Being mindful of mortality is unpleasant not only because it reminds us of the end, but also because it brings gravity to our lives. We are forced to ask, “Is there an afterlife?” Which leads to: “Does what I do here and now matter?” This is where things get rather unsettling. Without a vision of the grace of Jesus, most of us are left with the gnawing fear that perhaps watching Netflix and not killing anybody may not qualify me for the standard of living I would like in my hypothetical afterlife.

It’s time to bring back the phrase memento mori (“remember you must die”). Socrates taught that the proper practice of philosophy is nothing other than preparing to be dead. Stoics emphasized the value of living with death on the brain — meaning it was best to avoid emotional entanglements when death was going to have the last word anyway. Every significant world religion expends the majority of its energy orienting its followers on how to live in the light of death and the afterlife.

This brings us to the first of two significant questions we should ask when entertaining conversations about death:

What’s the difference between remembering death and being morbid?

Our society has reinforced our innate distaste for being morbid. That label now places you in the same socially outcast territory as being creepy or bigoted. The challenge is that being morbid is easier to sense than define. The sense is similar to when someone, in a group gathering, asks an overly personal question. In both cases, the trespass is the satisfying of a personal curiosity at the expense of another’s discomfort. And in both cases, the threshold is adjudicated by the one quickest to offense. This means that the safest course of action is to steer clear of the subject, or redirect as fast as possible, while in anything resembling polite society.

This, of course, has the cyclical effect of driving the reality of death further into the shadows, which is where we have most desired to keep him. We can’t bind him, or keep him as our prisoner, as we might like, but we can, at the very least, collectively pretend that he’s not there. Death is like that roommate with whom our relationship turned cold a long time ago. He’s still there—in fact, rather embarrassingly, it’s his name written on the lease. But we do our best to ignore him.

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