Memento Mori - Stoic Exercise 2 of 3

This is Part-2 of how Stoic exercises that helped me (Part-1 covered Premeditatio Malorum).

Meditating on this gave Max and me the courage and power for almost 2 years to live these lines from the classic Meat Loaf song:

And I would do anything for love, I'd run right into hell and back

There is no way on earth we could have pulled it off without the help of those wise men who lived before us.

Hitchens during his final months in the hospital wrote in his last book Mortality:

Only OK if I say something objective and stoical: I am remarking that a time might come when I’d have to let go: Carol asking about Rebecca’s wedding “Are you afraid you won’t see England again?” Also, ordinary expressions like “expiration date”… will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say— I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!

I never looked at death through these mundane and ordinary eyes before I read those lines in 2012.

In 2015, Max had a growth on his toes and the vet was worried about Melanoma. It took almost 2 weeks for all the tests to come back and dismiss it as benign. During those 2 weeks, his ear cleaning liquid ran out and the vet gave me a big bottle. As soon as I saw that the question that came to my mind was - will Max outlive to finish the contents of this bottle? Just now, I checked the date on the bottle - 08/13/2015. He lived for four more years but didn't outlive the bottle. Now Neo, Fluffy, and Garph are using its contents on a weekly basis.

I started seeing materials in my life through this lens; if all goes well, I might have to buy only one more car in my lifetime, I might have to change carpet only more time in my house, I wouldn't need to buy new bed ever, no new house, I might spend roughly 1000 hours with my family (i.e., if I live till 80) and so on and on.

This mindset has helped me now to say it aloud that I am not regretting spending enough time with Max. Even making the decision of bringing Neo home (just 4 days after Max passed away) was based on this. I am 45, if all goes well when Neo, Fluffly, and Garph are ready to go,  I will be close to 60. Who knows these guys would be my last dog and cat in my life. And I don't want to regret not being without experiencing life through their eyes.

Memento Mori was (and is) the easiest thing I followed. I took to these beautiful sentences from Montaigne and instilled inside of me that now it feels innate.

If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.

That sentence sounds contradictory to Memento Mori but it's not. No one is capable of thinking about death constantly. I see, Memento Mori as a struggle between virtue and vanity. How to be virtuous when we all know its all vain and how to sprinkle vanity when the body feels strong and virtuous (or more complicated term for this is "catalepsis" which was coined by Martha Nussbaum -  "a condition of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.”). Some days the former take the forefront and somedays the latter but most days, I hope to get a balance between both.

To quote Hitches again on how body dissipates slowly in front of our eyes:

It’s normally agreed that the question ‘How are you?’ doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, ‘A bit early to say.’ (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, ‘I seem to have cancer today.’) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of ‘life’ when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask… It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.

I have seen Max's body go from a beautifully shiny and healthy bundle of joyful life into bare-bones in a matter for a few months. Every one of our final destiny is to watch our body dissipate. No one can escape this. If this doesn't make us all more humble, kind, caring and stop immersing ourselves in a self-centered world then I don't know what would.

    Max with Graph on August 14th, 2019. Around September, his body slowly went downhill.

So all this memento mori, stoicism, reading, mindfulness et al., was it worth it when the rubber hit's the road?

Having immersed in memento mori for years, I still haven't come it terms with Max not being around. It feels like I am still practicing life after him and it hasn't actually happened. In a weird way, practice and reality have overlapped. I hope that this false hope lasts.

English translation of one of my favorite Tamil song goes like this:

For all of us,  good times are guaranteed in our lives, 

Even for the “have-nots”,  bad times will change and progress is guaranteed in this world.

Why do we dwell in unwanted questions and unattainable dreams, your day will come, all things will be in your hand’s reach.

So, why do you unwantedly suffer now? believe in a better tomorrow,

On our earth, all we souls have innumerable desires, not one but more than thousands of needs...

Buddhists have been warning us about desires for thousands of years. I did heed to their wisdom. I think I have tamed a lot of my wants, desires, and needs over the past 13 years.

But.. yes there is always a but - since Max came into my life, I had two desires. Honestly, I didn't have any other and most likely, will never have more desires for the rest of my life.

Desire 1 - I wanted Max to take his final breath in this house where he grew up, played and lived happily for almost 14 years. I didn't want him to be killed by some lethal injection in a faraway place by a vet. I always wanted him to die a peaceful and natural death by my side in this house.

The desire was almost lost last October in those terrorizing 5 days. A miracle did happen. Max had miraculous turnaround on the fifth day and he was ready to go home. His eyes were full of sparkle asking me to get him out there and take him home. He loved home more than any other place on earth - the same as his dad.

On December 20th, when no one was home except Max and I, he took his last breath by my side in the place he loved most - home.   I am so grateful that one thing I desired and dreamt for so many years finally came true. Forget my desire, I know he wanted to be home when took his last breath. I cannot explain, I just know.

Desire 2 - I want to take my last breath in this same house where Max grew up, played and took his last breath. I want my head on his little pillow and covered in the blanket he had before we took him for his cremation. I have this beautiful dream that it will be true someday. That is only remaining desire. I can only hope I would be as lucky as Max.

To state the obvious - Yes,  the meditations on Memento Mori not only helped Max and me but also bought both of us a miracle to make this desire come true (plus the effort of many other people who helped Max along the way. I am grateful for each and every one of them).

A natural question arises when time tested methods like Premeditatio Malorum and Memento Mori works so well then why most people don't even know about it leave alone practicing it? I think the answer lies in these wise words from Pascal:

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

P.S:

I have avoided quoting any classic Stoics (Montaigne is an exception) and focus on contemporary people who meditate on Memento Mori. 

There are many others I left out. Last lines of Nassim Taleb's AntiFragile is a good example:

The glass is dead; living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.

I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components— and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books— my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me. 

Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres— make room for others.

And even someone like Naval Ravikanth reflects on this:

We’re not really here that long, and we don’t really matter that much. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually, you will fade. Your works will fade. Your children will fade. Your thoughts will fade. These planets will fade. This sun will fade. It will all be gone. There are entire civilizations which we remember now with one or two words. Sumerian. Mayan. Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No. I think we’re just here for an extremely short period of time. 

A great review of Hitchens's book captured the essence of it brilliantly:

If, as Montaigne famously said (by way of Cicero) “to study philosophy is to learn to die,” Mortality is a crash course in lived philosophy, without benefit of abstraction or metaphysical speculation.

Robert Triver's theory of self-deception (more on that some other time) is grossly undervalued and misunderstood; it is a groundbreaking insight into the human condition and explains why we don't reflect on the upcoming death periodically. 

Note: There is purely bullshit talk by Yuval Harari (I am a big fan of his book Sapiens - which is based on history and not 'predicting' future) with Daniel Kahneman titled - Death Is Optional and Peter Theil with his misplaced optimism (and exceptional linguistic skills) is working on "cures" to live forever. 

I rather, ask them to first try to design artificial blood from ground up (don't kill pigs for this); we depend on donors for this even today. These are complex systems, you cannot tackle them with optimism, pep talks and trillion dollars but only with humility. I will be impressed if some of these silicons valley hedgehogs can cure a common cold. 

By sheer coincidence, a dog named Max (an Australian Shepherd) gave blood transfusion to Max on 10/02/2019 which saved his life. I am eternally grateful for that Max and nurse Kathy who is Max's mom.