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In the summer of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought it was an appropriate time to take on a personal 40-day challenge to live each day with death on my mind.
This challenge was inspired by the late spiritual teacher Stephen Levine’s book A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last, a classic manual for conscious living and dying. In the spirit of Levine, I resolved to keep a “death journal,” in which I’d offer my daily reflections and meditations on specific themes related to death.
During the 40-day period, I partook in the Buddhist Maranasati practice (meditation on one’s own death), reflected on my first encounter with death as a child, looked to the…