Everywhere we go, my children and I, strangers speak to us about death.
The grandparent in the frozen aisle, the couple at the diner, the dogwalker we shimmy past on the sidewalk with the double stroller—out of all the wisdom empty-nesters might extend to young parents, the opening line is always the same: “It goes so fast.”
They style this bittersweet advisory as small talk because they’re trying to break it to me gently, and obviously a woman with a hangry toddler and teething baby in aisle four needs “gentle.” But I hear it for what it is: an impassioned plea, a prayer, a signal fire, telling me what they wish they had known.
Make no mistake: These benevolent strangers are speaking to young parents of mortality—theirs, ours, our children’s. They are trying to warn us about death.
Perhaps you consider this a stretch, but let’s liberate the subtext from its euphemism. “It,” of course, is life. “Goes” implies a certain scarcity—a resource running out, an active loss. “Fast” suggests “it”—life—is over too soon. Their most critical caution goes unspoken: Time is moving somewhere fast, and that somewhere is the end.
“It goes so fast” is an old prayer. It might be seen as a memento mori—Latin for “Remember your death”—which ancient civilizations have practiced through the centuries. These parents might as well be priests: crossing my brow with ashes, reciting the Lenten liturgy. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Some months after my first pregnancy, a miscarriage, I found myself kneeling at the Communion rail at my Episcopal church on Ash Wednesday. I found surprising consolation in this ashen proclamation of my mortality, because these words told the truth, even if it was a hard truth. A part of me had already returned to dust. A new beginning, gone so fast, too soon.
I received the ashes next to a young family with a baby waving a tiny purple giraffe. As I write in my book Even After Everything, I could not bear to look when the ashes came to her.
Today, I take my own children—both born after miscarriages—to the Ash Wednesday service. The first time, I braced and squirmed to know the ashes were coming for them. Death is our universal reality, yet I feared I might full-body-tackle any priest who tried to mark my children with their mortality.
Against my discomfort, I take them every year, because I am keenly aware that we live in a death-denying, anti-aging culture that works against mindful living. The Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Ernest Becker famously called death humanity’s primary repression, and this is an inheritance I’d rather not pass to my children.
Such denial is expressed in everything from A.I. creations of avatars of deceased loved ones to the settings option in Zoom to “touch up my appearance,” blurring the natural effects of time.
Concurrently, the need for death doulas has surged in post-pandemic years, as people worldwide increasingly seek end-of-life care. Children (including my own) show remarkably perceptive insights and curiosities about death, and studies show that children desire more information from their caregivers about death and dying. Notably, children who receive this open information are better equipped to cope with grief than those who are shielded from it.
If end-of-life care matters, surely it can be strengthened by beginning-of-life wisdom. On this first day of Lent and year-round, I want to model for my children clear-eyed acceptance of what we cannot control and agency in what we can.
Of course, I have my own tensions with time and its tricks.
The first time I packed away the baby clothes that no longer fit, I felt dizzied—this was supposed to be an organizational chore, not an emotional experience. But, as seasoned parents know all too well, such clothes-sorting is never just laundry—it’s a ritualized farewell to bygone eras, its own memento mori. The smocked overalls and tiger sweatshirts serve as proxies for the tiny eras of our children that we will not hold again in our lifetime.
Yet here I must offer a rebuttal to the call to “savor every moment” that so often rides sidecar to “It goes so fast.” This sentimental mandate is enough to make any parent in the thick of sleep regression, toddler tantrums or bedtime battles scream, myself among them. I resent the scarcity-provoking math of 18 summers or 940 Saturdays because it’s difficult to read this any other way than as an obligation to perpetual enjoyment. Then, when the parenting experience at times shreds one’s mental-emotional health, parents are stranded in the guilt trip of not savoring enough.
As a parent, as a person, I find haven in the ritual of Ash Wednesday because while it declares time is short, it makes no imperative to enjoy every moment. Its invitation is far simpler, far richer: to simply be in the present moment, whatever it holds. The call of the Lenten liturgy is to remember your end, so that you can tend meaningfully to this moment in the confidence that your here and now are the exact coordinates where God meets us.
We can shut our eyes to the creaturely realities of aging and the life cycle that includes death, or we can learn to live with our mortality as a partner, a prompt, for the well-tended life.
This Ash Wednesday, I will remember the dust as my destiny, as I remember the little ones who have already gone ahead of me, and the children who wiggle next to me before the altar. I will squirm and brace when the ashes come for them, as I always will, for death is the greatest imposition and it is only human to resist it. But I will not kid myself, nor my children, that life is one immortal summer. The Incarnation tells a story of life, death, resurrection and God with us through it all. To skip any part of this narrative undermines the whole story. Without memento mori, there can be no mindful living.
The parents and priests, they tell me the truth about time. I bless them for it. And I believe our children deserve nothing less.
