8
Memento Mori

Death as a Way of Life

If I had my life over I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death … without an everpresent sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

– Inspector Mortimer in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori

AT ONE POINT DURING the course of the 200,000-line Indian spiritual epic, the Mahabharata, the warrior-prince Yudhisthira is being cross-questioned about the meaning of existence by a nature spirit on the banks of a lake, which is the sort of thing that happens in the Mahabharata all the time. ‘What is the most wondrous thing in the world?’, the spirit wants to know. Yudhisthira’s reply has become one of the poem’s best-known lines: ‘The most wondrous thing in the world is that although, every day, innumerable creatures go to the abode of Death, still man thinks that he is immortal.’

Wondrous is a good way of putting it. Again and again, we have seen how merely not wanting to think certain thoughts, or to feel certain emotions, isn’t sufficient to eliminate them. That’s why nobody ever wins Daniel Wegner’s ‘white bear challenge’, why selfhelp affirmations often make people feel worse, and why confronting worst-case scenarios is almost always preferable to trying to pretend they couldn’t happen. But mortality seems a baffling exception to this rule. Death is everywhere, unavoidable, and uniquely terrifying. Yet as long as it’s not impinging on us immediately – through recent bereavement, or a life-threatening illness, or a narrowly survived accident – many of us manage to avoid all thoughts of our own mortality for months, even years, at a time. The more you reflect on this, the stranger it seems. We are perfectly capable of feeling acute self-pity about more minor predicaments, at home or at work, on a daily basis. Yet the biggest predicament of all goes by, for the most part, not consciously worried about. ‘At bottom,’ wrote Freud – sweepingly, as usual, but in this case persuasively – ‘no one believes in his own death.’

This apparent nonchalance in the face of mortality looks stranger still in light of the fact that we do talk about death, all the time, yet somehow without ever really talking about it. Who reads those magazine features listing ‘a hundred things to do before you die’ – places to travel, foods to eat, albums to hear – and pays any real attention to the ‘before you die’ part? If you did, your reaction might well be a cry of existential despair: ‘Why bother, if I’m just going to die in the end anyway?’ (And existential despair, needless to say, is not the response a magazine editor usually wishes to evoke among readers.) We’re captivated by fictional tales of murder, but the ‘murder’ in a murder mystery rarely has much to do with the realities of death. Even real deaths in news reports can trigger horror, sympathy, or outrage without once prompting the viewer to reflect that the same basic fate, in a few decades at most, awaits him too. The idea of choosing to think about our own mortality, in a personal sense, as a matter of daily conversation, strikes us as hilarious – the joke on which, for example, much of the humour in Woody Allen’s 1975 movie Love and Death rests:

BORIS: Nothingness. Non-existence. Black emptiness.

SONJA: What did you say?

BORIS: Oh, I was just planning my future.

One of the most persuasive explanations of this psychological puzzle remains the one put forward in 1973 by Ernest Becker, in his magnum opus The Denial of Death. (Another death-fixated Woody Allen character, Alvy Singer, uses a copy to woo the titular heroine of Annie Hall.) Becker was born in Massachusetts in 1924; as a drafted soldier he encountered the worst realities of death while still a young man, helping to liberate a Nazi concentration camp by the time he had turned twenty-one. The lack of serious thought we give to mortality, for Becker, is no accident or oversight: it is precisely because death is so terrifying and significant, he argues, that we don’t think about it. ‘The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,’ his book begins. But the consequence is that we dedicate our lives to suppressing that fear, erecting vast psychological fortifications so that we can avoid confronting it. Indeed, an enormous proportion of all human activity, in Becker’s view, is ‘designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man’.

We are able to sustain this denial, he explains, because we possess both a physical self and a symbolic one. And while it is inevitable that the physical self will perish, the symbolic self – the one that exists in our minds – is quite capable of convincing itself that it is immortal. The evidence of this is all around us; in fact, it’s so ubiquitous that you might miss it. In Becker’s view, all religions, all political movements and national identities, all business ventures, all charitable activity and all artistic pursuits are nothing but ‘immortality projects’, desperate efforts to break free of death’s gravitational pull. We long to think of ourselves not as mortal humans but as immortal ‘heroes’. Society itself is essentially a ‘codified hero system’ – a structure of customs, traditions and laws that we have designed to help us feel part of something bigger, and longer-lasting, than a mere human life. Thanks to our symbol-making capacities, he writes, ‘The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself, even as it gaspingly dies.’ From this perspective, it isn’t only conventionally religious people who depend on the notion of an afterlife. All normally adjusted people, religious or not, unconsciously do so – and ‘every society is thus a “religion”, whether it thinks so or not’. For Becker, mental illness is a malfunctioning of the internal death-denial machinery. Depressed people are depressed because they try but repeatedly fail to shield themselves, as others manage to do, from the truth that they are not, in reality, cosmically significant heroes – and that pretty soon they’re going to die.

Immortality projects may be the cause of plenty of good things – great architecture, great literature, great acts of philanthropy, great civilisations – but in Becker’s view they are simultaneously the cause of the worst things, too. Our urge to think of ourselves as heroes doesn’t discriminate: it helps explain why we compete in sports or politics or commerce, but also why we fight wars. War represents the ultimate clashing of rival immortality projects: if my sense of immortality relies on my nation’s triumph, and yours upon yours, we’ll fight longer and harder than if we were seeking only territory or power. ‘Making a killing in business or in the battlefield’, writes the philosopher Sam Keen, paraphrasing Becker, ‘frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth … [Human conflicts] are life-and-death struggles – my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project.’ In other words, we will fight so hard to preserve our symbolic immortality that we will sacrifice our physical lives. In order to deny death, we will die. Even worse, we will deny that this is what we are doing, until the point at which we can deny it no longer. ‘One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war’, Becker observes, bleakly, ‘is that deep down, each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die. Each protects himself in this fantasy until the shock that he is bleeding.’

If Becker is right, the ‘wondrous’ fact that we behave as if we’re immortal isn’t so wondrous after all. You don’t fail to think about your mortality. Rather, your life is one relentless attempt to avoid doing so – a struggle so elemental that, unlike in the case of the ‘white bear challenge’, for much of the time you succeed.

A few years after The Denial of Death became a bestseller, several experimentally minded psychologists realised that Becker’s speculations (and, powerful as they were, they were just speculations) could easily be subjected to a more scientific test. If Becker is correct that we spend our lives fiercely but subconsciously trying to evade thoughts of our own death, it ought to follow that people who are explicitly reminded of their mortality – who are, in the language of psychology experiments, ‘primed’ to think about it – would instinctively fight back, by clinging ever harder to their death-denying beliefs and behaviours. This is the hunch underlying the field known evocatively as ‘terror management theory’, which over the last two decades has generated numerous persuasive examples of just how deeply the denial of death affects us.

One typical set of terror management experiments, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in 2003, unfolded as follows. First, the participants were fed a banal cover story about why they had been invited to take part – the study, they were informed, concerned ‘the relationship between personality attributes and opinions about social issues’. Mortality wasn’t mentioned. Then they were asked to fill out some lengthy and largely mundane questionnaires, which were identical for each participant, except when it came to two specific questions. For one set of respondents, those questions were about something mundane, too: their television-watching habits. For the others – described as the ‘mortality salience’ group – the questions focused on death. One was: ‘Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you.’ The other question demanded that respondents ‘jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.’

Then came a second exercise, which was the study’s real point. Participants were asked to read a short essay that expressed strong support for the foreign policies of George Bush, then to decide how far they agreed with it. ‘Personally,’ read the essay, ‘I endorse the actions of President Bush and the members of his administration who have taken bold action in Iraq. I appreciate our President’s wisdom regarding the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power … We need to stand behind our President and not be distracted by citizens who are less than patriotic.’

Again and again, in terror management experiments, people who have been shifted into this condition of ‘mortality salience’ – prompted to think about death – demonstrate markedly different attitudes from those who haven’t. Their responses to questions lend weight to the hypothesis that they are grasping hold of their immortality projects much more firmly than usual, in reaction against being reminded that they will die. Christians show more negativity towards Jews. Moralistic people become more moralistic. Where money is involved, people become less willing to share or to trust, and more eager to hoard whatever wealth they can. And at Rutgers in 2003, when asked how far they shared the views of the essay about President Bush, people in a state of ‘mortality salience’ were significantly more willing to endorse its author’s fighting talk. Other studies have shown a similar preference, in conditions of mortality salience, for authoritarian personalities over ‘relationship-oriented’ ones. It seems clear that Bush benefited greatly from mortality salience effects in the real world as well. The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 would have functioned like an extreme version of the death questions on a terror-management questionnaire, startling anyone who heard the news into the realisation that they, too, could go into the office one ordinary morning and die. ‘It is [fear] that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices,’ wrote Becker – leaders ‘who seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction – what calm, what relief.’

Mortality salience makes itself felt in numerous other, sometimes unexpected ways. Experimental subjects who have been prompted to think about death demonstrate more intense reactions of disgust to discussions of human bodily waste. They agree more strongly with statements such as ‘If I see someone vomit, it makes me sick to my stomach.’ They are more likely to rank certain hypothetical scenarios as ‘very disgusting’, for example seeing maggots on a piece of meat. This response, researchers argue, shows that participants are struggling to buffer themselves against confronting reminders of their ‘creatureliness’ – of the fact that, like other animals, they are physically mortal. ‘Disgust’, one such paper states, enables ‘humans to elevate themselves above other animals and thereby defend against death’. (This reaction to mortality, following Becker’s logic, may also help explain some cultures’ taboos against menstruating women, and why defecation and urination are generally done in private.) People in a condition of mortality salience, it transpires, are also more likely to be sympathetic to the theory of ‘intelligent design’, perhaps for similar reasons: if you can convince yourself that life didn’t emerge meaninglessly from the primordial swamp, it’s easier to feel that it won’t end in meaningless extinction, either.

In view of all this, the argument that it could be beneficial to live with more daily consciousness of one’s mortality might sound impractical at best. For one thing, Becker’s argument seems to suggest that the denial of death is far too deep-rooted for us ever to hope to unseat it. Besides, if it is the motivation for all sorts of extraordinary human achievements, would you really even want to do so? Yet since the time of the ancient Greeks, certain radical thinkers have taken the position that a life suffused with an awareness of one’s own mortality – as a matter of everyday habit, not just when direct encounters with death force our hand – might be a far richer kind of existence. It is also surely a more authentic one. Death is a fact of life, however hard we might try to deny it. In fact, the ‘cult of optimism’, with its focus on positivity at all costs, can itself be seen as a kind of ‘immortality project’ – one that promises a future vision of happiness and success so powerful and all-encompassing that it might somehow transcend death. Positive thinkers, it’s true, do pay lip-service to mortality awareness, with their homilies about ‘living each day as if it were your last’. But this is usually delivered as mere motivational advice, as a spur to get moving, to start realising your greatest ambitions. And if those ambitions are themselves simply more immortality projects, we have not really come any closer to living with an awareness of death.

Ernest Becker’s appointment with mortality came tragically early: a year before The Denial of Death was published, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, at the age of forty-seven. Two years later, Sam Keen visited him, literally on his deathbed, in a hospital ward in Vancouver one rainy day in February 1974. Keen was there to conduct an interview with Becker for Psychology Today. ‘Well,’ Becker told him, ‘now you’ll have a chance to see whether I lived as I thought.’ He had requested only a minimum of pain-killing medication, he explained, so as to remain ‘clear’ in his final interactions with his family, and in his dying. The denial of death might have structured all human civilisation, but it wasn’t the best way, Becker believed, for an individual to deal with his own death. ‘Gradually, reluctantly,’ Keen wrote later, ‘we are beginning to acknowledge that the bitter medicine [Becker] prescribes – contemplation of the horror of our own death – is, paradoxically, the tincture that adds sweetness to mortality.’ The interview was published a month after their meeting, in March. A few days afterwards, Becker died.

It may be hard to swallow the idea that we should spend more time contemplating death, but there are some powerful and pragmatic arguments for doing so. Consider, for example, the Stoic technique of the ‘premeditation of evils’. Death is going to happen, Seneca would say, and so it must be preferable to be mentally prepared for its approach, instead of shocked into the sudden realisation that it is imminent. In any case, our subconscious strivings not to think about death are never entirely successful: long before your own death becomes a probability, you’ll occasionally find yourself in the grip of that middle-of-the-night panic so vividly captured by Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Aubade’: ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now … Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.’ Better, surely, to avoid such horror by normalising the prospect if possible.

But how to go about doing this? The denial of death isn’t like most other problems, which weigh on us so heavily that we may eventually be driven to find a way to solve them. The whole problem is that, most of the time, it doesn’t feel like a problem at all. Subconsciously assuming that you’re immortal makes for a much easier existence, so long as you can keep it up. How, then, to fight this instinct and choose, as a matter of daily living, to confront death instead?

Solving this conundrum sounded like it might be a job for someone who was both a philosopher and a psychotherapist, and so in search of answers I turned to Lauren Tillinghast, a woman whose business cards and website described her as a ‘philosophical counsellor’. She was part of a contemporary movement among philosophers who felt that they were returning the discipline to its Socratic roots, as a therapeutic practice intended to soothe the soul, not just an academic exercise in theory-spinning. Tillinghast did her fair share of such theorising; she’d published articles in philosophy journals with titles such as ‘What is an Attributive Adjective?’ and ‘The Classificatory Sense of “Art”‘. But she also had a consulting office, in downtown Manhattan, a bright and neatly furnished room hidden inside an ageing office building that was home to a number of more conventional therapists, psychiatrists, and counsellors. She was in her early forties, and had the practised, friendly neutrality of a woman accustomed to listening non-judgmentally to other people’s problems. She poured me some mint tea into a white china cup, ushered me to an armchair, and didn’t flinch when I told her I wanted to talk about death – and, specifically, how one might learn to choose to live with greater awareness of one’s mortality. ‘Well, that’s a pretty big topic,’ she said. But we had to start somewhere, and we decided to begin with Epicurus.

The first step in trying to become more comfortable with your mortality involves attempting to reduce the terror induced by the mere thought of death. (If you can’t manage that, you’re unlikely to get much further.) Tillinghast explained that philosophers had often sought to achieve this by means of rational argument: if you can be persuaded that the fear of death is illogical, you’re more likely to be able to let go of it. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus – a contemporary of Zeno of Citium, the original Stoic – had made one of the earliest attempts. Before him, the philosophical consensus on death, broadly speaking, was that it wasn’t really final: the best argument for not being scared of it was that a glorious afterlife might follow. Epicurus’s argument is the mirror-image of this. If life doesn’t continue beyond death, he points out, that’s an excellent reason not to be scared of it, either. ‘Death is nothing to us,’ he says, ‘since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’ You might fear a painful dying process. You might dread the pain of losing others to death; our focus here is not on the terrible pain of grief. But fearing being dead yourself makes no sense. Death spells the end of the experiencing subject, and thus the end of any capacity for experiencing the state we fear. Or as Einstein put it: ‘The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident to one who’s dead.’ The one great fear that governs our lives, from this perspective, stands exposed as a kind of error. It’s as if, instead of imagining death, we had all along been imagining something more like being buried alive – deprived of all the benefits of existence, yet somehow still forced to experience the deprivation.

One powerful counterargument to this position is that our fear doesn’t come from imagining death wrongly, but from the fact that we can’t imagine it at all. That was roughly Freud’s view of the matter: that what we call ‘the fear of death’ is really more of a horrified seizing-up in the face of something utterly inconceivable. But as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel points out, there’s something wrong with this argument, too – because there’s nothing about ‘unimaginable’ states that is terrifying by definition. We can’t imagine what it’s like to be in a state of dreamless sleep, either, but we surrender to it every night, and very few of us do so with feelings of terror. ‘People who are averse to death’, Nagel notes, drily, ‘are not usually averse to unconsciousness.’

Epicurus has a second, connected point to make about the non-scariness of death, which has become known as the ‘argument of symmetry’. Why do you fear the eternal oblivion of death, he wonders, if you don’t look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born – which, as far as you were concerned, was just as eternal, and just as much an oblivion? Vladimir Nabokov famously opens his memoir Speak, Memory with lines that drive this point home: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the pre-natal abyss with much more calm than the one he is headed for.’ If you weren’t traumatised by not having yet been born, it seems logical not to worry about being traumatised by being dead. But of course, Tillinghast pointed out, ‘it’s not very useful, for most people, to point out that a fear is illogical. It doesn’t make it go away.’

There’s another problem with all these efforts to make being dead a less frightening prospect, which is this: who says that being dead is the problem in the first place? When we contemplate our own personal mortality, the real sting is surely that we’re going to stop being alive, and lose all the benefits we enjoy as a result of living. ‘People don’t generally come to me because they fear the oblivion of being dead,’ Tillinghast said. ‘But the idea of everything that makes life lifely drawing to a close - well, that’s a much greater source of anxiety.’ It is true, of course, that you won’t be around to experience being deprived of those benefits, so fearing that deprivation is arguably unjustifiable. But as Nagel argues, in an essay entitled simply ‘Death’, the fact that you shouldn’t fear death doesn’t mean that it isn’t a bad thing. By way of analogy, he says, imagine an adult who suffers a severe brain injury and is reduced to the mental state of a three-year-old. He might be perfectly happy in his new condition, but nobody would disagree that something bad had still happened to the adult he once was. It makes no difference that the adult is no longer around. No matter how persuasive you find Epicurus’s arguments against fearing death, it doesn’t follow that death is not bad.

This distinction is crucial, because it begins to make sense of the idea that a greater degree of mortality awareness might be part of the recipe for happiness. For as long as you’re terrified by the idea of your mortality, you can’t really be expected to swallow Ernest Becker’s ‘bitter medicine’ and voluntarily opt to spend more time thinking about your own death. On the other hand, trying to embrace death as a good thing would seem to be asking far too much of yourself. It might not necessarily even be desirable, since it could cause you to place less value on being alive. But coming to understand death as something that there is no reason to fear, yet which is still bad because of what it brings to an end, might be the ideal middle path. The argument is a thoroughly down-to-earth, pragmatic, and Stoic one: the more that you remain aware of life’s finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distractions. ‘Look at it like going to a really nice restaurant,’ said Tillinghast. ‘You take it as a fact that the meal isn’t going to last forever. Never mind if that’s the way it should be, or whether you feel like you’re owed more meal, or you resent the fact that the meal isn’t eternal. It’s just the case that you have this one meal. So it would make sense, wouldn’t it, to try to suck the marrow out of it? To focus on the flavours? To not let yourself be distracted by irritation at the fact that there’s a woman at the next table wearing too much perfume?’ The psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, in his book Staring at the Sun, points out that many of us live with the dim fear that on our deathbeds we’ll come to regret how we spent our lives. Remembering our mortality moves us closer to the deathbed mindset from which such a judgment might be made - thus enabling us to spend our lives in ways that we’re much less likely to come to regret.

Truly to confront your own mortality, Yalom argues, is to undergo an awakening - a total shift in perspective that fundamentally transforms how it feels to be alive. And it is not necessarily remotely pleasant. He recalls the reflections of one of his therapy patients, a woman in her early thirties: ‘I suppose the strongest feelings came,’ she told him, ‘from realising that it would be me who will die - not some other entity, like Old-Lady-Me, or Terminally-Ill-And-Ready-To-Die me. I suppose I always thought of death obliquely, as something that might happen, rather than that would happen.’ To make that switch, Yalom insists, is not merely to ratchet up the intensity with which you live, but to alter your relationship to life. It is a transformation he describes, borrowing the language of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, as a move from focusing on ‘how things are’ to the fact ‘that things are’ - on the sheer astonishing is-ness of existence.

This is the real distinction between mortality awareness as a way of life, on the one hand, and those clichéd slogans about ‘living each day as if it were your last’ on the other. The slogans may be motivational - a reminder to get down to the important stuff before it’s too late. But Yalom is talking about a transformation that redefines what constitutes the ‘important stuff’. When you really face mortality, the ultimate and unavoidable worst-case scenario, everything changes. ‘All external expectations, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,’ Apple’s founder Steve Jobs once said, in a speech that was speedily co-opted by several gurus of positive thinking, though in truth its message struck fatally at the heart of theirs. ‘Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.’

Start thinking this way, Yalom points out, and it becomes a virtuous circle. Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully - which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety. As he puts it, there is a positive correlation between the fear of death and the sense of unlived life. Live a life suffused with the awareness of its own finitude, and you can hope to finish it in something like the fashion that Jean-Paul Sartre hoped to die: ‘quietly … certain that the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man’.

After wrestling for a while with the ideas of Becker, Epicurus, Thomas Nagel and Irvin Yalom, I decided to take a trip to Mexico. I had suspected for some time that this would prove necessary if I was really going to understand the role of mortality awareness in daily life. I had often seen it claimed that Mexico had a unique attitude towards death. By common agreement, it was one of the few countries that still had an active tradition of memento mori - rituals and customs designed to encourage regular reflections on mortality - and, according to several recent international surveys, it was also one of the happiest; perhaps even the happiest or second happiest nation in the world, in fact, depending on the measures used. The most famous example of this attitude towards death is the annual celebration known as the Day of the Dead, when Mexicans toast those who have died - and death itself with copious quantities of tequila, and bread in the shape of human remains; people build shrines in their homes, throng city squares, and conduct all-night vigils at the graves of deceased relatives. But this way of thinking runs deeper than a national holiday each November. As the celebrated Mexican essayist Octavio Paz writes, in his book The Labyrinth of Solitude: ‘The word “death” is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips … the Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favourite toys and his most steadfast love.’

This more intimate relationship with mortality was not always so unusual. Such traditions date at least to ancient Rome. There, according to legend, generals who had been victorious in battle would instruct a slave to follow behind as they paraded through the streets; the slave’s task was to keep repeating, for the general’s benefit, a warning against hubris: memento mori, ‘remember you shall die’. Much later, in Christian Europe, memento mori became a staple of the visual arts: symbols of death appeared frequently in still-life paintings, sometimes including skulls intended to represent those of the artists’ patrons. Public clocks featured automata representing death, and sometimes the Latin slogan ‘Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat’ as a reminder of the effect of the passing minutes: ‘Every [hour] wounds, and the last one kills.’ The specific motivation for contemplating mortality differed from era to era, and culture to culture. In the ancient world, it had much to do with remembering to savour life as if it were a delicious meal, as Lauren Tillinghast had advised; for later Christians, it was often more a case of remembering to behave well in anticipation of the final judgment.

I’d been especially intrigued to hear about one contemporary example of death-awareness in Mexican daily life. Santa Muerte was the name of a new religion (according to its followers) or a Satanic cult (in the eyes of the Catholic Church) which worshipped death itself - the figure known as La Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. The movement had sprung up several decades ago in the toughest neighbourhoods of Mexico City, among prostitutes and drug dealers and the very poor - people for whom both the Mexican government and the Catholic Church had failed to provide. Instead, they prayed to Santa Muerte for protection from death, for a gentle death, or sometimes for death to their enemies. Now, as a result of immigration, Santa Muerte had spread to parts of the United States; it was also said that some of Mexico’s most powerful businessmen and politicians kept secret death-shrines at home. And although many of the followers of Saint Death were law-abiding Mexicans - they had marched in the streets to protest the government’s attempts to characterise the movement as nothing but a band of criminals - it was nonetheless true that it had become the religion of choice of the narcotraficantes, the ruthless drug-smuggling gangs of Mexico’s north. At the movement’s main shrine in the barrio of Tepito in Mexico City - where a life-sized model of a skeleton, laden with jewellery, stood in a glass case on a side-street - some of the country’s most violent men came to leave offerings of dollar bills, cigarettes, and marijuana. Whatever other significance the movement had, being a follower of Santa Muerte seemed to entail devoting oneself to an especially extreme form of memento mori - to organising one’s life around the omnipresence of death. ‘In a world of facts,’ writes Paz, ‘death is merely one more fact. But since it is such a disagreeable fact, contrary to all our concepts and to the very meaning of our lives, the philosophy of progress … pretends to make it disappear, like a magician palming a coin.’ In Mexico, Santa Muerte was where you turned if the circumstances of your life made this sleightof-hand impossible - if the constant fear of violent death removed the option of ignoring your mortality.

I did visit Tepito during my time in Mexico, a few days before the Day of the Dead itself, though it didn’t prove the most successful of assignments. I had been warned not to get there by hailing a taxi from the street, because of the risk of kidnapping; as a reporter, I have no real thirst for danger, and arguably I shouldn’t have gone at all. ‘Foreigners for obvious reasons never go to Tepito!’, someone advised, in an internet forum that I probably shouldn’t have consulted. ‘Only idiots and the ignorant visit Tepito,’ warned someone else. A few days earlier, an armed gang had gunned down six people on a street corner there, in the middle of the day. In the newspapers, it was reported that the police had written off whole sections of it as too dangerous to bother trying to patrol. A filmmaker based in Mexico City, who’d made a documentary about Tepito, declined to accompany me there, citing safety concerns. And a restaurateur in a smarter part of the city had cheerily passed along what she claimed was a well-known saying: in Tepito, even the rats carried guns. My walk into Tepito was therefore, if nothing else, a pretty good exercise in memento mori for myself.

I set off from the heart of the city in the middle of the morning, through shopping streets and Mexico City’s business district, then along bigger highways lined with scrappy, busy markets, until the streets grew narrower and the buildings smaller again, and I found myself in Tepito. The core of the neighbourhood was another cacophonous market - Tepito is notorious as a centre for the sale of counterfeit and stolen goods - but in my search for the Santa Muerte shrine I soon left the main roads and plunged into the deserted backstreets, where rats scuttled from towering piles of rubbish. I hurried past darkened doorways, growing nervous.

In the event, the scene at the shrine itself was festive. Around twenty people were waiting in an orderly line to pay their respects to the skeleton, which was resplendent in purple and orange necklaces and a lace shawl. Some carried their own, smaller statuettes, or bottles of spirits to leave as a gift; one or two blew cigar or cigarette smoke over the skeleton when they came to the front of the line, in what I later learned was a rite of spiritual cleansing. The devotees chatted and laughed - men and women, elderly women and muscular young men, some with newborn babies and toddlers in tow.

Having been unable to persuade a translator to come with me to the barrio, I was forced to rely on my terrible Spanish to start a conversation with a woman carrying a foot-high Death statue under her arm. Several other people in the line turned to stare.

She didn’t want to talk. The atmosphere in my immediate vicinity quickly turned less festive. I was intruding. Besides, it was quite possible that some of those around me wouldn’t want to talk to any reporter, or any stranger: people came to Santa Muerte, according to the Mexican essayist Homero Aridjis, ‘to ask her “protect me tonight because I am going to kidnap or assault somebody”’. It was a struggle to imagine a life in which death played quite so central a role. Then again, the great truth that was underlined by the scene at the shrine - where the generations mingled as they waited in line - was that death was a subject in which everyone had an inescapable interest.

As a pale, skinny Englishman, though, I was prominently out of place. And a muscular man in a black sleeveless vest, who seemed to be standing guard over the shrine, appeared to have noticed this. He glared at me. There was as much amusement as menace in his glare, since it was embarrassingly plain that I posed him no physical threat. Still, he tilted his head in such a way as to indicate the direction in which he believed I should now proceed: away from the shrine and back to the main street.

It was shortly after this that I made the decision to leave Tepito.

I had better luck on the Day of the Dead itself. (Celebrations begin on the last day of October, but the festival reaches its peak on 2 November.) Through a friend of a colleague, I’d made contact with a local retired taxi-driver named Francisco, who spoke decent English and had a sideline as a ‘fixer’ for journalists visiting Mexico City. At dusk, he pulled up outside my hotel in a severely battered grey van. ‘It’s a very safe car,’ he said, beaming, though I hadn’t asked, then added, ‘My other car was in an accident - and now my brother cannot use his leg!’ I didn’t pursue the subject. Francisco, as he’d explained to me on the phone a few days earlier, knew his way round the tiny settlements in the countryside outside the capital where the Day of the Dead was still auténtico - not commercialised or touristic but haunting and pure, and where villagers spent the entire night conducting vigils in local cemeteries, communing with the corpses of their relatives. It wasn’t really in my interests to start quibbling about road safety.

In Mexico City, the official municipal celebrations were reaching their peak. The historical central square, the Zócalo, was packed with families strolling among carts selling bone-shaped bread and sugar skulls. People - adults and children - were everywhere dressed as death: boys as hollow-eyed vampires in stiff starched collars, women as ‘La Catrina’, the iconic Mexican image of death as a woman in a broad-brimmed hat. On many corners, there were altars to the dead, bedecked with papier mâché skulls. Such traditions stretched back centuries, but they had been integrated into the life of a busy, modern city. In the offices of banks and insurance companies downtown, I’d been told, desks were often turned into altars. It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die.

But Francisco and I were headed away from the bustling squares, onto wide, chaotic highways - dodging stray dogs and suicidally piloted minibuses - and then, as night fell, on empty, unlit country lanes. ‘You know,’ Francisco said, after we had passed another dimly illumined roadside statue of death, looming from the blackness, ‘when I was a child, on this day, we would go from house to house, to make a joke about how each person was going to die. So if someone smokes too much, you brought him cigarettes, to make a joke about how he was going to die from too much smoking.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘Or if there was someone who lived in that house had died from too much smoking, then you could bring cigarettes as a gift to remember him.’

‘Didn’t people get offended?’

‘Offended?’

‘You know. Insulted.’

‘No, why?’ He turned to look at me. ‘I think that this is only in Mexico, though.’

He was largely right about that. Elsewhere in the Catholic world, 2 November is All Souls’ Day, designated since the eighth century as an occasion for mournful remembrance of the dead. But when the conquistadors reached Mexico, in the fifteenth century, they encountered celebrations of death among the Mayan and Aztec populations far more elaborate than their own: the Aztecs honoured their ‘lady of the dead’, Mictecacihuatl, with a twomonth festival of bonfires, dance and feasting. The colonists were determined to replace all this with something more sombre, and more Christian. The Day of the Dead - with its strange mixture of Christianity and pre-Christian religions, mourning and humour - is a testament to the incompleteness of their victory.

There were cultures that took memento mori to even greater extremes. The sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne was fond of praising the ancient Egyptians - ‘who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room, to serve as a memento to their guests’. (A writer’s working space, Montaigne also believed, ought to have a good view of the cemetery; it tended to sharpen one’s thinking.) And in the Satipatthana Sutta, one of the formative texts of Buddhism, the Buddha urges his monks to travel to charnel grounds in order to seek out - as objects upon which to meditate - one of the following:

… a corpse, one or two days old, swollen up, blue-black in colour, full of corruption; a corpse eaten by crows; a framework of bones, flesh hanging from it, bespattered with blood, held together by the sinews; bones, scattered in all directions, bleached and resembling shells; bones heaped together, after the lapse of years, weathered and crumbled to dust …

‘Corpse practice’, as it was known, was intended to lead the meditating monk to the realisation that - as the Buddha is supposed to have phrased it - ‘This body of mine also has this nature, has this density, cannot escape it.’

Francisco and I drove on. Eventually, after a diversion to a tiny town to eat pork chilaquiles from a roadside stall, and to watch a procession of churchgoers bearing framed photographs of dead relatives, we arrived at his intended destination: the village of San Gregorio Atlapulco. It was chilly, and almost midnight. At first, all I could see was an orange glow in the black sky; then, rounding a bend in the road, we came suddenly upon its source. The village cemetery was covered in hundreds of candles, and blanketed everywhere in marigold petals, sending a soft orange light into the sky.

Francisco parked the van, and we walked into the cemetery. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to what I was seeing. Many of the gravestones were only rough concrete slabs, or stubby pieces of wood, but almost none were unattended. Next to each, sitting in folding chairs, or cross-legged on the ground, were groups of two, three, or four people, sometimes more, holding murmured conversations and drinking tequila from paper cups. In one corner, a mariachi band in full costume strolled from grave to grave, serenading every headstone in turn. I stopped a woman who was carrying armfuls of rugs and chairs towards a nearby headstone, and asked what she was doing. ‘Oh, it’s my mother,’ she said brightly, gesturing at the grave. ‘We come every year.’

It would be entirely wrong to give the impression that the Day of the Dead - or Mexico’s approach to memento mori in general, for that matter - represented any kind of shortcut around the inescapable and scarring realities of grief. The participants in the cemetery vigils were not, by and large, those still reeling from the impact of having recently been bereaved. The idea, in any case, was not to adopt a rictus grin in the face of death. That approach is surely the ‘cult of optimism at its worst’: it doesn’t work, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be an appropriate response to loss. The Day of the Dead is not an effort to remake something horrifying as something unproblematic; it is, precisely, a rejection of such binary categories. What was happening in the cemetery was memento mori at its most powerful - a ritual that neither repressed thoughts of death, nor sought, in the manner of an American or British Hallowe’en, to render it saccharine and harmless. It was about letting death seep back into life.

‘In our tradition,’ observes the writer Victor Landa, who was raised in Mexico, ‘people die three deaths. The first is when our bodies cease to function; when our hearts no longer beat of their own accord, when our gaze no longer has depth or weight, when the space we occupy slowly loses its meaning. The second death comes when the body is lowered into the ground … the third death, the most definitive death, is when there is no one left alive to remember us.’ Death was omnipresent that night in the cemetery, and yet - precisely as a consequence of that - the third kind of death was absent. An entire town was remembering. And remembering, too, their own mortality, which differed from their dead relatives’ only in the sense that it had not claimed them yet.

You need not engage in cemetery vigils to practise memento mori, however. You can start much smaller. The psychologist Russ Harris suggests a simple exercise: imagine you are eighty years old - assuming you’re not eighty already, that is; if you are, you’ll have to pick an older age - and then complete the sentences ‘I wish I’d spent more time on … ‘, and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on … ‘. This turns out to be a surprisingly effective way to achieve mortality awareness in short order. Things fall into place. It becomes far easier to follow Lauren Tillinghast’s advice - to figure out what, specifically, you might do in order to focus on life’s flavours, so as to improve your chances of reaching death having lived life as fully and as deeply as possible.

This kind of smaller habit may actually be the most powerful form of memento mori. For it is precisely through such mundane and unassuming rituals that we can best hope to enfold an awareness of death into the daily rhythms of life, and thus achieve something of Epicurus’s calm rationality in the face of mortality. What lingered in my mind for months after Mexico, in any case, was not the loud celebration of death, though I had seen some of that in central Mexico City. Instead, it was the sense I had absorbed, in San Gregorio Atlapulco, of relaxing alongside mortality, of comfortably coexisting with it, of the companionship of life and death.

Before we left the village that night, some time before two in the morning, I noticed an elderly woman, sitting alone on a folding chair near one of the cemetery’s boundary walls. She was wrapped in a shawl and appeared to be talking softly to a head-stone.

Tentatively, I approached her. Interrupting felt wrong, but she wasn’t hostile; smiling, she nodded at the ledge beside the grave, inviting me to sit. So I sat.

The strains of the mariachi band drifted over from the other side of the cemetery. Some families, I noticed, had built small wood fires to keep warm; a few feet away, Francisco clapped his arms around himself in an effort to generate heat. I looked out over the cemetery, strewn with marigolds and crowded with huddled figures. Beyond its edges, no lights illuminated the blackness, but inside, the fires and the hundreds of flickering candles lent the night a kind of cosiness, despite the chill. The musicians carried on playing. Death was in the air, and all was well.