We often hear or read the famous Latin phrase, memento mori, remember death. Used as a greeting by the hermits of Saint Paul in the 1600’s, it is now found in daly life. You can purchase merchandise bearing the phrase, there are hundreds of items for sale online. And Pinterest and Shutterstock feature dozens and dozens of images of the two words. All of it seems well intentioned, but the words alone don’t have much force. Simply saying the words “memento mori” as a reminder to change one’s awareness of mortality has for me about as much success as a written reminder to eat healthy foods when I’m confronted with a side of fries. That is to say, not much.

If we turn to our Tibetan friends for help we might find something more useful. The Nyingma and Kagyu sects of Tibetan Buddhism developed a form of meditation practiced in graveyards and charnel grounds called Chod. Meditation and visualization practice in such places provides the practitioner with an accelerated means to understand the law of impermanence. The fact that the death and decay of the physical body is front and center is a forceful reminder of death.

We don’t have to learn how to undertake their practice, though. To visit a cemetery, not for a burial ceremony to which one is invited, but simply to slowly walk around, paying attention to the gravestones with the names and dates inscribed thereon and taking in the quiet is a wonderful meditation. One invariably starts doing the math, subtracting birth year from death year, and ruminating on how old this unknown person was when they died. It gives one pause to note the occasional infant grave, some without even a name. Or viewing the stone of a couple who were together many years, and seeing that the widowed wife lived on ten or twenty years after her husband died. One passes a series of graves of soldiers, many having died in a war. Some are from World War One, famously dubbed “the war to end all wars”. Next to that gravestone there is another one but from the war that followed, and over here, another from the next war after that, each in turn putting the lie to that famous phrase. As you read this, fighting and dying is taking place in the Ukraine and Russia, Palestine and Israel. The beat goes on.

I am alway comparing my current count of years to those whose graves I walk past. Here’s a man that lived one more year than my age today. Over there, a woman who died twenty years before my number. If one concentrates on this mathematics of the graves a sense of one’s own mortality begins to come forward. Row after row of stones, each one whispering in one’s ear the words memento mori. There is nothing superficial about the phrase now, the fact of one’s own end is front and center as one stops in front of each stone and reads what is there. I do find that this walk is best undertaken alone. With another there is always some considering, wondering if the other is ready to leave, or wishing to share some fact one has encountered. Alone is best.

As I finally turn back towards the car another emotion often appears, one described by another Latin phrase of two words, carpe diem, seize the day. The two phrases, memento mori and carpe diem, belong together, each one supporting and deepening the other. For carpe diem provides a response to the question of why one should remember death. I drive off, and for a little while I am aware of what is at stake today, this one precious day. It is the only day of which I can be sure.

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