In the early centuries of Christianity, the Desert Fathers — Christian monks who withdrew into the wilderness — practiced the strange and beautiful discipline of reminding one another of their mortality: “Brother, remember your death.” This was not meant to be morbid; rather, it was meant to awaken the soul to God. To remember death was to remember that every breath is a grace, that our time is fleeting, and that eternity is reality.
Centuries later, following the horrors of the widespread Black Death, medieval Christians gave the remembrance of death a hauntingly artistic form. The Danse Macabre — the “Dance of Death” — depicted dancing skeletons leading a social hodgepodge of kings, popes, merchants and peasants hand-in-hand toward the grave. The message was simple: death will come for all, regardless of one’s rank or riches. In the medieval context, it was understood that every person would ultimately be measured by the posture of one’s soul before God.
It is within the Christian tradition that the Latin phrase “memento mori” — “Remember your death” — finds its home. It has become one of my favorite sayings due to its redemptive quality. As a palliative care and end-of-life spiritual care counselor, death is not an abstract concept in my work — it permeates the homes I enter, lingers heavily in the rooms where I sit with families, and forms the backdrop of nearly every story I hear. I meet and support people who are confident about what lies ahead, others who are terrified of the unknown, and still others who have never truly contemplated what it means to die. Yet remembering our death is not a morbid exercise; it is an invitation to live more wisely and more fully.
In the Old Testament of the Bible, the psalmist prays, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). To remember that our days are numbered is to understand our lives not as disposable or ordinary, but as a sacred trust — time lent to us by God. When we live in awareness of our mortality, we begin to make decisions differently: we slow down, we forgive more readily, we speak love while we still can, we embrace our children longer and we let go of the nonessential or even ambitious things that once seemed so urgent.
The early Christians practiced memento mori not as a fixation on decay, but as a daily realignment of the heart. They embraced it as a worldview fully aware of the presence of God, practicing the awareness that despite the passing and temporal nature of the world, it is yet brimming with eternal significance. For those who follow Christ, to remember death is also to remember resurrection. The one who entered the grave and rose again has transformed death from an end into a doorway.
Therefore, we remember our mortality, not for despair, but to live with deeper gratitude and ever greater faith; not to live foolishly, but to live with wisdom and intention. May every remembrance of death point us to the one who conquered it.
Rev. Christianne Salinas Zeiger is a palliative care chaplain at Kenai Peninsula Home Health.
