portman’s reading and comprehension class for the upcoming fall semester is titled “How to be mortal.”
I came across her class description while I was aimlessly scrolling through the class directory. A sense of envy toward her future students washed over me as I read, “We will examine attitudes toward death across cultures, the psychology behind how death has been personified in film and media, critiques of the American funeral industry, and speculations about whether new technologies can extend life or even abolish death altogether.”
Lacking the opportunity to take this class myself, I sought to interview Dr. Portman to discuss these matters, and to perhaps hear her perspective on what teaching this class is like. So, over the summer, I met with Dr. Portman on Zoom to have a conversation about death.
Logan Roscoe: The class you’re teaching for fall of 2024 is titled “How to be mortal.” So, before we get into the weeds of the question, in your opinion, how does one be mortal? You can be as broad or as specific as you’d like.
Bridgette Portman: I love this question. And my answer is, I think if I knew the answer to that, I probably wouldn’t have designed a class around it. Because some of it is me kind of working through these questions myself, along with the students. It’s a question that has fascinated me for a long time, and I feel like it’s a question that maybe takes a lifetime to answer.
If I were to try to answer it, I would say that, how to be mortal is to find a way to live your life with purpose and meaning, whatever that might be to you, despite — or perhaps — because of the fact that your life is finite. And I think in that way, the awareness of death can have a generative function where, because we know our life is limited, we can treasure it more. We can try to do more things that might make a lasting impact. And so I think that there is a benefit to reflecting on the fact that we are mortal. And that’s the philosophy behind the class.
LR: Do you think that you could still find meaning in a life that is infinite?
BP: That’s a really, really good question. I’ve thought about the question: If you could be immortal, would you? I wrote a play that grapples a little bit with this. And I feel like it would be harder to live a life of purpose because there just wouldn’t be any need to do anything, right? Like you wouldn’t necessarily need to leave anything behind, to try to change the world for the better, to leave a legacy to create great works — because you would know that you would always have time to do that later. And I know I procrastinate, so I know a lot of people procrastinate. So I think I would just keep putting it off, and I would probably get bored.
LR: A lot of what you’re saying has a quality of subjectivity to it. One of the biggest things that caught my eye when I was looking over your class description was how the outlook on death varies by culture. How would you describe the outlook here in America?
BP: Yeah, I want to acknowledge first that I know American culture is not a monolith; it’s very diverse. And we have lots of different cultural and religious outlooks that mingle in our country. But if I’m going to just make a generalization, I think that Americans are — in many ways — in denial about death. Meaning, you know, “I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to consider that it might happen to me someday.” In fact, one of the readings that I had students read this past semester in the class was an article called “Why Americans are Uniquely Afraid to Grow Old.” And I had the students reflect on that and whether they think that’s true. And you know, you can look at the anti-aging industry, cosmetics, various things that we do to not have to think about “I’m going to get old, and then I’m going to die.”
I think part of that is for a good reason. It’s the rise in modern medicine. If you think back, say 100 years ago, many people died in their homes. And so children would often see an older relative of a grandparent or maybe a parent on their deathbed, and, you know, the body laid out and that would be something that was very common in part of life. And then as medicine has advanced, we have found more and more ways to keep people alive longer. But what that has often meant is that when people die, it’s not in the home anymore. It’s in the hospital or it’s in a nursing home, or it’s somewhere where it’s kind of shut away. And so, we might not feel like we need to look at it, or that we want to see it, or that we want to have it be part of life. And I think that might be part of it.
I also read a theory that I find very interesting, and it ties death denial into capitalism. The theory is basically that in a society that is very capitalistic and has strongly entrenched values of individualism and the need to accomplish and produce and profit, death can be seen as a failure and a weakness, rather than as something that is just a natural part of life.
LR: Are there any cultures you can think of that are very different from that? Maybe where they accept death more or encounter it on a daily basis and try to implement it into their regular lives?
BP: Yeah, I think there are definitely cultures that place more emphasis on connecting and remembering the dead. I’m thinking, you know, in Mexico: the Dia de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — where families will come to the graveyard and put offerings for their dead relatives and speak to them. In China, there’s a similar festival called the Tomb Sweeping Festival, where families will bring offerings to grave sites and honor their dead relatives. And I think that’s something that we don’t have as much here in the United States. Certainly, we remember our relatives fondly, but there’s not really this sense of, “they’re still part of our lives.”
To take an extreme example, there is a community in Indonesia — in a place called Tana Toraja. And they have a festival where they actually unearth their dead relatives and clean them and change their clothing, dress them, like bring them in the home for a while, stand them up. And yeah, it was a little strange when I first heard about this. My reaction was like, “No, this is not something that I would want to do.” But then I was interested. So I read more about it. And I feel like I still don’t quite understand it fully, but I have a better understanding of it. And I think the benefit of something like that is, again, death is not seen as this strange threatening thing that shouldn’t be part of life. It’s seen as an integral part of life. And I think, in general, viewing something like that makes it less scary, right? Like, if you don’t have to think about something and you don’t see it, sometimes it can build up in our imagination to be even more frightening.
I was looking into this about death anxiety across countries across cultures, and it’s a little bit mixed. I think there hasn’t been a lot of research in this area, but I know there have been some studies that have found that the United States and other Western countries tend to have higher average levels of death anxiety compared to some Eastern cultures.
LR: I’m somewhat interested in where the quality of life comes into this question, because there seem to be pros to having death anxiety — where you’re motivated to do more, like we mentioned in the beginning. You have some drive to do something, knowing that life is finite. But then also you have the cons, where you’re just riddled with anxiety for a good amount of your life. Where do you think that this question of quality of life comes into play? Do you think that one outlook is particularly better over the other?
BP: I mean, I think that maybe we can think of it as a spectrum of being in complete denial about death and never thinking about it, and then at the other end would be dwelling on it so much that you can’t function. There are people that have such extreme death anxiety that it becomes an issue of mental health, and it does interfere in their ability to live life — to appreciate life. And so, popping into my head is this quote from “Moby Dick”: “There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness.” And so, there’s an awareness, but if you dwell on that too much, then you’re not fully living. So where do you find that balance? And I don’t know if I have a great answer to that. I feel like I’ve lived most of my life in a little bit of an existential crisis. So I’m maybe a little bit more toward the unhealthy side. But yeah, I think everybody has to find the balance there.
LR: Absolutely. I know that your class goes a lot into fiction and those pieces of work that navigate the relationship between quality of life and death. What’s your favorite representation of death in fiction? And what do you particularly like about it?
BP: I’m going to say the character Death from the classic movie “The Seventh Seal,” directed by Ingmar Bergman. I have students watch this film; we watched it in class. It’s very existential. It’s very bleak in many ways, so there is some humor in it. Death is this iconic figure. He’s this man — like a chalky white face — and he’s in this big black robe. And he plays a game of chess with the main character throughout the film. I like this depiction of death. It’s been parodied in other films and media many times. But I think I like this depiction of death because, in a weird way, it’s not comforting. So the purpose of this personification is not to alleviate the fear of the main character. And in fact, the main character asks Death, “Once I die, will you tell me what you know? Will you tell me your secrets?” The main character wants to know things like, is there a god? Is there an afterlife? Does life have purpose? And Death says “No, I have no secrets. I am unknowing.” And I just feel like that captures the relationship that we have with death. Because death is such an unknown. And it’s also just dramatic and really cool to watch this character play this chess game throughout the film.
LR: So continuing with this line of fiction, you, yourself, are a playwright and a novelist. You mentioned earlier trying to write characters that are immortal and such. But as you go about this process of writing out death, what are the biggest lessons you’ve learned in translating the experience of death into words?
BP: It’s been a theme in a lot of my writing and particularly in my plays — characters who are facing death or dealing with grief. And I think what I’ve learned is: There are no easy answers. And you know, I don’t try to write plays where the characters completely come to terms with death because I don’t know that that’s really possible. So the characters are grappling with it. And I think what I often try to show is that one way to deal with that grief and that anxiety and these negative feelings is to reach out to each other and to make connections. So I have a play right now that I’m working on called “Dead People.” And it’s set in the morgue. It’s a two-character play. It’s about a morgue director and then a young woman who believes that she’s dead. And by the end of the play, they end up forming this emotional connection that helps them both. So I think that’s the theme or the way that I approached death in my fictional works — that it’s something that is frightening and that the characters can never completely be OK with. But they can find ways to alleviate that anxiety by forming bonds — by forming a community.
LR: That sounds like a really good way to approach it. So when we’re talking about this frightening nature of death, it leads me to wonder about when someone is equipped to handle and tackle those questions. And this class that you’re teaching — it’s a reading and comprehension course taught here at Berkeley. Those courses are usually taken by freshmen and sophomores. So with this in mind, I’m interested to hear how you think this age range in particular would tackle questions about mortality, and if you think that there’s a particularly important time in life to start asking those questions.
BP: Yeah, and I’ll start off with a question for you, if that’s okay. Consider thinking about our attitudes toward death across the lifespan. What kind of a relationship would you predict that there might be between age and fear of death?
LR: I would expect later, the fear gets higher — the closer that you are to encountering it.
BP: I think that that’s what makes the most sense, right? Like, that’s the most intuitive answer, and it’s actually wrong. So research has found consistently that there is an inverse relationship. And the age group that actually has the highest death anxiety is people in their 20s. And if we think about this, again, at first, it seems pretty weird. But it makes sense if you consider that in your 20s, you still have your whole life ahead of you. So, if you were to die, it would take away so much more — all of your remaining years. Whereas if you’re older, you can look back on maybe a life well lived. Maybe family, maybe children, maybe things that you’ve done that have made a legacy. And that can be a source of comfort. And I think when you’re older, death is around you more. You know, your parents pass away, maybe your siblings, your friends. Maybe you become a little more desensitized, but for whatever reason, young people tend to express the most fear of death.
And so I tell the students, “You know, if you feel like you have a lot of anxiety about death, the good news is, it’s likely to decrease. Like, you’re kind of in the worst of it in terms of the age groups.” And of course, this is just in general; there’s a lot of variation within age groups. But I think it’s an interesting time to start talking with young people about these issues. And the other thing is, in your 20s is often a time when grandparents passed away. So I’ve asked students to write a personal narrative about a time that they have been exposed to death or thought about mortality, and a lot of them write about the deaths of grandparents or older relatives. So even though we think of young people as being very far away from death, it is something that they think about. And that is precedent. And so no age is too young to start talking about mortality.
LR: That’s all so interesting, and it’s really reassuring, honestly. I’m glad that you’re imparting that onto these kids. So that does it for all the questions that I’m particularly curious about. Is there anything else you want to express in this interview?
BP: One thing I’ll say is, again, I don’t have an answer for exactly what is the best way to be mortal. But I’ve talked to a lot of people about it, I’ve read a lot about it, and one thing that’s come up, again and again, is in terms of reducing concerns about mortality and death anxiety, it helps to have a connection to something outside yourself. So for some people, that might be religion, for some people that might be a cause that they believe in, for some people that might be creative works that they’re putting themselves into. I interviewed somebody who mentioned feeling comforted by the fact that the constellations are always the same, and they see the same constellations return every year. And so if there is some sense in which we can feel part of a larger whole, then death isn’t quite as threatening. Because we ourselves might be just little flashes in the dark, but the whole endures. So I guess that would be advice that I try to follow. And that would be advice that I would impart to people.