Death offers a terrific lesson in rhetoric.

Learn it and feel better about life—or its end at least.

I’ve been following Maura McInerney-Rowley’s newsletter, Hello Mortal, which focuses on one of my one of my favorite topics: death.

Yeah, I’m super fun at a party, even without my weird time zone.

Anyway, McInerney-Rowley, a death doula, recently reposted a piece on Lily House. It’s a “social model hospice home” on Cape Cod, which treats its two residents with off-the-charts pampering. Its executive director says that when they come to Lily House to die, “they actually start thriving.”

As a rhetorician, I see some serious reframing here. It can help us all deal with our own scary thoughts about the end of life.

I’ve written earlier about how reframing can help with a debate about dishwasher loading—the kind of argument that can shake even the most stable relationships. I’ve also claimed that framing sparked the environmental movement. And it can also make us feel better about death.

The technique comes down to four basic steps.

1. Question the terms.

In any argument, the first question to ask yourself is, What’s this really about? When somebody dies, is that about somebody losing a battle with disease? Or passing away to some other place? Or having had a good ending? (Personally, I’m a big fan of death language expressed in the present perfect tense.)

2. Broaden the issue.

When someone close to us dies, we tend to focus on the person’s absence. Of course we all need to mourn someone we love. But I believe it’s not helpful to feel sorry for the deceased. This may sound soulless on my part, especially if we’re talking about someone who died young.

I took this photo of my parents in 1967, when I was 12 and they were 42. They died, still youthful, 18 years later. Should I feel sorry for their early death? Or for myself?

But Aristotle taught that death is not painful, life is. Both the Stoics and Epicureans agreed. Epicurus wrote that, as long as you and I exist, death does not. And once we die, we no longer exist, so death literally has nothing to do with us. This idea led to inscriptions you can still see on ancient Roman gravestones:

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.

A philosophical approach to fear of death treats it as a fallacy. If you don’t exist, how can you fear nonexistence? This broadens the issue of a person’s death beyond a single instance, and lets us think about the richer meaning of life.

Did I mention how much fun I am at a party?

3. Simplify.

When Marcus Tullius Cicero discovered a conspiracy to overthrow the republican government of Rome, he had the conspirators arrested and strangled by an executioner. Cicero then announced in the Forum:

“They have lived.”

Biographer Anthony Everitt noted that Cicero’s use of the present perfect tense avoided an “unlucky mention of death.” But that same expression could be used for someone who died far less violently. “She has lived” is a simple reframing of a prolonged, painful end, and may ease the suffering of those who miss her. (Also, Cicero wanted to avoid saying, “I had them all strangled.”)

4. Personalize.

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring broadened and simplified the harm caused by the insecticide DDT. The title expands the thinning of raptor eggshells to environmental destruction, then zooms in on our own birdless backyard.

In the case of death, the ultimate personalization has to do with our own mortality. The thought shouldn’t have to make us lonely. As McInerney-Rowley puts it:

Honoring our shared mortality can bring us together—and awaken us to the lives we’re truly meant to be living.

I’ve lately been focusing on ways to use rhetoric to persuade ourselves into better habits and attitudes; that’s the subject of the new book I keep hawking (Rachel Carson pun notwithstanding).

But there’s a hidden agenda to this work. Just about everything seems to divide us these days; even attitudes toward death, and what to do with the end of life. Rhetoric offers the surest way to disagree without anger, and to focus on choices—including how to live, and how to live toward the end.