The odds are extremely good that all of us will die—you and I and everybody else who reads this column.

Until recently, we mortals were reminded of death just about daily.  Many of us died young, for one thing, some of us in childbirth, and even in childhood.  Family members often died at home, where “wakes” or “vigils” were kept.  Decaying headstones standing akilter in overgrown churchyards made it difficult for worshippers to forget that they, too, would someday join their friends and relatives who were already there.

In fact, at least Western Christendom seems occasionally to have been obsessed with death, in an unhealthy, morbid, macabre way.

However, we today may have overcorrected.  Death often comes, now, in an antiseptic hospital room rather than at home.  Professional undertakers handle the last preparations, rather than families.  And park-like cemeteries are separated off as destinations that must be intentionally visited, or not visited at all.

Sometimes, too, when death comes, it’s regarded almost as a medical failure, rather than as the eventually unavoidable end for all of us.  A friend who was a highly respected cardiologist once confided to me that he was thinking about early retirement.  Why?  Partly because he’d come to dread having people angrily and unreasonably confront him, complaining that it was his incompetence that had permitted a parent to die—even when that parent had suffered from heart disease for two or three decades and had died well past ninety years of age.

We’re bombarded with ads for skin care products and expensive surgical procedures that promise to miraculously erase the signs of aging.  We zealously follow fitness and diet programs in pursuit of the unattainable phantom of everlasting youth.  And yet, President Russell M. Nelson has written of a “gift” that we’ve been given:

“It is the blessing of aging, with visible reminders that we are mortal beings destined one day to leave this ‘frail existence.’” Our bodies change every day. As we grow older, our broad chests and narrow waists have a tendency to trade places. We get wrinkles, lose color in our hair—even the hair itself —to remind us that we are mortal children of God, with a “manufacturer’s guarantee” that we shall not be stranded upon the earth forever.”

Now, obviously, there’s nothing at all wrong with trying to remain healthy and fit as long as we can.  (President Nelson himself provides a striking illustration of the benefits of healthy, active living.)  But there can be no illusion:  All physicians will die.  Every athlete will eventually die.  Death will come for the undertaker and the fitness trainer, too.

In a culture that sometimes seems to pretend that we will never die, that we will go on forever, it may be helpful to be reminded that our time on earth is limited and brief.  In the words of a song that was popular in my youth, “We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass.”

A Latin phrase comes to mind: “memento mori.”  It can be literally translated as “you must remember to die,” but may be loosely rendered as “remember death” or “remember that you die.”  Generally, it refers to an artistic symbol or trope that is intended to remind us of the inevitability of death.  It has its roots in both Christianity and the philosophers of classical antiquity, and it appears quite frequently in funerary art and architecture extending from medieval Europe up until almost modern times.

In ancient Rome, the Senate frequently granted a victorious general what was called a “triumph.”  On that day, the general wore a crown of laurel and an all-purple, gold-embroidered triumphal toga, which was intended to identify him as near-kingly when not altogether near-divine.  He would ride in a four-horse chariot through the streets of Rome, accompanied by an unarmed procession of his army, the captives that he had taken, and the spoils of war that he had seized. At the conclusion of the parade, when the procession had reached the temple of Jupiter on Capitoline Hill, he would offer sacrifice and the tokens of his victory to the chief god of the Roman pantheon.

In some accounts of the procession, though, and amidst all the pomp and the glory of the day, a strikingly discordant element also occurs: A companion or even a public slave would stand behind or near the triumphant general, reminding him from time to time of his mortality.

An analogous practice occurred for more than five hundred years during the installation of new popes.  Since the papal coronation of Paul VI in 1963, the ceremony has been simplified, and the papal crown has not been used.  Between the coronation of Alexander V in 1409 and the installation of Paul VI, however, a very interesting ritual was practiced:  As the new pope was conveyed around St. Peter’s Square, the procession would stop three times.  Each time, the papal master of ceremonies would fall to his knees before the pope, holding a silver or brass reed that bore a tow of smoldering flax.  On each occasion, three times in succession as the cloth burned away, he would say, in a loud and sorrowing voice, “Pater Sancte, sic transit gloria mundi!” (“Holy Father, thus passes the glory of the world!”)  The point, of course, was that worldly honors, and life itself, are only transitory.

And, indeed, this is true. Many years ago, I spent a summer at Princeton University.  One day, while strolling not far from the campus, I happened upon the small and modest Princeton Cemetery.  Unexpectedly, I found myself standing at the grave of Grover Cleveland, the former governor of New York and both the 22nd and 24th president of the United States.  (Prior to Donald Trump, he was the only American president to have served two non-consecutive terms.)  His simple grave marker—no more elaborate than many others around it—gives the date and place of his birth and death but fails to mention his high public honors.

Ernest Hemingway, a Nobel laureate, one of the great figures in twentieth-century American literature, and a legendarily larger-than-life personality even apart from his novels, is buried in the small Ketchum Cemetery in central Idaho.  (Ketchum has a population of roughly 3500 people.)  No monument marks the spot, which is easy to miss; his simple tombstone supplies his name, his birthdate, and the date of his death.  Nothing more.

The Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence is far more grand, and it contains the tombs of some of the greatest names in the history of Western civilization, names such as Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Marconi (who won a Nobel Prize for laying the foundations of all modern wireless technology, including radio and television), and Enrico Fermi (another Nobel laureate, who is sometimes called “the architect of the nuclear age”).  Each of them gets a niche in the church’s wall.  No more.  (As does the great poet Dante Alighieri, although his body isn’t actually there.  To its shame, the city of Florence drove him into exile in 1302.  He died in Ravenna in 1321 and is buried there.)

One of the most stunning collections of the burials of luminaries, of course, is to be found in England’s Westminster Abbey.  Crowded within its walls are the final earthly resting places of such titans of English history as Henry V, Henry VII, Elizabeth I (“the Great,” after whom the “Elizabethan Age” is named), Mary Queen of Scots, James I (who commissioned the King James Bible), and Mary I (“Bloody Mary”).  Giants of literature are generously represented, too, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.  Much of the history of modern science can be told with reference to people, like Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, and Isaac Newton, whose mortal remains lie within the Abbey, as do those of great figures in the history of English music and theater (e.g. George Frederick Handel, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Laurence Olivier, and Henry Purcell).  But Westminster Abbey is crowded now.  It is an unusually elegant warehouse of the bodies of the illustrious dead; even the greatest of the monarchs, scientists, and authors in it are granted only a few square feet of space.  (The great early-seventeenth-century playwright and poet Ben Jonson was buried standing up, to save space.)

The residents of Westminster Abbey, however, are relatively fortunate: The Egyptian pyramids and the spectacular tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings are almost entirely empty now.  The royal mummies that have survived rest forlornly in display cases in the museums of Cairo, where tourists walk by every day to gawk at what’s left of the men who were once the most powerful rulers in the world.

More than once, President Spencer W. Kimball related an experience that had had a profound effect upon him.  I cite here from his telling of it in the April 1968 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

“One day, a friend took me to his ranch. He unlocked the door of a large new automobile, slid under the wheel, and said proudly, ‘How do you like my new car?’ We rode in luxurious comfort into the rural areas to a beautiful new landscaped home, and he said with no little pride, ‘This is my home.’

“He drove to a grassy knoll. The sun was retiring behind the distant hills. He surveyed his vast domain. . . .

“We turned about to scan the distance. He identified barns, silos, the ranch house to the west. With a wide sweeping gesture, he boasted, ‘From the clump of trees, to the lake, to the bluff, and to the ranch buildings and all between—all this is mine. And the dark specks in the meadow—those cattle also are mine.’

“And then I asked from whom he obtained it. The chain of title of his abstract went back to land grants from governments. His attorney had assured him he had an unencumbered title.

“‘From whom did the government get it?’ I asked. ‘What was paid for it?’

“There came into my mind the bold statement of Paul: ‘For the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.’ (1 Cor. 10:26.) . . .

“And then I asked, ‘Did title come from God, Creator of the earth and the owner thereof? Did he get paid? Was it sold or leased or given to you? If gift, from whom? If sale, with what exchange or currency? If lease, do you make proper accounting?’

“And then I asked, ‘What was the price? With what treasures did you buy this farm?’

“‘Money!’

“‘Where did you get the money?’

“‘My toil, my sweat, my labor, and my strength.’

“And then I asked, ‘Where did you get your strength to toil, your power to labor, your glands to sweat?’

“He spoke of food.

“‘Where did the food originate?’

“‘From sun and atmosphere and soil and water.’

“‘And who brought those elements here?’ …

“But my friend continued to mumble, ‘Mine—mine,’ as if to convince himself against the surer knowledge that he was at best a recreant renter.

“That was long years ago. I saw him lying in his death among luxurious furnishings in a palatial home. His had been a vast estate. And I folded his arms upon his breast, and drew down the little curtains over his eyes. I spoke at his funeral, and I followed the cortege from the good piece of earth he had claimed to his grave, a tiny, oblong area the length of a tall man, the width of a heavy one.

“Yesterday I saw that same estate, yellow in grain, green in lucerne, white in cotton, seemingly unmindful of him who had claimed it. Oh, puny man, see the busy ant moving the sands of the sea.”

Legitimate ambition is a good thing, of course.  So is hard-earned achievement.  So are efforts to create and to develop.  They are, in fact, godlike.  But they must be kept in perspective.  There is a world beyond this one, and very little of what we do here will survive into it.  Most important is building for eternity, achievement that will endure.  Otherwise, in the end, even the best, most beautiful, and most lasting of the structures that we erect here on earth will share the fate of a sandcastle that’s been built on a beach at low tide.

As I close, I think of the words of Prospero, spoken at the conclusion of the play that sits within Shakespeare’s own last play, “The Tempest”:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Happily, like many other faithful believers, Latter-day Saints understand that, after this “sleep,” we will awaken in another world.  As the English poet John Donne understood, death too shall die.  We have been away at school but when it’s over, we will go home.

A passage at the end of “The Last Battle,” the final book in C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia,” has always moved me.  The great lion, Aslan, Son of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea, addresses the Pevensie children, who have suddenly, unexpectedly, found themselves in Narnia.  This time, though, they’re in the true Narnia.  And they’re confused:

“”There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us, this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after.”