Memento Mori, Ichigo Ichie, and My Friend Wally

He is positive, but not in a shallow or forced way. He is kind. He is grateful. He is generous in spirit. He has a warmth that makes other people feel seen. There is no self-dramatizing cloud around him, no demand that the world stop and revolve around his suffering. Instead, there is an unusual peace in his presence, as though he has accepted something the rest of us spend most of our lives trying not to think about.

He knows he is dying.

Of course, the truth is that so are we all.

That is the meaning behind the old Latin phrase memento mori — remember that you must die. Over time, the phrase became a spiritual and philosophical meditation: do not forget that your life is temporary. Do not become drunk on vanity, power, distraction, or self-importance. Remember death, so that you may live wisely and fully in the here and now.

To modern ears, memento mori can sound grim, severe, almost joyless. But I think that misses the point. It is not a command to obsess over death. It is an invitation to stop wasting life. It is the quiet insistence that mortality gives meaning to everything. We are all going to die. In fact, we are all already dying, moment by moment, day by day. Time is not standing still while we make our plans, nurse our grudges, postpone our joys, or wait to become the people we mean to be.

And that is exactly why we must live here and now.

There is a Japanese phrase that carries a similar truth in a more delicate form: ichigo ichie. It is often translated as “one time, one meeting.” The idea is that any encounter happens only once, exactly as it is happening now. The people may meet again, but this moment — this particular exchange, this version of ourselves, this hour, this feeling in the room — will never return in the same form. It is unique and unrepeatable.

What memento mori and ichigo ichie share is a reverence for the fleeting nature of life. One says: Remember, you will die. The other says: Remember, this moment will never come again. Together they point toward the same wisdom: presence is not just a wellness slogan or a spiritual luxury. It is the only way to truly inhabit a finite life.

Wally seems to understand this instinctively.

His t-shirt says in plain language what philosophers, monks, poets, and the dying have been trying to teach the living for centuries: I am dying, you should try it. In other words: stop living as though death is something that happens only to other people. Stop treating awareness of mortality as a curse. Let it awaken your gratitude. Let it strip away what does not matter. Let it wake you up.

And then comes the second half: I am here now.

That may be the most radical sentence of all.

So many of us are absent from our own lives. We replay old humiliations, rehearse future disasters, chase trivial goals, cling to resentment, or numb ourselves with distraction. We are physically present but spiritually elsewhere. We delay joy. We postpone tenderness. We pass by opportunities for real human connection. We imagine we will eventually become more grateful, more attentive, more loving, more alive, more present — later, when things settle down.

But later is a dangerous illusion.

Wally, of all people, has reason to retreat into fear about what is coming. And yet he seems to dwell, as much as he can, in what is here. In the people around him. In kindness. In humor. In gratitude. In the small holiness of ordinary moments. He does not deny reality. He embodies it. He knows time is precious, and perhaps because of that, he wastes less of it than most of us do.

There is a painful irony here. The people we assume should be most defeated by life are sometimes the very ones who teach us how to live. We expect suffering to harden a person. Sometimes it does. But sometimes suffering burns away illusion and leaves behind something cleaner and truer. Not cheerfulness, exactly, but clarity. Not denial, but courage.

That is what I see in Wally.

His diagnosis does not make him inspirational in the sentimental way people often use that word. Illness does not automatically ennoble anyone, and suffering should never be romanticized. Dementia is not beautiful. There is nothing noble about the disease itself. It is devastating. But within that devastation, the human spirit can still reveal itself in astonishing ways.

Wally is not just a man with early-stage dementia. He is a person still fully capable of offering others calm, humor, generosity, and grace. He is still himself.

Wally has his own way of describing what he is experiencing. As his cognitive abilities have changed, he says his emotional life has become more vivid and more available to him. He even has a name for it: “Mild Emotional Enhancement,” or MEE. Whether or not medicine ever adopts such a phrase, it captures something real in the way he now meets the world — with greater openness, feeling, and presence. What he means is that as cognitive function begins to diminish, emotional life can feel, at least relatively, more immediate and more pronounced.

You could say that Wally has become a kind of poster child for this perspective. In fact, he has found new meaning and purpose by making it his mission to raise awareness around dementia. To that end, Wally and I have begun drafting a podcast series exploring this very topic: Two Sides of the Same Coin.

Our core message is simple: dementia is not only a diagnosis or a caregiving challenge. It is also a human experience that affects identity, communication, relationships, planning, and meaning. By hearing both the person living with dementia and the person walking beside that reality through caregiving and service, audiences can gain a fuller and more compassionate understanding.

Wally’s shirt may look irreverent, but I have started to think of it as a kind of theology, or at least a kind of wisdom. It cuts through illusion with a joke. It says what many of us need to hear but resist hearing: your life is not hypothetical. You are not immortal. The clock is running. So love better. Notice more. Complain less. Be kinder. Be braver. Be present.

In that sense, Wally’s message is not really about death at all. It is about life stripped down to its essentials.

Maybe that is why his shirt lingers in my mind.

Not because it is shocking, but because it is true.

We are all dying.

So let us meet one another fully, while we are here.

Let us live this one life with open eyes.

Let us not wait for catastrophe to teach us wonder.

Let us remember: memento mori.

Let us embody: ichigo ichie.

And let us say, with sincerity and while we still can: I am here now.