“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” With these words on his lips, the priest marked my forehead with ashes at the Ash Wednesday Mass last week. The memento mori came in a timely fashion, as just a week earlier, the St. Thomas neighborhood was struck by the news of a sudden pedestrian death. The victim was on a mundane afternoon jog when he was hit and killed by an allegedly distracted and inebriated driver. That, as well as Ash Wednesday, served me as reminders of the fragile nature of mortal lives.

I rarely — if ever — approach daily routine with full awareness of death. On the contrary, assuming I have all the time in the world, I push things off, living like I’m immortal. But I’m not the only one. Billionaires residing in Silicon Valley have been dropping billions of dollars into funding longevity and, perhaps, immortality research. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is just one of the many who have funded medical research with a few billion dollars to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.”

This obsession with curing our mortality goes to reflect not only our culture’s fear of facing death, but also our refusal to find meaning in the life we already have. Instead of frantically wasting energy on changing our nature, realization of our own mortality provides us with purpose now; we learn to live and seek for meaning when we become aware we are only here for a limited time.

Psychologically, then, a realistic approach to mortality would benefit humankind, as it would lead to less procrastination and active appreciation of the present, which is something we all need.

However, there is more. The death of the jogger, so close to Ash Wednesday, and the reads done on the obsessive fear of death in Silicon Valley have taught me something more personal about my faith. Beyond psychology, in this Lenten time for Catholics, memento mori means something more. Lent opens with a recollection of death not to lead us into a state of gloomy paranoia, but to point us to the final destination of our Lenten journey; the one who already defeated death, Jesus Christ.

This reflection, which may seem a bit macabre, was instead quite fruitful because I realized that by being realistic about the state of my existence I not only acquired a better sense of my present life but also a deeper appreciation for personal values. If we all learned to live with better awareness of life and death, then, we would be more in tune with ourselves and with each other’s existence.

Letizia Mariani can be reached at mari8259@stthomas.edu