Can Death Bring You Back to Life?

We’re all going to die, and we all know it.

A poor soul dies in the U.S. every 12 seconds or so (Xu et al., 2020), and we’re all just doing our best to hope we won't be one of them.

Our lives are culminating towards the utmost finality of all—the rite of passage known as death—and we’re working diligently to avoid the topic altogether. You're unique if you are still reading this article because most people dodge death with a carnal instinct (Becker, 1973). Death is the wildly unpopular yet ominously present inevitability, even though it’s the very thing that might help us live like we mean it.

Awareness of mortality uniquely burdens humans (Solomon et al., 2015). We’re just smart enough to know what we don’t know and reflective enough to send ourselves into potentially existential tailspins. However, our beliefs and attitudes about death profoundly impact our well-being and how we live our lives (Wong & Tomer, 2011). Contemplating death allows for so much more than a thoughtful reflection of the end; it provides an opportunity to lead intentional lives in the specter of death (Singh, 2016).

What do we have to gain by ushering death into our daily lives rather than avoiding it or meeting it at the end?

Source: Paula Guerreiro/Unsplash

In a world consumed with expanding the length of our lives, cultivating a more intimate familiarity with death can also help us expand the metaphoric width and depth of our lives.

We make life wider when we stuff it full of vitality and gusto—expanding the breadth of life's pleasurable experiences. We make life deeper when we infuse it with meaning and purpose that elevates us out of the doldrums of emptiness.

Widening Our Lives

Living our lives with more vitality takes us out of the autopilot mode that can be pseudo-satisfyingly efficient but also flatteningly dull, boring, uninspired, lifeless, and all sorts of words we don’t want to use to describe our lives. We get caught up in routines that, in many ways, make our lives easier (driving the same route to work each day, completing the same TPS reports), but these routines don’t always make us feel vitally alive, do they? The lukewarm, mediocre experiences of life might not make us feel like we’re dead, either. But we know we can do better than living a slumbering existence.

Deepening Our Lives

Living lives void of meaning feels just as troublesome as seemingly stale lives. A dearth of meaning feels shallow, hollow, disconnected, and unfulfilled. These are descriptions we’d likely not want to read about us at our funerals. Widening our lives isn’t enough for an optimal living experience. We can fill our time with pleasurable experiences and still feel empty inside. Our quest for meaningful depth in life is a natural human tendency that’s an essential ingredient in the recipe for a well-lived life (Baumeister et al., 2013).

What is memento mori?

The practice of memento mori is acting on the Latin phrase that translates to “remember we must die,” which can paradoxically wake us up and breathe life into our lives. Reflecting on death can act as jumper cables to reinvigorate our lives with vitality and meaning, creating the perspective we need to fully participate in our lives with urgency, priority, and meaning (Yalom, 1980).

While “remembering we must die” might be viewed as macabre, this exercise has less to do with the morbid aspects of death and so much more to do with the profound opportunity to celebrate and focus on life. The memento mori call here intends to trigger an agentic, active process to thoughtfully edit our lives, rather than having to encounter the wake-up call of a near-death experience, which is what it usually takes for us to snap to attention and start living on purpose (Groth-Marnat & Summers, 1998).

Memento mori allows us to peer at death from a safe distance and initiate positive change. We don’t have to emerge from a coma to find meaning and a distinct sense of aliveness in our lives.