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MEMENTO MORI

Advances in technology allow everyone on Earth to know the exact day that they will die. All people need to do to find out is fill out a form provided by the government.

After two weeks, a paper arrives in the mail containing one’s personal death date. Requesting one’s death date is a choice that not everyone takes lightly. In fact, it divides society into two camps, people who know and people

who do not want to know. For some, the decision is a nobrainer. Knowing when they will die helps them plan and prioritize their goals so they can live an optimal life.

Others believe that living life fully means being uncertain about when they will die. There is a freedom and

spontaneity that is lost when we know too much.

This is a future world imagined by writer Rose Eveleth. But the knowledge that death is coming for us all is true for everyone. For some, the knowledge that our days are

numbered is a source of anxiety and for others it can be a wake-up call to not waste our limited time.

Memento Mori means “Remember that you will die” in Latin. There is a legend about a victorious Roman general who returned to Rome. As he paraded through the streets in celebration, it was a slave’s job to whisper these words in his ear. “Remember that you are mortal.”

Memento Mori is an ancient practice of reflecting on how life can end at any moment. The Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, once said, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” This reminder is not meant to be gloomy or morbid. It is meant to be inspiring. It is a call to use our limited time on Earth doing what is truly important in life.

So what if you did know your death date? Would you do anything differently? When Kevin Kelly learned that he would die in six months, he was forced to face this very question head on.

Kelly was a 27-year-old photographer traveling through Jerusalem in the 1970s when he found himself wrestling with questions about the existence of God. One night he missed the curfew for his hostel and walked the streets of the old city for hours. Finally, he found the only place still open: a church. He went in, lay down and slept. In the morning he found himself sitting outside the tombs where Jesus was said to have risen from the dead. At that moment he was overcome with faith in God. This new faith wasn’t the answer to all his questions. It just created new ones. What should he do with his life? Should he become a monk or a preacher?

Should he throw away all his worldly possessions and head into the desert? As he pondered these thoughts, an idea popped into his head. He was going to die in six months.

Kelly describes himself as a logical person. He knew that this idea wasn’t backed by any evidence. And he knew it sounded silly, but he felt compelled to spend the next six months believing it was true.

His next question was how to spend those precious

remaining months. He says the answer to that question surprised him. He didn’t want to climb Mt. Everest or take up scuba diving and explore the ocean depths. Instead, he had the most mundane desires. Having spent most of his 20s on the road, he longed to return home to New Jersey. He wanted to see his parents and just be ordinary.

And that is exactly what he did. He took out the trash; he worked in the yard and did other menial jobs to help his family. He describes it as completely ordinary, and he relished every minute of it.

Kelly was a traveler at heart, and after three months, the travel bug hit him. With only three months left before his date with death, he decided that he wanted to visit with each of his four brothers and sisters. And he decided he wanted to do it on a bicycle. His siblings were scattered around the country, so he prepared for a long ride that would end up being 5,000 miles.

Before setting off, he bought a bike and proceeded to give away all his remaining money. He sent anonymous checks for $500 and $1,000 to his friends. He said he felt it was the first truly selfless thing he had ever done since there was no way that their gratitude could be returned to him. He did get something out of it though. He relished watching his friends trying to figure out who had been so generous. While people are often suspicious of other people’s motives, Kelly felt he was planting a new kind of suspicion in his friends, a suspicion of good.

After giving away most of his money, he was ready to hit the road. He had only enough left for food during the journey. Hotels were out of the question. He needed to rely on the kindness of strangers. Each night he would go to a stranger’s house, knock on the door and ask if he could sleep in his tent in their backyard. Usually, they would say yes, and end up inviting him to talk about his journey. Kelly describes these people as being highly ordinary people who never had a chance to go on an

adventure like his. He says that the more upbeat he was, the more upbeat they were. And it was his job to live in the moment for these people.

Living so close to death made Kelly rethink his

relationship with time.

I think there are a lot of people who have trouble staying in the present. There are some people who like to slip into the past, as a means perhaps to fantasize or escape…. I often retreat to the future.

… my entire life was shifted to the future, and the thought of doing something now, for the enjoyment…of just right now, without any sense at all that it would ever be used again, that it could ever be brought forward, was extremely difficult and disconcerting, and I fought it day by day.

Kelly says that he refused to think of anything beyond his death date. If something beyond that point came up, he’d tell himself, “Nope, can’t think about it, doesn’t work. You have to dwell in the present.”

After finishing his journey, he returned home to New Jersey on the day before he was supposed to die. He ate dinner with his parents and went to bed prepared to

never wake up again. He had thought about all his regrets in life and wrote letters trying to right the wrongs that he could. He was ready. He was tired from his journey and he went to sleep not knowing what would happen.

And, the next morning, he woke up.

He says, “I had my entire life again, I had my future again.” Kevin Kelly went on to start Wired, a magazine about the future. He is also active in the Long Now Foundation, an organization that promotes long-term thinking.

Their projects include saving languages that are in danger of going extinct and the creation of a clock that is designed to run for 10,000 years without human assistance. Founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, is currently funding this special clock at the cost of $42 million. Called the Clock Of The Long Now, it is meant to reframe the way people think about time.

While Kelly probably would say that living in the present is important to living a full and meaningful life, he spends a lot of time thinking about the future. He says, “Having a future is part of what being human is about. That when you take away the future for humans, you take away a lot of their humanness. That it’s not actually a very good thing to live entirely in the present. That one needs to have a past, and one needs to have a future, to be fully human.”