Finding My "Memento Mori": From a High School Memory to a Life of Dignity

 Finding My "Memento Mori": From a High School Memory to a Life of Dignity

One morning recently, I woke up with a haunting phrase echoing in my mind from a book I had read back in high school:

"Prepare your grave, for you must die."

Now, at 65, having recently reached my retirement age and occasionally hearing of the passing of old classmates, this phrase felt less like an old story and more like a tangible reality. I wanted to trace it back to its roots.

My search led me to an old short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa titled Two Letters. In it, Akutagawa introduces a famous 18th-century German doppelgänger legend. A scholar walks into his study only to find "another version of himself" sitting at his desk, pointing at a verse in the Bible. The verse was the very one stuck in my memory. The scholar died the next day.

As someone who has read the Bible entirely, I immediately recognized the source. Akutagawa had sensationalized Isaiah 38:1, where the prophet Isaiah tells the dying King Hezekiah to "Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die." In its original biblical context, it has absolutely nothing to do with doppelgängers or paranormal horror. It was simply a straightforward, practical piece of advice given to a dying king.

The Flaw in Akutagawa and Dostoevsky

Remembering this story reminded me of exactly why I disliked Akutagawa's work when I was a teenager. Despite his undisputed mastery of the Japanese language, his literature lacks a solid ideological foundation.

Take his famous short story Rashomon, for example. At the climax, a servant - driven by desperation - rationalizes stealing an old woman's clothes just because she justified her own sins. To me, this plot twist felt completely unnatural. If Akutagawa wanted to show true humanity, the servant should have wrapped his own coat around the shivering old woman and quietly walked away.

A writer's ultimate responsibility is to offer a compass for how to live and to respect human dignity. Akutagawa fails this by merely offering cynical, cold snapshots of human selfishness without any ultimate redemption.

I find a similar flaw in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. In the intense scene where the villain Svidrigailov corners Raskolnikov's sister, Dunya, his sudden shift into a "saint-like" figure who lets her go and commits suicide feels artificial. In a real psychological extreme, a profound, mutual romantic breakthrough would be far more plausible. Dostoevsky forces a moral lesson onto the character. Furthermore, allowing Raskolnikov to find spiritual rebirth through Sonya's love while still early in his exile feels unearned. True "crime and punishment" should be explored after serving the legal sentence, when a criminal must actually face society.

For me, true literary giants like Leo Tolstoy and William Shakespeare stand far above the rest. They dive deep into the mud of human ego, yet they never lose sight of human dignity, providing readers with a beautiful, realistic blueprint for life.

Embracing My Own Memento Mori

Fortunately, I have not seen any doppelgängers myself - which modern medicine rightly notes can be a biological warning sign of brain tumors or neurological errors rather than an omen of death!

Instead, remembering this biblical phrase has given me a renewed perspective on Memento Mori ("Remember you must die").

To me, Memento Mori is not a dark, terrifying concept, nor is it a cynical observation. It is a guiding principle for my retirement. Understanding that our time is limited is exactly what makes our remaining days beautiful. As I step into this next chapter of my life, I intend to live each day fully, holding onto human dignity, and quietly enjoying the profound gift of time.