Why You Need to Spend More Time in Graveyards

Oliver Gill's piece in The Times this weekend introduces a word we hadn't heard before: "sadmin." It's what end-of-life charity Marie Curie uses for the administrative aftermath of bereavement. Things like probate, house clearance, call centres, passwords, banks, utilities, forms, and the bewildering bureaucratic trail that lands on people already flattened by grief.

Simon Rogerson, the man behind the Octopus empire, has decided to disrupt it. His new venture, Octopus Legacy, is being pitched as the Octopus Energy of death: technology, transparency, fixed pricing, and a more human approach to what is, for most families, an unrelievedly grim slog.

The picture Rogerson paints will resonate with anyone who's been through probate: the cottage industry of high-street solicitors quoting a percentage of the estate, relatives left to clear houses alone, and the dictaphone Sam Grice puts in his will kit so your grandchildren might one day hear your voice again.

There's a real and decent piece of work being built here, and we think it's hugely important. But there's another layer underneath all this that the article barely touches.

The "sadmin" of death may be modern, but the avoidance of death is not.

Enter Martin Heidegger

In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger spends hundreds of pages circling a question most people spend their lives avoiding:

What does it mean that you're going to die?

Not your parents or humanity in general or the abstract "everyone dies eventually."

You. The person reading this sentence right now.

Heidegger's claim is that most of the time we don't truly relate to death as our own possibility at all. Everyday life contains powerful mechanisms for keeping death at a distance.

We say: "People die." "One day we all go." "Hopefully not anytime soon."

Death gets shifted into the third person, postponed into the future tense, and diluted into statistics.

Heidegger calls this immersion in das Man, usually translated as "the They." The they-self is the anonymous social voice that tells us what's normal, respectable, successful, desirable, and worth worrying about. It's not some evil external force, but the atmosphere of average everyday life itself.

And one of its favourite tricks is making death feel perpetually distant.

In one sense, Octopus Legacy perfectly mirrors the modern condition. It's a compassionate attempt to make death administratively manageable. Fixed pricing. Transparent process. AI handling repetitive tasks. Emotional support where legal coldness used to dominate. Good. Necessary, even.

But while you can outsource the administration surrounding death, you can't outsource the existential fact of your own mortality.

That remains stubbornly yours.

The structure of death

Heidegger said, "As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die," describing death as a possibility with four distinctive characteristics.

• Death is certain. There's no negotiating this one. The base rate is a hundred per cent and always has been.
• Death is indefinite. Its arrival is guaranteed, but its timing is radically uncertain. Sam Grice's mother died suddenly in a car accident in New Zealand. Nobody had scheduled that into the calendar. You don't know whether your death is in forty years or forty minutes.
• Death is non-relational. Others can accompany you to the edge of death, but nobody can die your death for you. When death arrives, the social roles that normally organise identity (executive, founder, parent, coach, and friend) no longer provide shelter.
• Death is not to be outstripped. You can't permanently evade it through optimisation, productivity, supplementation, status, wealth, or health protocols. It's the horizon that silently structures every finite life. You can't top trump the possibility of your absolute impossibility.

If you sit with those four long enough, something begins to shift. The abstraction cracks, and the social fog of the They begins to thin. Death stops belonging to "people" and starts belonging to you.

Anticipatory resoluteness

Heidegger's phrase for the stance that emerges from this confrontation is "anticipatory resoluteness" (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit).

It sounds forbidding, but the underlying idea is surprisingly concrete. It means living with lucid awareness of your finitude rather than continually fleeing from it.

It's not morbid or nihilistic. People who've been very close to death often describe a feeling of clarity, like soldiers, surgeons, hospice workers, and the seriously ill. Much of what normally consumes attention suddenly looks trivial. The noise falls away and priorities reorder themselves.

For Heidegger, this confrontation with mortality can loosen the grip of the "they-self" and return a person to their own possibilities.

Two movements matter here.

First, you retrieve. You take over the concrete situation into which you were thrown: your inheritance, temperament, history, obligations, wounds, talents, and relationships. Not as passive facts about you, but as possibilities you must now own.

Second, you project. Out of a finite life, you choose which possibilities are genuinely yours to pursue rather than simply inheriting the ambitions, metrics, and scripts circulating around you in average everydayness.

This is what Heidegger means by authenticity. Not performative self-branding, the shallow cringe of "being your true self," or expressive individualism.

Authenticity, for Heidegger, means existing in a way that lucidly owns the finite and irrevocably personal character of your life.

Importantly, this doesn't mean living in the woods and escaping society altogether. We always remain embedded in a shared world with others. Authenticity isn't a permanent state of enlightenment beyond everyday life. Rather, it's a different way of inhabiting that everydayness.

Graveyards

In a 1961 lecture, Heidegger was reportedly asked how we can live more authentically. In a rare piece of direct life advice, he's said to have replied, "One should spend more time in graveyards."

Graveyards interrupt abstraction. They cut through the fantasy that death is something that only happens statistically, eventually, or to somebody else.

They place you among people who once believed they had more time. And in doing so, they quietly return a question to you:

What are you doing with yours?

Rogerson and Grice are building something valuable. Making bereavement less administratively brutal matters. But the deeper task, the one no company, platform, or process can perform for you, is the task Heidegger spent much of his life pointing toward: retrieving your life from distraction, owning its finitude, and choosing how to live before your possibilities close.

Simon Rogerson, respectfully, your dad died a few years ago. You told The Times the probate was horrific, and out of that horror, you've built something that will spare other families the worst of it. Good. But here's the question your business can't answer for you: what did your father's death ask of you, beyond the company you built out of it? Asked of you as the man who now has to live the rest of his own life knowing the same horizon is yours.

And the same question lands on you, whoever you are, reading this now. The death you've already lived through, the parent, the sibling, the friend who went too early: what is it still asking of you? You won't get to it through better tooling or smarter admin. You'll only get to it by sitting with it long enough that it changes how you live.