I walked into a family holiday park recently and was struck by the in-your-face Halloween
decorations. Skeletons everywhere… spooky wooky indeed!

Around the time our baby was born, I was reading Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun, a book
about our fear of death and how confronting our mortality can help us live more fully. I joked that
it was some ‘light bedtime reading’, or perhaps ‘a bedtime story for the baby’.

Looking back, I wonder whether the jokes were a way of making the subject more manageable,
not just for myself but for other people; someone had expressed concern about what I was
reading, and perhaps the humour was a way of reassuring them that they needn’t worry about
me. Sometimes our jokes aren’t just about making light of something that frightens us. They can
be a way of protecting those around us from their own discomfort.

My work in counselling, alongside volunteering for a hospice, frequently brings me close to
questions of death and grief. But at this particular holiday park’s reception area, it was three
child-sized electronic skeletons playing violins that really caught my attention. A nearby toddler
was absolutely terrified of them. While the adults seemed to accept the decorations as part of
the fun, he was having none of it. It struck me that he was probably the most honest person
there – seeing past the joke and recognising the actual horror being presented.

Perhaps that’s part of the strange appeal of Halloween. We bring death out into the open, dress
it up and make a joke of it. We play at being frightened by something genuinely frightening, but
at a safe distance. Then November comes, the skeletons go back into storage and life carries
on. I wonder what it is we’re doing when we bring those skeletons out each year. Are we finding
a way to approach and get up close to something difficult, without having to confront what it
really means?

I’ve spent time alongside clients grieving profound losses, and I’ve experienced loss in my own
life that has tested some of my beliefs about how I live, my feelings about death and the way the
world works. Experiences like these can challenge the stories we tell ourselves about how life is
supposed to unfold: that ‘good things happen to good people’, that ‘if we do the right things
everything will work out OK’, that ‘there’s some kind of order to it all’. Sometimes those stories
help us feel safe. But then sometimes life (or death) happens, making it impossible to keep
believing those stories in quite the same way.

Thinking about death can be uncomfortable, but it can also help us see things (and some very
important things!) differently. What really matters to us? What are we putting off? Are we living
according to our own values, or following others’ expectations, ones we’ve never really
questioned?

From an early age, we absorb stories about how life works and what we’re supposed to want,
how we’re supposed to be. We don’t always stop to ask whether those stories still fit, or whether
they were ever really ours in the first place. It’s uncomfortable to recognise that the world
doesn’t necessarily offer us the meaning or certainty we’d like, or that some of us were
promised growing up. But there can also be freedom in realising that meaning isn’t something
someone else can simply provide for us. We each have to make sense of our lives, drawing on
our experiences, relationships and values. We certainly can’t choose everything that happens to
us, but we can explore how we want to respond and what we want our lives to stand for.

I’ve recently bought Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which the psychiatrist reflects
on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and the question of how we find meaning in the
face of profound suffering. I suspect I’ll make a few self-deprecating jokes when I open it at
bedtime, perhaps as another way of reassuring others that they needn’t worry about me.

But as my supervisor pointed out, the title mirrors my own process rather aptly: I am indeed a
man in search of my own meaning – and I do subscribe to the existentialist idea that that is my
responsibility, in an inherently meaningless world.

This is one of the things I value dearly about counselling and psychotherapy. Beyond relieving
symptoms, therapy can offer a space to explore the stories we live by, the ways we’ve learnt to
protect ourselves and the possibilities we might be missing. To examine the meanings we’ve
had imposed onto us, and how we want to proceed when we realise that some of the things we
were told – and lived by – don’t hold up anymore. Therapy is certainly not about being told how
to live, but certainly provides the time and space to understand ourselves well enough to make
choices that feel more genuinely our own.

Yalom returns to the powerful idea of regret in Staring at the Sun – and its potential to
encourage positive change. He asks us to consider that if we know our time is limited, and if
we’re already living with regrets, then what’s one change you could make to the way you’re
living now, so that when you look back in a year’s time, you’re living with a little less regret?

It’s a question worth sitting with.

This doesn’t have to be grand actions like a trip to Tahiti. Although, if that really matters to you
then it also could! This could be that you reconnected with an old friend; had more meaningful
conversations with someone who really matters to you; spent a little bit more time doing things
you love.

And just imagine, when the skeletons come out again next year, the seemingly silly ritual that
helps us keep death at an arm’s length, will you be able to muster the honesty of that two year
old and see what’s there in front of you? Perhaps you’ll take a moment to consider your own
mortality, and feel reassured that you chose to live this year just a little more meaningfully.