A well-lived life can beat the death clock
On a sweltering summer afternoon a few days ago, I found myself about to doze off while idly scrolling on Instagram, when a video jolted me awake. A person had a chart consisting of thousands of tiny red and white squares, meticulously arranged as a graphic visualisation of the number of weeks left in his life. The ones which he’d lived were red, and the others were blank waiting for him to fill them.
An assumed life expectancy of 80 years showed that he had 2,190 weeks left, since he was 38. He said that while the idea of a ‘death chart’ sounded terrifying, it was a wake-up call to focus on what truly mattered in life, letting go of the trivial distractions that consumed us.
Later, I came across an online tool, created by an engineer, Shah Garb Ahmed, which creates a personalised death chart like the aforementioned. (Go to the website failflow.com/die). There are also variations of the ‘Death Clock’ which predict the years you can expect to live, displayed as a percentage, based on your demographic data.
The concept of reflecting on one’s mortality isn’t new. It dates back to several centuries. Memento Lori, a Latin phrase that means ‘Remember you must die’, has been used as a symbolic trope in hundreds of well-known works of art. Dance of Death, an artistic allegory from the Middle Ages, appears in several frescos all over Europe. It depicts the dead dancing along a grave, summoning the ones still alive, from all walks of life. A pope, an emperor, a child, and a labourer are shown, with no one being able to escape the dance. Philippe de Champaigne’s Vanitas painted in 1671, shows a beautiful tulip in a vase, a skull, and an hourglass, representing life, death, and time.
The topic of death, whether it is our own or that of those we love, is so perturbing that most do not discuss it. Yet, to have a life with meaning, it is important to contemplate on what we do with the time we have left. Randy Pausch said: ‘We don’t beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living fully and living well.’
In The Collected Regrets of Clover, a book I recently read, the protagonist is a death doula who helps people through their last moments and then decides to live out the wishes they never got to fulfill. In the top five regrets of the dying, Bonnie Ware, a nurse who spent considerable time in palliative care, outlines what people on their deathbeds regretted the most during their lifetime. What gets measured, gets managed. The Death Clock helps us do just that. It shows us how precious each second, we have left, is.
It reminds us to live our life with gratitude for all the things we already have, so that when the sun sets, we have a life that is well-lived, well-loved and hopefully with zero regrets.
Preeti Shenoy
Novelist, Illustrator, Speaker
Instagram: @preeti.shenoy