On my desk I keep a photograph of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. It’s a beautiful picture, with its skewed tombstones among spindly trees. But I don’t keep it around for aesthetic reasons. It’s my memento mori, a reminder that life is short, so I’d better stay focused and kind, or try to.
This is my definition of a meaningful life. But the picture is no help in defining a meaningful death—or the meaning of mortality itself. So (to paraphrase Saul Bellow) the question remains: What do we do about death? How do we live with the fact of our mortality?
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