Tombstone Psychology
Photo by Brett Sayles
I spend a lot of time walking in cemeteries.
It’s open space and one of the few places where I can let my dog off the leash. Tommy Tom Toms loves to run, it is his joy, and he will chase the tennis ball or just zoom back and forth racing twenty yards ahead of me, making a tight turn and then streaking back past me at full speed another twenty yards to the rear, then repeating his oval loops until, finally, he just stands there looking at me like “ok, let’s go for a walk”.
These ambles in the early dawn or late afternoon give me a chance to spend some time with the dead. I look at their headstones, calculate their lives by numbers and names and who they are lying next to for eternity. I’ve never been around so many people with so little that needs to be said. Just enjoying the breezes in the trees, the mystery of never knowing each other, and yet I am somehow communing with them one by one as we move along the winding paths.
My cemetery travels with “Triple T” (the dog) often have the feel of a walking meditation, and this period of quiet reflection has given rise to a practice that I call “tombstone psychology”. It’s a way of looking ahead in order to look back on your life: you just imagine a phrase that you might put on your tombstone because it captures something about who you are and how you lived your life. So, for example:
“He Got Shit Done” or “All Used Up for a Good Purpose”
You get the idea, it’s your own one-liner obituary. This activity is inspired by my work in psychosynthesis where there is an emphasis on finding purpose in one’s life and then leaning into that as a guiding principle. There’s an opposite or complementary game too where you come up with a phrase you would not want on your tombstone (actually quite useful in a different sort of way, especially when you’re feeling caught or trapped in the tiny world of your own troubled mind…):
“She was consumed by lots of small, insignificant details” or “He Forgot to Flush”
Have some fun with this the next time you find yourself wandering in a cemetery or while gazing up at the night sky. It’s a good gut check on whether you are living according to your values and what truly matters.
Who knows, this might even come in handy when your actual time has come and someone has to decide what it will say on your tombstone. When my mom died a few years ago, the five of us siblings came to a consensus pretty quickly about a special phrase that seemed a good fit for her. If you ever visit a New Haven graveyard and come across the back of a tombstone that says “Mine was Delicious!”, please say hello to Audrey for me.
The next Psychosynthesis Professional Training program with Synthesis Northeast starts in September 2022.
Applications now being accepted.