The Buffer: What Holds Us When We Face Death

Since 2011, people in a hundred countries have gathered in living rooms and cafés to eat cake and talk about death with strangers. Nobody there is trying to solve death. In the shorter companion post, We Shall All of Us Die, I argued that death frames every life and that no amount of company removes the isolation of dying. Still, presence brings a dying person comfort, and a sense of coherence, even meaning, to the experience. The research below is what I think those strangers are reaching for, and I’ll mark the places where it’s thinner than I’d like.

Two Kinds of Defense

In The Denial of Death (1973), the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker described human beings as “out of nature and hopelessly in it.” Each of us is a symbolic self, a creature with a name and a life history who can imagine infinity, housed in a body that aches, bleeds, and will stop. An animal fears the threat in front of it and, once the threat passes, goes back to living. We carry a self that can watch itself age toward an ending it can name in advance.

Terror management theory is Becker’s argument turned into a research program. The social psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski introduced it in 1984, at a conference of experimental social psychologists, and when an editor told them no one would take it seriously without evidence, they started running experiments. The first, in 1987, involved twenty-two municipal court judges in Tucson.

The most useful idea from that work is that the mind reacts to mortality in two ways. When thoughts of death are in focus, people use proximal defenses: suppressing the thought or pushing death into the distant future by denying they’re vulnerable now. When those thoughts are active but outside awareness, distal defenses take over: maintaining self-esteem and faith in one’s cultural worldview, which have no logical connection to death. On this account, they keep the knowledge of death from becoming anxiety.

One caution before going further. The theory’s signature experiment, in which a brief written reminder of death makes people defend their worldview more strongly, did not replicate in the 2022 Many Labs 4 project, which pooled data from seventeen labs and about 1,550 participants. One of the theory’s founders, Tom Pyszczynski, co-wrote a critique of how its results were analyzed, though he and Sheldon Solomon had also helped the organizers choose which study to replicate. One study below, Routledge and Juhl’s, uses the same kind of brief reminder, and I’ll explain what that means for it when we get there.

What “I-Sharing” Actually Measures

Long before the idea entered experimental psychology, Irvin Yalom distinguished three kinds of isolation in Existential Psychotherapy (1980): interpersonal isolation, or ordinary loneliness; intrapersonal isolation, the walling-off of parts of oneself; and existential isolation, the gap between any two people that no amount of intimacy fully closes. The social psychologist Elizabeth Pinel later brought the third kind into the lab.

Drawing on Yalom, Pinel and her colleagues put existential isolation plainly: “No matter how well we know a person, we simply cannot know certain things about them firsthand.” To me, it’s the feeling of sitting at a crowded dinner table, laughing at the right moments, and being sure no one there sees the evening the way you do.

Pinel’s term for the moments that interrupt it is I-sharing: the belief that you and another person share an identical subjective experience. Her 2006 studies with Tom Pyszczynski and others found that I-sharing changed how much objective similarity mattered. Participants preferred a person who resembled them only when that person also I-shared with them, and people with a strong need for closeness reacted to I-sharers and non-I-sharers with particular intensity.

Pinel’s work shows that shared subjective experience draws people together, and that feeling existentially isolated changes whom we’re drawn to. I have not seen it show that I-sharing reduces death anxiety. An earlier version of this essay said it did, and I can’t find the study. The link is an inference I’m making, one I think is reasonable given the rest of this essay, but an inference.

Reassurance doesn’t produce I-sharing, and neither does advice. In my experience, someone has to be in the moment with you.

Tea, Cake, and the Unsayable

There’s a real institution that seems almost designed around that idea. In November 2010, a Londoner named Jon Underwood read about Bernard Crettaz’s work and decided to build something on the same model. In September 2011, he hosted the first British Death Café in his Hackney home, with his mother, the psychotherapist Sue Barsky Reid, facilitating. The two later wrote a guide so others could host their own.

The format is intentionally spare. People, often strangers, eat cake, drink tea, and talk about death. A Death Café has no agenda, objectives, or themes, and it is explicitly a discussion group, not grief support or counseling. It leads no one toward any conclusion, product, or course of action. As of this week, the organization reports more than 24,000 Death Cafés held in 100 countries.

Nobody at the table argues anyone out of their fear, and nobody says it’ll be fine. Someone says aloud something they’ve never said, and someone across the table nods because they’ve thought it too. That nod is close to what Pinel means by I-sharing.

I know of no trials showing that Death Cafés reduce death anxiety. What their spread shows is demand: in a hundred countries, people have gone looking for a room where they can face mortality in company.

Estrangement Is More Than a Mood

The philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe adds a dimension that psychology can’t reach. He introduced the term existential feelings and developed it in his 2008 book Feelings of Being to describe experiences that our usual talk of emotion and mood tends to miss: they aren’t directed at any particular object, and although they are bodily feelings, the body isn’t all they’re about. They are, in his phrase, structures of relatedness between self and world, and they give us “a changeable sense of ‘reality’ and of ‘belonging to the world.’” That’s why changes in them so often come with the complaint that things or people seem unreal. Ratcliffe also adds that, in most if not all cases, they encompass our relations with other people.

This is my proposal, not Ratcliffe’s. Death anxiety often doesn’t feel like fear of a specific future event; it can feel like the world going slightly unreal. If that’s a change in background belonging rather than a belief about the future, a better argument won’t reach it. Relationship is one of the few things that can plausibly reach it.

The Attachment System Was Built for This

The Israeli psychologists Mario Mikulincer, Victor Florian, and Gilad Hirschberger brought attachment research into this field directly. In a 2003 review, they made the case that close relationships are a death-anxiety buffer in their own right, related to but separate from self-esteem and worldview. Their summary of the evidence has two parts. Reminders of death increase people’s motivation to form and keep close relationships. Keeping those relationships offers symbolic protection against the terror of death, while breaking them brings death closer to awareness.

An earlier study by Mikulincer, Florian, and colleagues makes the second part concrete. When participants imagined being separated from a relationship partner, thoughts of death became more mentally accessible, mostly when the imagined separation was long-term or final and among people high in attachment anxiety, the chronic worry that others won’t be there.

Here is what the studies report. In their review, Mikulincer and his colleagues note that people high in attachment anxiety describe more fear of death than others do, and that thoughts of death come to mind for them more readily. People high in attachment avoidance look different. The authors of that earlier study note that avoidant people tend to pull away from distress rather than watch for it. In that study, imagining a relationship ending didn’t bring thoughts of death closer for them, and the review reads this as a defense that holds.

A later study suggests that this calm has limits. Mikulincer, Tamar Dolev, and Phillip Shaver asked Israeli undergraduates to recall a painful breakup, and some of them to push the thoughts away. Avoidant participants pushed them away either way. They kept the thoughts at bay while their minds were free. Once the researchers added a demanding task, the thoughts came back, along with a more negative view of themselves. The authors describe the avoidant strategy as one that “collapses under high cognitive load,” and they write of its “psychological costs.” The study was about separation, not death, so it doesn’t settle the question here. It does show that what looks like calm can be a defense that takes effort to keep up.

What follows is my clinical reading, which goes beyond anything these studies tested. In my office, I have also seen the fear go underground. For some people, insecure attachment doesn’t so much remove death anxiety as privatize it, held in place by an old conviction, often formed before words, that showing this particular fear costs too much. They say little about death, but the fear shows up indirectly: in obsessive, ruminative thinking, and in efforts to manage and control events or other people. Mikulincer and Shaver had proposed something similar for avoidant people: that the distress they keep out of mind can surface indirectly, in physical symptoms, poor sleep, and estrangement from others. The fear of death is one of the places those costs come due.

Meaning Bears Weight

Viktor Frankl’s account of meaning is easy to flatten into a choice between finding and making. His own word was discovery: he placed the meaning of life “in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.” (An earlier version of this essay had him calling meaning constructed, which reversed his wording.) But his discovery is anything but passive. Life, he wrote, questions each of us, and we can answer only “by being responsible.” Meaning is a possibility in a concrete situation, waiting to be actualized, and he names three ways of finding it: by creating a work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone, or by the attitude we take toward suffering we can’t avoid. In a 1984 postscript he described perceiving meaning as “becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.” He called the outward pull in all of this “the self-transcendence of human existence,” and the second way runs directly through other people.

Here I part company with Frankl. His own image shows where. The logotherapist, he writes, is an eye specialist rather than a painter: a painter conveys “a picture of the world as he sees it,” while an eye specialist “tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.” But even the best eye specialist only helps us see the world as our eyes can take it in. Seeing is already an encounter, and so is meaning. Meaning isn’t simply there to be seen; we make it out of what we meet. Discovery is the openness to possibilities, to other people, to the natural world. Construction is the work of making something of what that openness lets in. Still, the two belong together. Meaning happens where an open person meets a world worth answering.

The word “meaning” does a lot of quiet work here, and Irvin Yalom separates its strands, then folds two of them together. Purpose, he notes, refers to intention, aim, function, what something is for; but because ordinary usage treats the purpose of life and the meaning of life as interchangeable, he treats them as synonyms. Significance is ambiguous, sometimes a synonym for meaning and sometimes closer to importance. And cosmic meaning, whether life as a whole fits a design beyond us, differs from terrestrial meaning, what gives my own life meaning, which can be entirely secular. In Yalom’s terms, some of the buffer the research describes is cosmic: terror management theory’s defenses offer a place in “a meaningful, eternal universe.” But much of it is terrestrial. Couldn’t it also take the form Gerasim offered Ivan Ilych: a person who stayed in the room?

The most direct test I know of meaning as a buffer is small. In 2010, Clay Routledge and Jacob Juhl asked sixty undergraduates how meaningful their lives felt, then had them write briefly, at random, about either their own death or failing an important exam. Afterward, everyone answered questions about fear of their own death. Writing about death raised that fear only in students whose lives felt low in meaning. This study uses the same kind of brief reminder whose classic effect Many Labs 4 failed to replicate, so I read it as suggestive, not settled: meaning seemed to keep the thought of death from turning toward dread, in one small room of students.

The psychiatrist William Breitbart built a group therapy on Frankl’s ideas for people with advanced cancer and tested it seriously. In a 2015 randomized trial, 253 patients were assigned to eight sessions of either meaning-centered group psychotherapy or supportive group psychotherapy. Among patients who attended at least three sessions, the meaning-centered groups improved more in spiritual well-being and quality of life and showed greater drops in depression, hopelessness, the desire for a hastened death, and physical symptom distress. Counting everyone who was randomized, the authors found the effects “somewhat more modest,” and their most conservative analysis kept only quality of life, depression, and hopelessness. The authors single out the desire for hastened death, and to a lesser extent hopelessness, as responding only to the meaning-centered groups.

One limit matters most here: the trial never measured death anxiety, and it found no difference between the groups in general anxiety. Whatever meaning-centered therapy does for people facing death, this trial can’t say it eases the fear of dying itself.

The most interesting detail is the comparison group. It was itself a support group, and the trial checked how the two felt from the inside. Patients in both arms rated their groups about equally on support from other patients and on talking about their feelings, and raters found no difference in encouraging hope or group cohesion. Where the groups did differ was focus: meaning themes ran through the meaning-centered sessions, and support themes ran through the supportive ones. Both rooms had company. The rooms where people talked about what their lives had meant did more.

Siegel’s Dog

The psychiatrist Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology treats health as integration: distinct parts of a system that stay distinct while becoming linked. In The Developing Mind he names nine domains where that integration can happen or be blocked. Two of them bear directly on this essay.

The first is temporal integration. Siegel opens it with his dog, who, he thinks, has no cortical map of time and shows no sign of worrying that nothing lasts. We have that map, and so we know that we all must die. Temporal integration, as Siegel defines it, means distinguishing our longings for certainty, permanence, and immortality from the reality of uncertainty, transience, and mortality, and then linking the two. Deny either side and rigidity or chaos can follow. His example is a friend whose cancer was removed successfully and who fell into a deep depression anyway, because at fifty she had never envisioned facing illness or death. The dog is my favorite detail, because it’s nearly Becker’s animal, which fears the threat in front of it and then goes back to living.

The second is the ninth domain, which Siegel calls identity integration. He says he didn’t start with it. People he saw in therapy, after deep work in the other eight domains, kept arriving at the same shift, and he added a domain to name it. He describes it as “breathing across” the others: a feeling of belonging to something larger than a body-bound self, and larger even than friends and family. People in that state come to feel that others, including people unlike them, and the natural world are part of who they are, and they want to contribute even when the results may not be known for decades. Elsewhere in the same chapter, he says integration across these domains yields “a sense of wholeness within and belonging between.”

My reading goes beyond what Siegel claims. Identity integration looks like the healthy cousin of what terror management theory calls symbolic immortality, a hope its founders say comes from feeling “a part of something larger, more powerful, and more eternal than themselves”: an identity wide enough that the body’s ending isn’t the end of what one is. The defenses in the experiments are held tightly against threat; what Siegel describes widens the self instead of fortifying it, and like the rippling Yalom describes in Staring at the Sun, it doesn’t wait to be seen. Siegel doesn’t present it as an answer to death anxiety, though in the same chapter he notes clinical trials, for people facing “terror in the face of a terminal illness diagnosis,” that move them “toward a freer, more interconnected sense of self.” He does say it emerged in people who had done integrative work across the other domains, interpersonal integration among them.

Lines Less Independent Than They Look

Several of these lines belong to one family: Pinel’s I-sharing studies included one of terror management theory’s founders, and Routledge, Juhl, and Mikulincer all framed their work in its terms. Ratcliffe, Breitbart, and Siegel came from elsewhere, and none of them was studying death anxiety itself. If their work points the same way, that means something, because they had no stake in the theory. The synthesis is mine: death frames every life, and human beings do not seem built to face its edge alone.

Buber’s Dream

Yalom was writing about relationship as the answer to isolation before most of this research existed. In Existential Psychotherapy, the same book that calls isolation an unbridgeable gulf, his chapter on isolation turns several times to Martin Buber. “No relationship can eliminate isolation,” Yalom writes. “Each of us is alone in existence. Yet aloneness can be shared in such a way that love compensates for the pain of isolation.” He quotes Buber’s image of a great relationship throwing “a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.”

Then he retells a dream that came back to Buber all his life. Buber is alone in a vast cave or at the edge of a gigantic forest; something extraordinary happens, an animal tearing at his arm, say, and he cries out. Far away, another voice answers with the same cry. As Yalom puts it, the answering cry is the critical event for Buber: existence begins with the relationship. Yalom reads the same dream the other way. Buber starts alone, frightened, crying out. To Yalom, the dream “speaks to me of fundamental isolation and suggests that our existence begins with a solitary, lonely cry, anxiously awaiting a response.” A page earlier, Yalom had already conceded that Buber “would protest” his making isolation fundamental, “and even more vigorously would he protest at my citing his work as part of my discussion.”

I read the dream as Buber did, but Yalom’s reading isn’t wrong either, and Buber’s essay “Distance and Relation” helps me see why. There he argues that we can enter into relation only with what has been set at a distance, as genuinely other, though he insists this isn’t a sequence in time. Distance is the precondition of relation, though he admits the two can also pull against each other. The far-off voice in the dream counts as an answer only because it comes across real distance, from someone who is not the dreamer. That awareness of distance and difference makes the answer possible, and, felt from inside the uncanny place, it is exactly the isolation Yalom puts first. Anyone who has lain awake afraid of dying knows the cry. The manuscript behind this blog follows the answer toward a self made in the between, not only rescued there.

My Take

If the buffer is mostly people, then whether someone can face death without being flattened by it isn’t only a private achievement. It depends on whether anyone is around to answer the cry. A culture that thins out the places where people sit together long enough to say what frightens them shouldn’t be surprised when death anxiety has nowhere to go but private dread, or outward into blame.

I hold that as a hypothesis, not a finding. But I find it hard to look at strangers meeting in a hundred countries to talk about death over cake without seeing how many people are missing a room ordinary life used to provide. I am thinking particularly about my elderly clients, many of whom have lost spouses and friends, and whose remaining family members are uncomfortable holding space for the kind of conversation a Death Café makes room for.

Go Deeper

• The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. Terror management theory told by its founders for general readers; read it alongside the replication debate above.
• Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality by Matthew Ratcliffe. Demanding, but the full statement of the argument above: existential feelings as bodily feelings, ways of relating to the world as a whole, and the source of our sense of reality, with chapters on depersonalization, schizophrenia, and the Capgras delusion.
• Death Café (deathcafe.com). The movement’s own site, with a guide to holding your own and listings of upcoming gatherings.

References

• Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.
• Breitbart, W., et al. (2015). Meaning-centered group psychotherapy: An effective intervention for improving psychological well-being in patients with advanced cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 33(7), 749–754.
• Buber, M. (1988). The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays (M. Friedman, Ed.; M. Friedman & R. G. Smith, Trans.). Humanities Press International. (Original work published 1965)
• Death Café. What is Death Cafe. deathcafe.com/what.
• Frankl, V. E. (1984). Man’s Search for Meaning (3rd ed.). Simon & Schuster.
• Klein, R. A., et al. (2022). Many Labs 4. Collabra: Psychology, 8(1), 35271. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.35271
• Mikulincer, M., Dolev, T., & Shaver, P. R. (2004). Attachment-related strategies during thought suppression: Ironic rebounds and vulnerable self-representations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(6), 940–956. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.6.940
• Mikulincer, M., Florian, V., & Hirschberger, G. (2003). The existential function of close relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7(1), 20–40.
• Mikulincer, M., Florian, V., Birnbaum, G., & Malishkevich, S. (2002). The death-anxiety buffering function of close relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 287–299.
• Pinel, E. C., et al. (2006). Seeing I to I: A pathway to interpersonal connectedness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(2), 243–257.
• Pyszczynski, T., Greenberg, J., & Solomon, S. (1999). A dual-process model of defense against conscious and unconscious death-related thoughts. Psychological Review, 106(4), 835–845.
• Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of Being. Oxford University Press.
• Ratcliffe, M. (2009). Existential feeling and psychopathology. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 16(2), 179–194.
• Routledge, C., & Juhl, J. (2010). When death thoughts lead to death fears. Cognition and Emotion, 24(5), 848–854.
• Siegel, D. J. (2020). The Developing Mind (3rd ed.). Guilford.
• Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the Core. Random House.
• Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books.
• Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the Sun. Jossey-Bass.

Revised October 2026. This version corrects several attributions in the original post and adds the Death Café and a closing section on Buber’s dream.

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