Tales from the Vault - Memento Mori

Nothing’s coming with me; not my clothes; not my sneaker collection; not the comic book collection I’ve spent almost 15 years building; not the pain I felt throughout my life, none of the pleasure either. I’m leaving behind my son and hopefully his love, all the memories of my first kisses, and all the hurt from every last one. The way I see it, we become a ball of energy and drift off. That’s the price of dying. To get in, you have to pay with everything you’ve ever had.

The last time I got laid, it was with someone whose brain is scary smart. The type I like to have around simply because good conversation is hard to come by. After we did the deed, we lay there for a bit talking. She gets into my head and knows me so well that there isn’t much I can say that surprises her.

“Yeah, you’re smart but you stand in your own way,” she says, “I can’t wait for you to get out of your head, you have so much promise and the day you let it out is going to be amazing.” 

I remind myself to pat me on the back at the very next opportunity.

“I’d never date you though,” she goes on taking me slightly aback. 

Who wouldn’t want to date me? I think before transforming this thought into words for her. 

“I wouldn’t,” she replies, “you’re a fatalist. You make no moves towards anything you want because your logic is someday you’ll die, and none of it will matter, so what’s the point, right?” 

I lay there, the euphoria from finally ending my dry spell wearing off, the annoying scratching of nicotine addiction beginning in the back of my throat, and come up with a response that works for me. 

“Right.”

The next morning, I forego a quickie and leave. On my walk to the train station, I am trying to remember what it was she said, but can’t find the word. For some reason defeatist keeps popping up, and I am damn sure she didn’t describe me that way. Still, I know it is something similar and I spend the next day agonizing over the word she used. We’ve talked since then, but she can’t remember, so I force myself to get over it and forget the conversation.

The brain’s a funny thing, though. Ideas and memories forgotten come back in moments we least expect. In my case, I was getting my ass kicked during a lunch rush, pumping out orders, murdering tickets, when the song “Rat a Tat” by Fall Out Boy came on; the best track off the album Save Rock & Roll. 

“Remember me as I was not as I am,” Patrick Stump sings, and suddenly I am not on the line. I mean I’m going through the motions, grabbing tickets, pumping food out, but mentally? I’d hopped in Freddy’s Delorean, set the date for December 23rd, hopped out, and into the bed where the word that haunted me for a night before falling out of my brain was spoken. 

The memory was now sharp and vivid. The way her hair curled, the way she tried to cuddle, and I brushed her arm away playfully serious, but most importantly, the word.

Fatalist. 

I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Now, it has to be said that the definition of “fatalist” isn’t what she described me as, and is actually the exact opposite of everything I believe when it comes to “destiny,” but in the moment it was a new word to me, so I took it in the context of the conversation. Moving on.

Almost two years ago, I became obsessed with a Latin phrase. I stumbled onto it by accident looking up a phrase I’m sure many people know. Carpe diem, or rather “seize the day.” I was thinking of getting the quote tattooed, when I stumbled onto a phrase I related to much more. Memento Mori.

 “Remember you will die.”

Remember you will die. The one aspect of life every human being shares is the knowledge that someday life ends. Rich or poor, honored or shamed, strong or weak. We will die. For an intelligent person it’s a humbling thought. A King and a slave end up in the same place. An idiot and a Savant end up in the same place. Unfortunately even Us and Them are going to end up in the same place. 

It’s crowded on the other side of forever.

Despite the phrase having strong religious ties to Catholicism, it doesn’t come off as very religious to me. I don’t wonder if I’ll make it to Heaven or Hell because I don’t believe in those notions. No, what I wonder is simple. 

“What’s the point?”

For a long time, too long honestly, I felt like I was without purpose. One of my biggest ideas as a child was that I was destined for greatness. As the years passed however, cynicism took a firm hold on my psyche. I got the idea that with every minute that passes I’m getting closer to death, and I won’t get to enjoy anything I leave here when I go, so what’s the point? 

Who cares if I’m remembered? Why not just make as much money as I can doing as little as I can, and when I’m gone be gone? A part of me wishes I still had that mindset, but I don’t. I’ll never have that mindset again.

I can only speak for myself. You can relate or you can’t, I’m not out to convince anyone, but as I said in the beginning, I’m not taking anything with me when I go. For a long time it was a depressing thought for me, and it’s still a huge contributing factor in why I’m afraid to die. I love opening up a cellophane bag and sliding a comic I haven’t read in years out of it. The smell of the yellowing pages, the artwork, the subtle things like how I hold the spine flat in the palm of my hand, yet don’t touch any page unless I’m turning it. I love watching movies or playing video games or reading a book, and having something from them spark my curiosity to the point where I have to go learn everything about what I’ve just seen or read. I love the laughter of all the children in my life and their curiosity for the world around them. I love the idea of love in all of its forms. 

Why would I ever want to be apart from these things? How could I ever be comfortable knowing someday, and not even a day of my choosing, I’ll be gone from all this? Memento Mori? Trust me I couldn’t forget that if I tried. I’m leaving behind my whole world.

Despite all that however, that Fall Out Boy line brought my thought process to a different level. “Remember me as I was, not as I am.” That got me to thinking that maybe part of the reason I’m so afraid of dying is because I’m scared that the last thing people will remember of me, is sadness. All of my loved ones in one room staring at my cold lifeless body, isn’t what I’d want my last impression of me to be. That’s not how I would want to be remembered. Most of the things I’m leaving behind speak to what I love. I just realized that there’s one thing I’m leaving behind that speaks to what I am.

This.