Caitlin Doughty

Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.” The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.

Pat O’Hara was the head of a Zen Buddhist center in New York City at the time of the September 11 attacks, when the towers of the World Trade Center came down in a scream of chaos and metal. “The smell didn’t go away for several weeks and you had the sense you were breathing people,” she said. “It was the smell of all kinds of things that had totally disintegrated, including people. People and electrical things and stone and glass and everything.”