Memento Mori

April 2025 

Growing up in a small industrial town in India during the 1990s had its own quiet rhythm.
The air was heavy with coal dust, and the boundaries between rural and urban life blurred in a way that felt natural, if not entirely seamless. Life was simple, but it carried an unspoken intensity, a muted hum beneath the surface. It wasn’t the kind of place that featured in books or travelogues, but it had its stories—gritty, real, and often wrapped in silence.

My father served as a medical officer in the local municipal corporation. But his work wasn’t confined to clinic hours or the walls of a hospital. It pulled him far beyond the limits of the town, into the forgotten interiors of the district, where roads crumbled into dirt paths, and electricity remained more an idea than a reality.

He travelled for hours,sometimes in battered Jeeps, other times in state-issued ambulances that rattled like hollow tin boxes—setting up temporary medical camps in remote villages. In these places, access to healthcare wasn’t just limited—it was mythical. For many who came, his arrival meant the first encounter with medicine in months, sometimes years.

As a child, I often accompanied him on weekends. It wasn’t a duty; it became a ritual. I would sit quietly in a corner of the makeshift tents, behind metal boxes filled with syringes, gauze, and rusted stethoscopes. And I would watch.

Patients came not in queues but in clusters, wounded farmers with sun-creased foreheads, women holding feverish infants wrapped in fading sarees, elderly men whose bodies had withered under decades of toil. Some arrived with ailments, others with injuries, and occasionally, though it was never spoken of, some came already dead, carried in on bamboo stretchers by exhausted relatives. There was no triage. No protocol. Just urgency and improvisation.

What struck me, even then, though I lacked the words to name it, was the stoic silence that blanketed everything. These were people who had made their peace with uncertainty. Their resilience wasn’t dramatic. It was matter-of-fact. As though suffering, like the monsoon or the dry season, was just another cycle of weather to endure.

Years later, I would come across the phrase memento more, “remember you must die.” It felt less like a revelation and more like a return. As though the Latin had been hiding behind the faces of those villagers all along. Death had never been theoretical. I had seen it arrive without urgency, without trumpet, without even the decency of timing.

It didn’t frighten me. It simply made everything else seem frivolous.

There is a saying in chess: the king and the pawn go into the same box. I thought of that often. In those villages, kings were rare, but the pawns were everywhere. And yet, their dignity was intact, not through pride, but through endurance. They didn’t speak of suffering because they had learned it had no audience.

That was my true education, not in the missionary school I was sent to, with its spoken English and crisply ironed uniforms, but those long, dusty drives into a countryside untouched by spectacle. It was there, amid makeshift tents and borrowed time, that I witnessed medicine in its rawest form—improvised, instinctive, often too late. Death came without drama, punctual and unceremonious. And somewhere between the quiet desperation of patients and the steady hands of my father, a boy absorbed—quietly, irrevocably—what it meant to be mortal.

There is a truth so absolute it flattens every hierarchy, strips every illusion, and humbles even the most triumphant: you will die. Memento Mori, remember that you must die—is not a threat, but a compass. It is not meant to sadden, but to sharpen. Not a summons to despair, but an invitation to clarity. To live with intention, not in spite of death, but because of it.

The Romans whispered it to their generals, those flushed with glory and surrounded by the spoils of their triumphs. “You are mortal,” said the slave, half-hidden behind the chariot. It was not cruelty. It was decorum. A way of restoring balance in the presence of too much applause.

The Stoics, those unflinching realists of antiquity, understood this well. They practised death not with morbidity, but with intention. For them, death was not a tragedy to be feared—it was a sharpened blade meant to carve away the fat of distraction, vanity, and delusion. And if wielded wisely, it became a sword of liberation.

“You could leave life right now,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

This was no poetic flourish. Marcus governed an empire while preparing, each day, for his own exit. He knew that a leader who forgets his mortality becomes drunk on his own myth. And so he reminded himself daily that he was not a god, but a man, a man whose every decision must withstand the judgment of finality.

The Law of Finality: When you remember that your life is finite, everything sharpens. Your time, your attention, your choices.

Contrast this with modern man. We are swaddled in comfort, distracted by endless amusements, and spoon-fed the illusion of permanence. Death is hidden away in hospitals. It is caricatured in films, made distant by euphemism, or cushioned by fantasies of the afterlife. But this avoidance, this retreat from the real, is a kind of soft suicide. You may be alive, but you are not truly living.

Seneca warned: “You live as if you were destined to live forever. No thought of your frailty ever enters your head. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply.”

And so we drift from screen to screen, from task to task numb, anxious, afraid of the silence that would make us confront what we are. But the Stoics, and those like them across cultures, knew the truth: To meditate on death is to become more alive.

The samurai would begin each morning by envisioning their own violent death. The Tibetan monks practiced maranasati, death awareness, as a central form of training. Even in Roman triumphs, generals were followed by a slave who whispered constantly: “Respice post te. Hominem te memento.” 

“Look behind. Remember you are but a man.”

These were not mere rituals. They were disciplines of detachment. Exercises in ego-stripping. Because when you truly accept that you will die, something profound happens: You no longer waste time trying to impress the world. You stop deferring the essential. You realize how few things actually matter.

The Sublime Power of Death Awareness

There is a strange alchemy to death. It is feared, and rightly so—but it is also the one force capable of transfiguring the mundane into the Sublime.

What is the Sublime? It is that rare experience of awe, when the ordinary is revealed as extraordinary. It is hearing birdsong in the morning after you have faced death and realizing that you had never truly listened before. It is the sudden softness with which you look upon a loved one, knowing they too are fading, moment by moment.

You need not have a near-death experience to access this. You need not scale mountains or face catastrophe. It is enough to reflect, daily, on the fragility of your own existence. To walk through a cemetery. To imagine your final breath while eating breakfast. To see your partner, your friend, your parent, and think: One day, I will never see them again.

This awareness, if sustained, becomes a kind of superpower. It creates urgency without panic. Depth without drama. Empathy without weakness.

The Psychological Strategy of Mortality

When the Stoics meditated on death, it was not self-punishment, it was preparation. Death was the ultimate strategist. It humbled the arrogant, disciplined the scattered, and sobered the frivolous. And in its presence, pettiness could not survive.

“The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day,” said Seneca, “is never short of time.”

Modern culture is ruled by distraction. Work, entertainment, image. But memento mori is an act of rebellion against this drift. It is a call to arms: to strip away the unnecessary, to speak only what must be said, to pursue what is essential while there is still time.

Meaning is not optional in a world like ours. It is the only counterweight against despair. And despair, let’s be honest, has many disguises: careerism, bitterness, cruelty, distraction. A man who forgets death becomes careless. A man who remembers it becomes precise.

The ash scattered, the urn placed on a shelf, the names engraved in granite, these are not endings. They are punctuation. What matters is how we use the sentence.