The 5 Benefits of a Mortality Meditation, Part 1

—Bumper sticker

I used to have an old episode of Peanuts tacked to the wall in my office. It showed Snoopy talking with a fruit fly, whose life span is only 24 hours and who confides his one regret: “I wish I knew at nine o’clock what I know now.”

He doesn't specify what it is that he knows now, but it's a safe bet it included—was perhaps even provoked by—the understanding that time is limited. And should you be lucky enough to apprehend this truth at an early rather than late hour, it can profoundly effect all the hours that follow. The way we live our days, after all, author Annie Dillard once said, is the way we live our lives.

Shortly before stumbling on this cartoon, back in my mid-20's, I took a trip to Chicago, and on a friend's recommendation visited a Bahai temple on the shore of Lake Michigan. I remember standing transfixed beneath an inscription carved above one of its nine quartz doors—the very reason this friend had suggested I visit the temple. It said, "I have made death a messenger of joy to thee; wherefore dost thou grieve?"

And for the first time in my life I sat and truly contemplated the Fact of Death. Not death in the abstract, not other people's death, but my own personal demise.

It was a sobering afternoon, I recall, but a game changer, and ever since then I've been a big proponent of the power of a regular mortality meditation to help clarify What’s Important and how to best use our precious nick of time.

I've come to understand that what frightens me (and perhaps most people) about death isn’t so much the dying as the prospect of not living rightly. Not doing what I'm meant to do or being who I'm meant to be while I have the chance and before the clock strikes twelve.

Here, then, are five reasons why I believe death awareness is a gift, if not a messenger of joy. Five benefits you can gain by knowing that you have a use-by date—as long as you also understand that the point isn't to focus on the mortality. It's to focus on the life.

1) Death is the ultimate clarifier.

The theologian Thomas Merton once said that in considering any important decision in life, and certainly in considering your priorities in life, it’s imperative to “consult your death,” for the same reason the English writer Samuel Johnson once said, “When you know you’re to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.” Besides, death asks the same question that passion does: “What do you love?” And having a question like that in your mind as you contemplate your priorities and decisions can tune out a lot of static.

Thus, allow your own mortality to help you root out activities, small and large, that don't pass the “hanged in a fortnight” test, or at least “one year to live” test. Ask yourself, regarding as many goals and decisions as possible, “What really matters to me, and does this activity take me toward it or away from it?”

2) Death can help liberate you.

When I was a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer I did a series of profiles of people who were forced to consult their deaths because a doctor told them they were dying, told them they had the proverbial six months to live. And I wanted to know what that experience was like, and what those people could tell the rest of us about how to live better without getting a diagnosis like that.

It's fair to say all of them were initially shattered by the news. But just as surely all of them were also liberated by it; freed from imaginary fears, tyrannical conformities, and petty authorities. One woman said her cancer diagnosis was “the best thing that ever happened to me.” Which seemed inconceivable to me at the time. Of all the things that could happen to someone in the course of a life, how could cancer be the best?

But she said, “I'm no longer trapped by life. My passions and loves are finally released. I'm free to speak my mind and follow my heart and re-arrange my priorities so they're no longer an insult to the brevity and preciousness of life.”

The philosopher Martin Heidegger considered the contemplation of one’s own mortality not morbid curiosity but an act of genuine courage, one that leads to a state of being he described as “passionate anxious freedom.” A state in which you strip yourself of any illusions of immortality, refuse to be tranquilized into witlessness about the fact of death, and are thus free to live your life to the fullest.

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The reality of death may defeat us, but the idea of death can liberate us. After all, a dead-end is also a turnaround.

3) Death turns up the sense of urgency.

Stephen Covey's second habit of highly effective people is “Begin with the end in mind,” by which he means having a clear sense of where you’re headed. And I don’t think it’s morbid, but life-giving, to keep the end in mind.

Death makes us all put our pencils down, so it's imperative to make your moves while you can, and understand that, certainly as you get older, postponement of your passions and callings is less and less a viable option.

Death can be a great source of meaning, the enzyme of your drives and passions, and the brute existential fact that gives urgency to love and work and what the poet Philip Larkin calls the million-petalled flower of being here.

It's the rationale behind the ancient Egyptian custom of bringing the skeleton of a dead man to feasts and festivities—to serve the guests as a reminder of their condition, how short-lived—and the ancient Roman tradition of parading victorious military heroes through the streets on chariots pulled by white horses, but accompanied by a slave holding a laurel wreath above their heads and continuously whispering in their ears, “Memento mori.” Remember, thou art mortal.

4) Transience increases enjoyment.

The transience of almost anything tends to increase your enjoyment of it. When you knew you had only 15 minutes before you had to stop playing and come in for supper, it intensified your play. When you’re on your last day of vacation, in those minutes before you turn around and head back to the hotel and it all becomes about return, you set your soul on wide-angle and really take it in. When you remember that your loved ones are all going to pass away, love strengthens.

Perhaps the most important gift of death-awareness is the sense of increased aliveness it can bring, deriving from an increased appreciation for the preciousness of life. Candle flames are at their most luminous only in the darkness. Only in relation to their opposite.

Or as Ernest Becker wrote in his seminal book, Denial of Death, “Joy and hope and trust are things one achieves after one has been through the forlornness.”

5) Death brings deeper gratitude for life and love.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sam Gamgee, Frodo’s faithful friend, gets married soon after returning to the Shire. Now that he’d been to Mordor and faced the terror of death, he was ready to take on the big guns: marriage. It’s as if facing death were merely a novitiate to the great work of love.

In fact, in addition to purely anecdotal evidence of this, studies have demonstrated that there’s a direct link between the two. One such study, out of Florida State University, showed that just being physically near a cemetery affects how willing people are to help a stranger. Those who walked through a cemetery were 40% more likely to help someone than those who walked only a block away. Their conclusion: the awareness of death motivates increased expressions of compassion, tolerance and empathy.

More generally, what mortality can teach us is a deeper gratitude for life, a keener appreciation for the beauties and pleasures of the world, a greater commitment to keeping our priorities in order, less time spent doing things we don’t want to do, sweating the small stuff, and worrying about what other people think, and maybe most of all a deeper communion with the people we love.

A woman I know who teaches “Year to Live” groups, based on Stephen Levine's book of the same name, told me that “Afterward, people typically find that they experience less bickering and contentiousness with people, that many of their reasons to be annoyed are reduced, and their relationships either improve or end. When you’re feeling deeply alive, there just doesn’t seem to be the same block between you and others. There’s a brightness to life, to looking at the world. And in that light, people see the deepest, purest intentions for their lives emerge.

“The most consistent benefit of the year seems to be acceptance. Accepting yourself, the life you’ve lived, the things you can’t accept, and accepting that you can’t accept them and bearing with it anyway. It’s not about self-improvement, but self-acceptance.

“Another common experience of the groups is a sense of deep gratitude for life. That you’re alive at all.”

In Part 2, we'll look at various forms of mortality meditations, and a few considerations and caveats about practicing them.

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