For two days you see your life clearly, you know exactly what matters and what you have been putting off.
By week three it is gone.
People have been trying to hold on to those two days for two thousand years. They gave it a name.
Where it comes from
Rome
The Stoics were Roman thinkers who went looking for steadiness in a life you cannot control. Three of them wrote most clearly about death.
Seneca, a statesman and writer, wrote to his friend Lucilius that we die every day, because every day some part of life is taken away.
Epictetus was born a slave and later taught for a living. He told his students to keep death before their eyes daily, and they would never entertain a mean thought again.
Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome. He wrote his Meditations in army camps, as private notes he never meant anyone to read.
The two Latin words came later.
The best-known version of the origin story is a single line in Tertullian, a Christian writer in North Africa, around 200 CE. He describes a slave riding behind a victorious general during his parade through Rome, saying in his ear: look behind you, remember that you are a man. In other words: you will die too.
Almost a century earlier, the Stoic Epictetus had already mentioned the man behind a triumphant general who reminds him that he is mortal. Whether Rome did this at every victory parade is not proven.
Worth knowing before you repeat it.
The monasteries
In Buddhism the practice is maranasati, mindfulness of death.
In one of the oldest collections of the Buddha's talks, he asks his monks how they do it.
One says he reflects that he might not live another day. Another says he might not live past a single meal.
The Buddha calls both of them careless. Only the monk who holds it in mind breath by breath is doing the real thing.
The manual
Around 1415 a Catholic friar whose name we do not know wrote the ars moriendi, a Latin handbook on dying well. He was probably asked to by a council: a large gathering where church leaders from across Europe met to decide what the church should do. That one sat in Constance at the time, in what is now Germany.
A shorter edition appeared around 1450 in what is now the Netherlands and Belgium, with eleven woodblock prints, and it spread across Europe in translation.
The original ran to six chapters: a whole book about dying, at a time when most households owned no books at all.
The paintings
In the 1600s Dutch painters built still lifes around a skull, a stack of books, a snuffed candle.
Every painter chose his own objects for the table. In Leiden, a university town, they liked to add the stack of books: learning runs out too.
Harmen Steenwijck, David Bailly and Pieter Claesz are the painters who became best known; their canvases hang in museums now.
These paintings are called vanitas still lifes.
The word comes from Ecclesiastes, a book of the Bible, which opens with the line vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas: vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Vanitas here is not about being vain. It means emptiness: everything you chase passes.
That is what the skull, the books and the snuffed candle are telling you.
These hung in the rooms where families ate dinner.
Why most reminders stop working
Today the practice has shrunk to a few seconds.
A ring. A tattoo. A wallpaper.
An app counting down your remaining weeks. The first time you see it, something stirs in you.
By the third week your eye slides past it.
Research has measured a difference between the short version and the long one.
The short one is a nudge of a minute or two: a few questions about your death, nothing more. People brace themselves afterward, and in several studies they end up wanting more for themselves.
The long one is a detailed scenario of your own dying, followed by questions about how you lived and who you touched.
In 2004 four American psychologists put the two side by side.
Afterward everyone got an envelope of raffle tickets for a hundred-dollar gift certificate. You could take as many as you liked: more tickets meant a better chance of winning, and fewer left for the people coming after you.
The ones who got the short nudge took more; the ones who had gone through the long scenario took fewer. The gap was widest among the students who had said on a questionnaire beforehand that money, fame and looks mattered a lot to them.
Same subject, opposite direction.
The tradition already knew.
To the Buddha, reckoning with death a day or a meal away was still careless: he wanted it close with every breath. The ars moriendi gave the subject six chapters.
Depth is what does the work here, and time is how you get there.
From five minutes to a full hour
What is the simplest memento mori practice to start today?
End your day with a five-minute review at a fixed time, before you pick up your phone.
Three questions: what did I do today that I would want to have done, what did I dodge, and what would I take back.
Write two lines by hand. Do it seven nights in a row, and on the fourth night reread what you wrote on the first.
How do you sit with your mortality for ten minutes?
Lie down, eyes closed, no music.
Follow your breathing and attach one sentence to every out-breath: this one could be the last. Ten minutes on a timer.
When your mind runs off to tomorrow, come back to the breath you are actually in.
This is maranasati, stripped down to what a beginner can hold.
What do you write when you put your last hour on paper?
Set a timer for twenty minutes and write it longhand, in the present tense, as though it is happening now. Who is in the room.
What you are still trying to say. What you would give anything to have back.
Then date the page and put it where you will find it in a year.
How do you keep it alive after the first time?
Tie an action to it.
At the end of every session, name one thing you will do within seven days: a message, a phone call, a booking, a sentence you have been swallowing for years.
Send one of them before you close the notebook. Insight fades fast. A sent message stays sent.
What is the most intense way to face the end of your life?
Give it a full hour, in the dark, alone, phone in another room, and walk through your ending in order: the news, the last people, the last words, the quiet after.
I did this myself in Seoul, at a ceremony where you face your own death: thirty minutes in a closed coffin, hands and feet bound.
What I built, and where it sits
I am Julian van der Wouden.
I was a pilot for ten years, first for the Dutch airline Transavia, then for KLM. The coffin in Seoul came after that, and the Last Hour Experience came out of the coffin.
It is a cinematic, guided audio experience of about an hour. You do it alone.
You live through your own last hour from the inside, and you come out into a set of questions that turn what surfaced into choices.
Think of it as the largest of the practices on this page: its structure, music and pacing carry you further than you would go on your own.
You pay once. You begin whenever you are ready.
One purchase. Return every year. No subscription.
Questions people ask. One of them is me.
Is memento mori morbid?
From the outside it looks that way.
In practice it narrows your attention to the handful of things you would defend at the end. The week that follows has more room in it, because the small things stop taking up space.
When the coffin lid opened in Seoul, the bright light and the fresh air made me feel alive.
Most of the effect shows up in the days after, in what you stop postponing.
Is this Stoic or Buddhist?
Both, and they arrived at it separately.
The Roman Stoics used memento mori to keep their judgment calm and take the sting out of loss.
Buddhist maranasati loosens the grip of the things you cling to, and sharpens attention. Christian Europe added the ars moriendi and the skull on the table.
Nobody owns it, and you do not have to be a Stoic, a Buddhist or a Christian to do it.
How often should you do it?
Small and daily, large and yearly.
Five minutes every evening keeps it alive. One full hour a year is what moves the things you have been carrying for a decade.
It usually goes wrong when people do the big one once, feel changed for a week, and let the small evenings slide.
What if someone close to me died recently?
Then wait.
Fresh grief is already the practice, at full volume, without your consent.
Give it months, and come back when you want to look at your own life rather than theirs.
If you are in treatment or in a crisis, check with your doctor first. This is reflection, not medical care.
Sources
- Seneca's letter to his friend Lucilius about losing a piece of life every day (Letters, number 24)
- The Enchiridion of Epictetus, the little handbook in which his students collected his teachings (chapter 21)
- The single line about the slave behind the general, in the Christian writer Tertullian (Apologeticus, chapter 33)
- Epictetus on the man behind the triumphant general (Discourses, book 3, chapter 24)
- The talk where the Buddha asks his monks how they think about death, from the Anguttara Nikaya: one of the oldest collections of his talks, written down in Pali
- The 2004 study on the short and the long death reminder: Cozzolino, Staples, Meyers and Samboceti, in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
One last thing
This practice is two thousand years old because it keeps working, and it keeps working because it asks something of you.
Reading about it changes nothing. Five quiet minutes tonight does.
So take the smallest form on this page and do it before you go to sleep.
That is where it starts, every time, for everyone who has ever kept it up.