Memento mori: thinking about death to see life clearly

During a Roman triumph, amid the cheering crowd, someone walked behind the general repeating a line into his ear for the whole procession. Roughly: look behind you, and remember you are a man. The Romans understood that the moment of greatest glory is the moment it is easiest to forget.

Not meant to make you sad

Memento mori gets read as a pessimistic reminder. In the Stoic tradition it is a measuring instrument. The idea is compact: most of what preoccupies us only seems important because we quietly assume unlimited time. Restore the limit and the priorities reorder themselves.

This is not only a Western habit. Zen has its contemplations of impermanence, Theravada Buddhism its corpse meditations, and Mexico sets aside two days a year to eat and drink with the dead. A great many cultures reach the same conclusion: remembering that life is finite makes people more awake, not more afraid.

How to use it without going bleak

• Count in large units. If you have roughly thirty summers left, how do you intend to spend this one?
• Count the remaining occasions. If you visit your parents twice a year and they are seventy, that number is far smaller than it feels.
• Ask the deathbed question. Does the thing keeping you awake this week appear on the list of what you will regret?

The second is the harshest and the most useful. We tend to think about our most important relationships as though they run on indefinitely, when in fact they measure out to a specific number — and that number is usually in the dozens rather than the thousands.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. — Seneca

What it usually changes

For most people this exercise does not produce a dramatic decision like quitting to travel the world. It produces smaller, more durable corrections: calling someone before you forget, dropping a grudge that was not worth keeping, saying the thing worth saying instead of leaving it for an occasion.

And if only one thing survives from this piece, let it be this: memento mori is not there to make you afraid of the last day. It is there to make you notice today, which is the only one you are actually holding.