$6M Super Bowl Ad To Thank The Vet Who Saved His Dog From Cancer

I will write more about Max's cancer, his myriad of treatments and his oncologist later but this is heartwarming news - I am not alone!

Max was almost 14 years but this dog Scout is only 7 years old. I am happy for Scout and his dad David who refused to give up based on some mindless survival probability.

Max was given 8 weeks but he went to survive for almost 2 years.  We are so used to putting dogs down so quickly just because its an inconvenience. We need to stop using these euphemisms and instead use the word "kill". Maybe, that would stop a lot of mindless killing.



His dog was given a month to live. But the owner, who couldn't accept that prognosis, is now thanking the veterinary clinic that saved his beloved pet by taking out a $6 million Super Bowl ad.

David MacNeil's 7-year-old golden retriever, Scout, collapsed in summer 2019, and a veterinarian told him the dog had cancer and one month to live, according to NBC Madison, Wisconsin affiliate WMTV.

"There he was in this little room, standing in the corner... and he's wagging his tail at me. I'm like, 'I'm not putting that dog down. There's just absolutely no way," said MacNeil, who is the founder and CEO of WeatherTech, an car accessories company.

He took Scout, who serves as his company's unofficial mascot, to the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine.

The dog had a one percent chance of survival, but doctors at the veterinary school treated Scout with aggressive chemotherapy and radiation that nearly eradicated his tumor.

MacNeil was so grateful he took out the ad, a 30-second spot called "Lucky Dog" that opens with Scout running on the beach and tells the story of his survival.

The spot encourages viewers to donate to the veterinary school's research.

Good Bye Clayton Christensen

Once again Cancer was the culprit. He might have inspired Steve Jobs with his book Innovators Dilemma but for me, his single insight on how to look at questions changed the way I see and behave with people.

You’ve probably heard it said that someone can’t be taught until they’re ready to learn. I’ve heard it said that way too. It makes sense, and my experience tells me it’s mostly true. Why though? Why can’t someone be taught until they’re ready to learn?

Clay explained it in a way that I’ve never heard before and I’ll never forget again. Paraphrased slightly, he said: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

Thank you, sir, for your great insights. That insight will stay with me until I perish. Tell Max I miss him and I love him if there is something more out there. 

Amor Fati - Stoic Exercise 3 of 3

This is Part-3 of how Stoic exercises that helped me (Part-1 on Premeditatio Malorum and Part-2 on Memento Mori).

Premeditatio Malorum and Memento Mori are easy ones for me to practice. The whole idea is to imagine from a subjective point of view on how objective it would feel when it happens (no question - it will happen). Being a human - the masters of imagination, it naturally came to me and practice didn't seem like practice.

Amor Fati as Ryan Holiday describes:

When we accept what happens to us, after understanding that certain things— particularly bad things—are outside our control, we are left with this: loving whatever happens to us and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness and strength.

It is the hardest exercise for me to follow since here one has to go from an objective standpoint into imagining a subjective point of view that might never happen. In other words, one has to consciously practice self-deception when one is emotionally weak.

How can I see anything positive in Max leaving me? The truth is there is none. And having read and loved so much on Robert Trivers mostly unknown and underrated research on self-deception makes it even worse.

Most people would see the positive thing in his passing (a quintessential "proven" human ways to delude oneself after the loss of their loved one) stating one or all of the these:

• Max is not hurting anymore and he is in a better place now - whatever that place is supposed to be; the best place in the universe for Max was always Home. I am not sure what that better place is. 
• I don't have to suffer with him anymore and use my time now productively - my time revolved around Max and without him, I don't grasp the concept of time. I am living inside David Eagleman's research on timewarp and perception of time which creates a fourth dimension inside the brain. Time has stopped and it has slowed down since Max.
• Everyone has to go one day; it is the rule and reality of life - knowing this doesn't make the loss any more bearable or insignificant. 
• And multitudes of other social "dances" - drinking, finding god, sex, being with friends, going on a vacation, reading, finding oneself (whatever that means) and other self-indulging mindless acts to help the brain forget the reality. These are convenient excuses to live inside the self-centered world masquerading as self-pity and grief. 

There was a time in my life when I had nothing - absolutely nothing and then Max came into my life. I am so glad that I didn't kill myself before meeting him. We had an ordinary life filled with beauty and wonder for 13 plus years. I cannot ask for more.

And now, I have everything but Max is not around.  These ironies of life are what few wise men have written and warned us for thousands of years. I am grateful that I was lucky enough to read and understand a few of their wisdom.

There is absolutely nothing positive about losing Max and I cannot delude myself into thinking otherwise. I saw Max take his final breath... he was struggling and finally, he stopped breathing and went into eternal stillness. Maybe, I have to keep breathing until it stops and until then, do whatever little I can do leave this world a little better place than the one I inherited.

There is a beautiful monologue by Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away - "I Have Ice In My Glass":



I really don't need the tide to bring me a sail. I have already had more than a lion's share luck when the tide bought Max when I was just 31 years old. I don't want nor wish for another one. It would be absolutely selfish of me to ask for more. It's about time I start giving back.

So the positive and objective things now that Max is not around are that I can breathe. I can walk. I am healthy. I have food. I have water. I have not one but three therapists. I live in the most powerful country with all the best comforts possible than any other time in history. I am so grateful for all of that.

And most importantly, I have lessons from Max on how to live and how to die. That is the greatest gift I got without even wishing for it. Now, all I have to do is keep breathing and not forget how grateful life has been to me.

I am not the first nor the last to feel these sorts of pain. Albert Camus went through worse (and to make things even worse, he was in bad health):

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

To discover that invincible summer, one has to emote with reason and reason with emotions outside of self and their self-centered families. No doubt, Max taught me well to survive in an eternal winter with no summer in sight.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera observed a fundamental truth we all ignore:

Mankind’s true moral test consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect, mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

I just need to keep breathing and help undo that fundamental debacle in whatever small ways possible to eliminate animal suffering.

P.S:

In Antifragile, Taleb observed a natural state of Amor Fati:

The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!

That applies to different situations. To be precise, that applies to bad things that are caused by other humans. 

But Albert Camus once again showed us a path which goes beyond Amor Fati: 

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

[---]

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

How Good It Is To Be Us !

When Henry David Thoreau died at the age of 44 in 1862 his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson gave one of the worst eulogies in history: 

There was somewhat military in his nature not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. “I love Henry,” said one of his friends, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.”

It was a pity that Emerson choose such harsh words; history will never forgive him. Thoreau had his faults but he didn't play the social games that Emerson embraced often.

One of the heartfelt and beautiful tributes I have read in recent memory was by Christopher Hitchens's wife Carol Blue (as an afterword in his last book Mortality):

Offstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow. 

At home at one of the raucous, joyous, impromptu eight-hour dinners we often found ourselves hosting, where the table was so crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents, college students and children that elbows were colliding and it was hard to find the space to put down a glass of wine, my husband would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny 20 minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause, and jokes. “How good it is to be us,” he would say in his perfect voice.

My husband is an impossible act to follow.

I miss his perfect voice. I heard it day and night, night and day. I miss the first happy trills when he woke; the low octaves of “his morning voice” as he read me snippets from the newspaper that outraged or amused him; the delighted and irritated (mostly irritated) registers as I interrupted him while he read; the jazz-tone riffs of him “talking down the line” to a radio station from the kitchen phone as he cooked lunch; his chirping, high-note greeting when our daughter came home from school; and his last soothing, pianissimo chatterings on retiring late at night.

I miss, as his readers must, his writer’s voice, his voice on the page. I miss the unpublished Hitch: the countless notes he left for me in the entryway, on my pillow, the emails he would send while we sat in different rooms in our apartment or in our place in California and the emails he sent when he was on the road. And I miss his handwritten communiqués: his innumerable letters and postcards (we date back to the time of the epistle) and his faxes, the thrill of receiving Christopher’s instant dispatches as he checked-in from a dicey spot on some other continent.

The end was unexpected. At home in Washington, I pull books off the shelves, out of the book towers on the floor, off the stacks of volumes on tables. Inside the back covers are notes written in his hand that he took for reviews and for himself. Piles of his papers and notes lie on surfaces all around the apartment, some of which were taken from his suitcase that I brought back from Houston. At any time I can peruse our library or his notes and rediscover and recover him.

When I do, I hear him, and he has the last word. Time after time, Christopher has the last word.

"How good it is to be us!" 

That's exactly how I felt those 13 plus years Max and I shared in a dreamland. I miss his wet nose, I miss his naughty eyes filled with life, I miss kissing his shiny coat, I miss biting his pink lips, I miss him giving me that big hug, I miss everything about him. I am so thankful that he was in my life and teaching me how to live and how to bid goodbye.

I love you - it was so good to be us!

My Therapists

They might look small but they have this scarce power to change their mind for good when it's needed. Most humans are incapable of this because of their self-induced arrogance.

I saw world differently for the first time in my life through Max's eyes. Now, these guys and gal under the giant shadow of Max are helping my little grey matter.

Meet: Miss Fluffy - In front of her, John Stuart Mill would look like Stalin's surrogate and contemporary libertarians would be indistinguishable from North Korean prison guards. 

She must be from the same lineage as Montaigne's cat. 

Meet: Mr. Garph (as in Garfield) - This little Buddha can instantly make Tibetian monks feel like barbarians dancing for rap music. Serenity would scream in his company. 

 

Meet: Neo - He thinks he is right out of Greek Mythology. He has the capacity to chew this planet Earth from one end and come out from the other side. 

The "Why" Question

But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds.

[---]

Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals.

A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

In simplistic terms - To know thyself, it is better to live with animals than meditate since meditation is probably going to confabulate our own self centered and biased thoughts.

John Gray is one contemporary philosopher (or otherwise) that I completely agree with at a fundamental level. Maybe, I have to re-read and read him more but nevertheless, he is grossly under-rated.

Why did Max and I have this bond? I am sure, if someone psychoanalyzes me enough they can find spurious correlations with my childhood, relationships, genes, and other cultural-social-economic factors.

I think the simplest answer is we both shared an ancestral past, shared a peaceful present, and we subconsciously knew about our shared future destiny.

This applies to each and every one of us.

The only credit I get is that I didn't just ruminate and ponder on this fact but lived by dedicating time and effort. Time and effort was only dedicated to Max and nothing else. Period.

In 1563, the death of his close friend Étienne de la Boétie deeply affected Montaigne.

It has been suggested by Donald M. Frame, in his introduction to The Complete Essays of Montaigne that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate", after losing Étienne he began the Essais as a new "means of communication" and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend". (source)

And Montaigne wrote a beautiful answer to this "Why" question:

"If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I."

Max and I at a cabin in Catskills during the summer of 2015

Play was the "purpose" of life for 13 plus years

Laughter was our language, Joy was our sense and Peace was our dwelling

World was beautiful with Max by the side

And We became "One"

    Colors of life might fade & perish but nothing can do us apart

                                                                                    In this ordinary life - beauty happened & wonder thrived

Crying

If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely. 

[---] 

Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely--but eventually be able to say, " All right, that was my moment of loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them all.

[---]

I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that's all.

I read that advice from Morrie (Tuesdays with Morrie) about 20 years ago.

I am an emotional creature (who isn't?) to begin with but emotions have engulfed me even more since Max left.

I have never had any shame or any sort of apprehension for crying (sans self-pity) but I never knew that I could cry spontaneously at any given moment - when I see his photos, when I kiss his ashes good morning, when I kiss his ashes good night, when I tell his stories to Neo,  when I visit his vet, at work,  while walking, while driving, in bed, in shower and now even as I type this.

But as Morrie had said - when we are in grief, a good cry is what we need. There is a reason why evolution has given us (and all other creatures on this planet) so many emotions. Each one serves multiple purposes.

There is no medicine in the world that can help us than our own tears when in emotional pain.  A good cry clears my mind. It helps me focus on what to do next. It helps me reflect on the beautiful moments in the past. And most importantly helps me let "it" flow in the present moment. Without this process, I cannot make any good judgments nor any decisions.

To put it bluntly - I feel lighter when I cry. It helps to float but not sink in pain. The process repeats. I don't for how long. The process will repeat as long as it takes since I am going to miss Max for eternity or till the end of my life whichever comes first.

Old news is that psychopaths to slaughterhouse workers lack or control their emotions but the new news is that if one controls their emotions (as the society preaches), one hasn't experienced nor used some of the fundamental tools that our body and mind has provided us with.

To add to  Pascal's quote:

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

Plus, man's inability to emote freely and constructively which helps him go beyond himself and his family to aware of it's insignificance and how much suffering he causes because of that in the world. 

Reinhold Niebuhr said it more eloquently :

Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.

I felt liberated when I read neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's groundbreaking book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and his brilliant insight into "Somatic Marker Hypothesis":

What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological and sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social causes or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the "culture of complaint") that is cause for alarm.

[---]

Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.

Today, it's been a month since Max passed away. I am not I without you, my love.

"From Prison to Python" - Shadeed Wallace-Stepter

After this point, I started meeting with Jessica pretty frequently, and she began to tell me about the open source community. What I learned is that, on a fundamental level, open source is about fellowship and collaboration. It works so well because no one is excluded.

And for me, someone who struggled to see where they fit, what I saw was a very basic form of love—love by way of collaboration and acceptance, love by way of access, love by way of inclusion. And my spirit yearned to be a part of it. So I continued my education with Python, and, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get more tutorials, but I was able to draw from the vast wealth of written knowledge that has been compiled by the open source community. I read anything that even mentioned Python, from paperback books to obscure magazine articles, and I used the tablet that I had to solve the Python problems that I read about.

[---]

Then, on August 17, 2018, I got the surprise of my life. Then-Governor Jerry Brown commuted my 27-years-to-life sentence, and I was released from prison after serving almost 19 years.
But here’s the reality of my situation and why I believe that programming and the open source community are so valuable. I am a 37-year-old, black, convicted felon, with no work history, who just served 18 years in prison. There aren’t many professions that exist that would prevent me from being at the mercy of the stigmas and biases that inevitably accompany my criminal past. But one of the few exceptions is programming.

- More Here

10 Weeks & Already Drawn Towards Sisyphean Task's

Max was extremely... I mean extremely picky about choosing his toys.

And obviously, that resulted in many unused (and untouched) toys.

Now, Neo is living in the middle of a jackpot of unused Max's toys (Max's favorite and used toys are already in the memory capsule).

Neo is drawn to this HUGE dinosaur toy. I bought it for Max when he was around 3 or 4 years old, he sniffed it once and never touched it for over 10 years.

Now, this little guy loves this toy which is double his current size and weighs almost his current weight.

I think this is a small window into the future on how different this guy will be from Max.

And Garph watches this spectacle with astonishment :-)

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.