The devotional Remember Your Death, by Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble, opens with the words, “You are going to die.” Sr. Noble writes,
The moment you are born you begin dying. You may die in fifty years, ten years, perhaps tomorrow — or even today. But whenever it happens, death awaits every person, whether rich or poor, young or old, believer or nonbeliever.
As many of you know, I am interested in principles and practices that reveal themselves across wisdom traditions. One of those practices is remembering your death (or Memento Mori). Many people rightfully connect the practice of Memento Mori with Stoicism, but it is also part of Buddhism and Christianity.
In his Rule, Saint Benedict urged his monk to “keep death daily before your eyes.” According to St. Benedict, remembering death helps us live better in this life and is most effective when done daily.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote that the “irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation.” As the Eastern sages knew, man is a worm and food for worms. “This is the paradox,” explains Becker, “he is out of nature and hopelessly in it….”
But how does this ancient practice help us overcome the fear and anxiety around death?
The sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne suggested, “To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” For Montaigne, meditating on one’s mortality does not hinder a life — quite the contrary. He stressed in his Essays, “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”
What do you want death to find you doing (or not doing)?
Remembering your death is synonymous with recognizing that the future lies in uncertainty. It is to see clearly and accept this fact of life. And to remember that the time to start living and leading one’s life is always now.
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in his Meditations,
In man’s life, his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux, his perception fogged, his whole bodily composition rotting, his mind a carousel, his fortune unpredictable, his fame unclear. To put it shortly: all things of the body stream away like a river…
The practice of memento mori should also keep us from living in the rearview mirror of the past. Becker observed, “Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.” The paradox of remembering your death is that it helps one to realize what truly matters. It’s not about thinking of the life we could have lived. It is to start leading (in each moment) the type of life we actually want to lead.
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Thank you for listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
The Paradox of Death