Memento Mori
To live well is to practice the artistry of dying.
When I was 27, I got a call from my mom’s psychiatrist — “This isn’t the kind of thing that gets better,” he told me.
The modern miracle of medicine wasn’t the simple panacea I had grown up to believe. Mental illness, as I learned, is best understood as an affliction that forever affects a person’s psyche. There is no drug known to man that can eliminate traumatic memories, or unwind the development of a mind living in a distorted reality.
That call was an inescapable end to a hope I’d held onto since I was a kid — we are rarely given so much certainty as a medical professional telling us there’s nothing to be done. I realized then that our lives lack the glamour and narrative structure of the stories we tell ourselves. As with those tales, there are endings - But in life they come with utter disregard for timeliness or desire.
The latin phrase “memento mori” compels us to turn our attention towards death - “Remember,” it begs, “we must die.”
For each of us, there are moments where the truth of our own mortality comes into distinct clarity. We are forced to face the limited time we have left. It is then that we see the unfinished plans and unrealized dreams that lay waiting in our mind, and feel spurred to consider using the day at hand to detract from their numbers. We are moved to seize our lives by remembering how precious and few our days are.
That clarity is ephemeral, especially in a world so overrun by distraction and escapism. So, I write this to compel you to reflect on your own death, whether the Grim Reaper is greeted as a familiar friend or for the first time. This shouldn’t serve as an encouragement to feed anxiety and exercise unmitigated caution - Instead, it should simply offer you the opportunity to answer a single question.
What, exactly, do you want to do with the rest of your life?