Memento mori

The Latin phrase memento mori, possibly best translated as "remember that you will die," apart from challenging anyone's knowledge of Latin grammar, keeps taking me back to what is called the first week in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. As a Jesuit novice more than half a century back I was to reflect on the fact of my death during the intense meditations making up what is called the Long Retreat, and on a yearly basis I was to go back to these somber reflections during an annual eight-day retreat. As a former Jesuit now in what are called the golden years of my life, I find myself coming back to them.

Just as it has been said that youth is wasted on the young, I think these reflections on death are just as wasted. As a young guy I could even imagine my death in some heroic manner, like those described in the daily readings that accompanied our noon dinner in the novitiate. Yes, chop away at my fingers like Isaac Jogues at the hands of the Iroquois, or let me suffocate over sulpherous fumes like the Japanese martyrs of a few hundred years ago. Or go the full "third degree" thing and be willing to be tortured in the same manner as Jesus himself.

In my final year as a Jesuit, ten years in but still three years away from ordination, I came to recognize how dishonest this was. No way could I want anything like this, and God help me if the time came when I would have to accept it, ready or not. As my dad, a vet of World War II once commented, he'd have said anything asked of him if had been a prisoner of the Japanese. He did not think this was being cowardly. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I was still a young guy at the time. As I got older I came to realize that honoring stubborness in the face of pain might not be quite as admirable as I had once imagined, especially if its sole result is to ratchet up the intensity of what someone has to endure until at last he is broken (and I'm told that eventually anyone can be broken).

However, the dramatic stuff was actually a distraction. It is more likely that if we live long enough we do not die in some heroic manner but in a way that takes us bit by bit back to the stage of being bawling, puking, pissing infants. As a novice I spend a few weeks assigned to help with the care of a couple of the elderly priests in our infirmary. What this meant in practice was just providing some companionship since there were no actual nursing duties assigned. One of the men, formerly a brilliant theologian, was a highly irascible soul who suffered from what today we know as Alzheimer's and had a memory span of a minute or so. The other, once seen as a holy terror in the Alaskan missions, had a sweet disposition, seemed completely lucid, and wanted only to talk about the wonders of the heaven awaiting him. It never really occurred to me that, were I to remain a Jesuit, there was a chance I'd be anything like either of them. But then I was a young guy.

Some of the men who were novices with me and have remained Jesuits have already died and a few others see the end as close enough. They have been well cared for, and there is a part of me that says I too might have had a complete life as a priest, just as they have. And there is that other part that says I have no regrets that I chose a different path, even with all the slips and falls that came with it.