death

I make my wife coffee every morning. It’s a little ritual. She has a very specific, very elaborate way she likes her coffee. It’s a complicated process—one I’ve made even more complex with time, adding extra touches here and there. I prepare the cup while the coffee brews. I start with four packets of sweetener, some powdered creamer—she prefers powdered to liquid, both of which taste like plastic to me but, it’s her thing—and then a few shakes of pumpkin spice seasoning she found at a buyout store. I stir that up first because if I don’t, the pumpkin spice separates from everything else and floats to the top. Then I pour in the coffee, swirl in a bit of vanilla extract—she used to use sugar-free vanilla syrup, another buyout find, but we ran out—and top it all off with a huge dollop of whipped cream and rainbow-colored sprinkles.

She never asked me to do this. I just saw how she made her own coffee and decided I’d start doing it for her. I bring it to her in bed. She drinks her candy coffee, and I sip my own, which is always just black and we have our first conversation of the day.

One morning, while going through the motions of making her coffee, I realized: I’m not going to do this forever. One day, this will stop. Maybe I’ll take a new job that gets me out of the house too early. Maybe she will. Maybe something else entirely, something more dire or life altering—sickness, death, a catastrophe—will interrupt this morning ritual. Whatever the reason, this moment is fleeting and someday will be the last day I do it.

I recently did a show called The Big Secret, and it centers around a couple of deaths. I do a lot of material about death—because I’ve outlived four siblings, one parent, all of my grandparents, and a few close friends. There’s just been a lot of death around me, so it has given me a lot oif material.

But one thing I always stress—and I brought this up in the show—is that I do not fetishize death. Someone else’s death isn’t about you. It’s not a totem, not a tool to give your life meaning. Still, I know so many people who’ve embraced a tragic death in their life as a source of identity. In the show, I talk about a friend who had to cut off his late wife’s best friend. After his wife died, the friend made the tragedy the center of her being. She kept the wound open, called my friend constantly to relive the pain, to bond through their shared grief. Eventually, he realized that if he was ever going to heal, he had to let her go. She was determined not to move on—not to grow from it, not to live the life that comes after. And for my friend, letting this woman go, cutting off that link to his wife’s memory, was painful—but it was also necessary.

Reflecting on that, and on how often I talk and write about death while trying to walk the line of not making a shrine of it, I started to wonder: why do we do that? Why do we turn tragedy into a badge of honor or an identity marker?

I think part of it is cultural. In America, we don’t have official ranks or places in society the way other countries, like England, historically have. There’s no official class system to define your worth, no universal standard to push against—or to be proud of if you lucked into it. So, we default to story. And a story needs drama. It needs tragedy. Surviving a horrible event becomes proof of our worth, our experience, our insight. It becomes how we earn space.

And yes, surviving something awful can grant wisdom. But it doesn’t guarantee it. Some people are just traumatized. The horror didn’t make them wiser—it made them damaged. It’s not the tragedy itself that gives someone gravitas. It’s how they process it.

When I was a kid, I turned seven a couple of months before the bully down the street did and, somehow, I got it into my head that just because I was now the older one, I could put him in his place. I got my clock cleaned. Tragedy is like that. Passing through a tragedy isn’t going to mean that on the other side you are automatically smarter or have more insight. You might just be older.

And when tragedy becomes your measure of value, that’s dangerous. Because it turns something deeply individual—how you deal with grief—into a kind of social currency.

I think we also confuse tragedy with the sacred. America is weird with religion. On paper, we’re supposedly a secular society, but we all know that is pretty much a lie when it comes to actual practice. Societally, we’re steeped in religion, to the point where even the least believing individuals tend to think and speak in somewhat spiritual terms. We want meaning. We want transcendence. We want to know that something matters, witch cosmic significance. And death—loss—feels like it should carry spiritual weight. That it should mean something. That we come through it carrying a scar that says the spirit made itself known here.

But just calling something sacred doesn’t make it so. Loss isn’t inherently sacred. It becomes sacred only if we treat it that way—if we process it with intention. If we choose to honor the person, or the love, or the lesson.

And that brings me back to the coffee. Because what I realized is that this, this small act done with full presence and love and awareness of its impermanence—that’s sacred. That’s what gives life weight.

The sacred is in the everyday. In the comfort and joy and ritual of being with the person you love - or with something you love, a task you love, a place- - in standing still long enough to feel what it means to be here, to be you, in this moment, doing this thing. Sacredness isn’t in the suffering. It’s in recognizing what you have before it’s gone.

When we mistake loss and suffering and tragedy as the things that give life meaning, we’ve reversed the order of things. We’re putting the end of a thing before the thing itself, the end of love before the act of loving, and doing that is both an understandable mistake, and inherently nihilistic. And it’s not sustainable. You cannot live in someone else’s death any more than you can live in constant fear of your own. So, I make the coffee just the way she likes it, and I wait for her to go “yay” in her little sleepy voice when I bring it in, and I try to be present with this fleeting, tiny thing that makes up the days of my finite life, and I hope that I am doing it right.