“Remember, You Must Die”

In Muriel Spark’s comic/tragic novel Memento Mori, old folks keep getting strange phone calls telling them nothing more than “Remember, you must die!”  The elders, rich and poor, male and female, are alarmed by the unwanted reminder and even recruit a detective to try to track down the culprit.  But the voices on the phone vary, and one of the characters decides that it must be Death that is calling them.  One might wonder why old folks would find such “news” upsetting.

In much earlier times, death was so common that people needed few reminders.  Buddhism recommends meditating on one’s own death daily, and monks often went to charnel houses to do so.  In the West, memento mori were common.  Paintings often included skulls and household objects were crafted to look like coffins.  It was considered good to be reminded of how brief and miraculous our being was.  In his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud intimated that people lived more authentic lives in times of war when the specter of death was always present, hard to ignore.  These days, the specter and certainty of death have surely receded. Silicon Valley is not even convinced that it is inevitable – they are “solving death.”  If Freud is right that acceptance of death makes a more authentic life, one might worry.

Lately I was reminded that we ourselves, we elders, are a kind of unappreciated memento mori for younger folk.  I was at a wedding last weekend, and surely was one of the four or five oldest persons there.  I thought again of Larkin’s poem “The Old Fools,” which he wrote when he was about 50, and begins as the poet looks at some of the elders around him:

What do they think has happened, the old fools,

To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose

It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,

And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember

Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,

They could alter things back to when they danced all night,

Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?

Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,

And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,

Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming

Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;

Why aren’t they screaming?

We are the memento mori now.  But are the young folks more afraid of death or of getting old? When Gulliver meets, in his Travels, the Struldbruggs – who age and age but are immortal – he sees them as a way of reconciling himself to death.  Gulliver swears that “no Tyrant could invent a Death into which I would not run with Pleasure from such a life [that of a Struldbrugg].” Gulliver decides that this amelioration of the mortal fear of death (which is far preferable to aging) is the only possible use for the immortals, and he considers bringing some specimens home with him “to arm our People against the Fear of Death.”

And why aren’t we “screaming”?  Well, some of us are as we run around cramming in travel and surgeries and whatever it takes to stop the reminders of our aging, but most of us accept it.  Some of us even like it.  In a way, our own bodies remind us that we are not going to last forever as bits and pieces wither, are surgically removed, or metamorphose into something we hardly recognize.  So, most of us have death on our horizon. I keep the memorial cards from loved ones who have passed away around the house where I can see their pictures daily and remember those who have passed ahead of me.  There is an old cemetery on my regular walking route, and one of the common headstone inscriptions is: “As you are now so once was I, as I am now so shall you be. Remember me as you pass by, prepare for death and follow me.”  Indeed.

Additionally, we have learned something in the process of getting older.  “Do they fancy there’s really been no change?” asks Philip Larkin sarcastically.  No, we know about the physical changes, but we also know that there is something that does not change very much at all. Don’t ask me to define it, but it is still there.  We aren’t screaming – not because we are looking forward to death – but because many of us have reconciled ourselves to it.  And, as Freud posited, we are better off for it.

I would note that one of Larkin’s very last poems, “Aubade,” is about the fear of death:

And so it [death] stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Poor Philip!  I would contrast his fear with Stevie Smith’s poem “Black March” about her welcoming relationship with death or Maya Angelou’s wonderful “On Aging.”

For one of my short stories about approaches to death, you might try “A Perfect Ending.”  Other blogs on this subject include “Memento Mori” and “The Purpose of Old Age.”  Jorge Borges wrote a story (“August 25, 1983”) imagining his own death, which I tried to emulate in my story “May 12, 2036.” It makes death very concrete when you pick a date!  Try it!

Or you might try Chapter 10 in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels.