Memento Mori

According to Cosmo Doogood's Urban Almanac, today is Memento Mori Day. The Latin phrase means, "Remember, you will die."

Sometimes it's hard not to remember. In Italian families, you know it just isn't the holidays unless you get to attend a wake. The sister of a good friend of mine from high school died last week. At the wake a few of us were talking about how many wakes and funerals we've gone to in the past few years. I guess we're of an age for that sort of thing, and it'll only get worse (or better, depending on your beliefs). The woman whose sister died happens to be playing tug-o-war with cancer. Several years ago, on a trip to India, she got a severe sunburn. A few years later, she was diagnosed with skin cancer where the burn was. Since that time she has had a multitude of lymph nodes removed (the cancer was spreading) and just recently was told she has a growth on her trachea. Doctors will remove the growth this Friday. She's my age (39)—far too young for cancer, IMHO.

As coincidence would have it, I was reading the October issue of "Utne" magazine this weekend, which featured stories on "Good Life, Good Death: Balancing the Fine Line Between Hope and Fear." Among the stories are an interview with Alan Ball, who created "Six Feet Under"; an article about how to die gracefully; a poem from an Indian mystic on how to live while you are alive; and advice on writing an "ethical will." ("Utne" was once called "The Utne Reader" and, in addition to its original articles, it excerpts stories from other publications.)

The main article had a quote I found interesting: "Zen teach Suzuki Roshi reportedly said about his terminal cancer, 'Well, it wants to live, too.'" How Zen. It reminded me of the Life Itself section of an amazing book, Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." In the chapter "Good-By to All That," Bryson explains that life just wants to be. "It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button." Yet, as David Attenborough points out, "They simply exist, testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake."

Bryson adds, "It is easy to over look this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. ... We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours—arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be."

He's speaking about life on a cellular level, of course. Our cells also are programmed to die—a process called apoptosis, which is described as a self-destruct mechanism. So, on the one hand our cells just want to be, but they're also programmed to die. And we know that their growth can go horribly awry -- such is cancer.

Which all reminded me of Star Wars. Stick with me here, I'm almost done. You know those things that Qui-Gon Jinn says Anakin has tons of in his blood—miticlorians? That's just Lucas playing with our mitochondria. Mitochondria keep us alive, Bryson explains. "Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. Without this niftily facilitating trick, life on Earth would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes. ... We couldn't live without them, yet even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they think things might not work out between us. They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. ... They don't even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live. It is like having a stranger in your house, but one who has been there for a billion years."

There's so much more in the book — I really recommend it. The last chapter says this: "If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by "we" I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp."

Memento mori, indeed.