I have been “lucky with death” for the last 15 years. The last time I really had to grieve was in 2010. And for fifteen years, death seemed to elude me, my family, my close ones.
It has been a good run, really. Fifteen years is a long time. Long enough to actually start forgetting about death a little bit.
That good run ended today, and I am now grieving.
Unexpected. Too soon. Unfair. Maybe all deaths are like that, I don’t know.
I had forgotten how to grieve during these fifteen years.
I was a 25-year-old bachelor in 2010 the last time I cried and mourned the loss of a close relative.
I am now a forty-year-old husband and father of two, and death means something very different now.
Death carries a whole lot of new questions and feelings, all colliding, and forming a question I have been avoiding for too long: what about my own death?
Literally, “memento mori” is an exhortation to remember our own mortality.
There are two common interpretations of this concept.
Most people tend to link this to Epicurean thought, and the concept of carpe diem. If death is certain, and perhaps near, let’s seize the day, let’s savor what we can, while we can.
The second one is more of a stoic reminder to keep our egos in check. We are all mortals, to be buried in the same dirt. Billions before us, billions after us.
As I said, I have changed a lot during the last fifteen years. Death used to be something sad, and today it has morphed into something absolutely terrifying.
A big part of that terror I am feeling today is the harsh truth that I am not ready to die. No one ever is, you might tell me. Sure.
But today, Death whispers a question in my ear: what if I came knocking tonight and you were not waking up tomorrow?
The terror I am feeling comes from the fact that I have not built enough. Far from enough.
I am not talking about money matters here. This is not something a life insurance policy can ever fix. This is about legacy.
I have not built enough.
I am not sure what to make of this feeling. It is brand new to me and it feels like it is coming extremely late in my life.
I feel urgency now, yes, but also a form of shame and even paralysis, facing the task at hand.
My intuition tells me that there is some kind of dark leverage coming with all this. A third way to use memento mori, though the thought is still forming as I write this article.
In the darkness of this feeling, and the questions colliding in my head at the moment, lies a powerful force. Of that, I am sure.
The motto of my hometown, Geneva, is Post tenebras lux. It means: after the darkness, the light.
My intuition is that there can only be light because of the darkness.
Perhaps Ex tenebris lux is how this idea should be translated. Maybe the dark can be a fertile soil?
I do not yet know if I will be able to harness that feeling, to move from where I am, to where I need to be. To build what needs to be built.
But I will try.