Your Supplements Will Not Save You

memento mori from a broken-open deathworker

Last night I watched a man die.

You might think this was because I am a deathworker, but he was simply a man eating on the outdoor patio of an Italian restaurant on a beautiful evening.

I won’t go into the details (they are not important and honestly, too traumatic for me to share right now), but I keep thinking about what his wife said to me. I was being of best help that I could, as everyone around her was too close to the situation to be supportive. As a deathworker of 25 years, I have found myself in this kind of situation often - a calling that doesn’t end once client hours are over. I stood with her and helped her regulate her breathing and come back to her body while her family got the logistical details figured out.

The one thing she kept saying over and over again was:

”I don’t understand. He was so healthy.”

And this is what kept coming back for me. The idea that if only we achieve the pinnacle of health perfection, we can outrun death itself.

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I am asked to talk about death phobia quite often. On podcasts and in guest lectures and my own classes, I share about the dangers of being phobic of the inevitable. I explain to folks that we have created a culture where we will do anything and everything to run away from the only thing that is guaranteed to us on this earth:

That we will die.

It might be in 40 years, or it might be tomorrow. It might be swiftly, or it might be slow. It might be violent, or it might be as gentle as a light breeze.


But the one thing that we all share is that we will die. That we are dying right now, in this very moment. That we will lose people and places and things around us until one day, we will lose ourselves.


One can see why this is walloping . Why it can be too much to be with. Why we spend so much time, money, energy, and attention doing everything we can to convince ourselves that we will look young and live forever.


The wife of the man who died was curious about what I do. And when I told her that I am a deathworker and death educator, she said to me, “please tell people that dying can happen to anyone. My husband was one of the healthiest people I know. Tell them that it couldn’t save him.”

So that is what I’m sharing about today. That taking your supplements isn’t going to save you. That running that extra mile, or refusing that donut, or injecting your face with botox isn’t going to deter death from knocking on your door.

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Literally minutes before I watched this man die, I was in Mass. I am not Catholic, but I love God and the houses of his worship. I am currently traveling and always looking for people of the faith (any faith) to gather with.

It just so happened that the sermon for the night was about health. How our discipline to our bodies reflects our discipline to the Lord. How we show gratitude for the gift of life by taking great care of it. How God rewards our hard work in health with longevity and the promise of Heaven.

Now, it isn’t my place (or the point of this essay) to give a critique of the sermon, but I will say it rubbed me the wrong way. The way we care for (or don’t care for) our bodies often has nothing to do with our relationship with God or our gratitude for being alive. We already live with so much shame, we don’t need to add on a layer of the Big Man™ looking down making the “tsk tsk tsk” sound because we ate ice cream.


For today, however, I will just share what specifically touched me about this happening right before the incredibly healthy man passed away:

God didn’t “reward” him with a long life. He wasn’t able to dodge death through discipline. He wasn’t “favored” in longevity.

He died just like everyone else dies. And his wife wanted me to share with you all that all of his energy given to being healthy didn’t make death not happen. In fact, he died at a younger age than most. A complete surprise. A deviation from the plan.

”He didn’t even eat a bite of the tiramisu”, she lamented. “He could have ended things on a sweeter note".”

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This, of course, isn’t to say that health isn’t important. Or that medication, supplements, treatment, bodywork, etc. can’t nurture the quality of our lives and potentially increase the likelihood that we will live longer.

It is to say that none of those things guarantee the number of years, months, weeks, or days we have left.

Not a single thing you obsess over with your health will promise you a long life.

I’ve had so many people in my life - both professionally and personally - who have died incredibly healthy.

A beloved grad school friend had a brain aneurysm while hiking at 30. A picture-perfect wife of a client had a blood clot from a plane ride that killed her. A client of mine who was an health influencer died from a heart attack at 28.

We have no idea how much time we have been given. And there is nothing we can do to have our expiration date set in stone.

What I’ve seen is the more obsessed, fixated, and terrorized people are about their decay and dying, the less present they are for their life.

There are so many people who make decisions about their health, appearance, or lifestyle fueled by a deep seated fear of not staying young forever or not living to 100. Our death phobic culture has led to disordered eating and body dysmorphia. Addictions to plastic surgery and alcohol and drugs and anything else that can numb the pain of us getting older and dying. The phobia of aging and dying has created a social media culture saying that 30 year-old women are “too old” to show their bodies and of preteens using retinol to prevent wrinkles.

All of these are distractions from the deeper thing. The thread of truth that always runs beneath us if we are quiet enough to listen:

This life is precious. Day by day, we move toward death. We don’t know how long we will be given on this Earth. So much of it is out of our control. And one day, we will die.

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Memento Mori is a Latin phrase meaning “remember, you must die”.

It is also an artistic practice that began millennia ago, but was popularized in Europe in the Medieval times. Often depicting explicit death imagery, such as a skill or a coffin, these pieces were a visual reminder of one’s upcoming death.

The most striking thing about these memento mori was that they were to be seen every single day. Fashioned as jewelry, or as art that would hang in the home, one was supposed to look at and be moved by this remembrance of death often. Clocks during these times often has the phrase tempus fugit “time flees” and songs were sung about plagues and death.

For thousands of years, we have lived in communities where our own mortality was something we were intimate with. Where death was spoken about, acknowledged, and honored. Fast forward to now - a time where so many of us do everything we can to not see the gray hairs, the wrinkles, the lessening capacities. Where death is a four letter word that we best not mention, lest we “attract” it.

We have cut ourselves off from the very truth of our human experience. And through that, we have cut ourselves off from love.

Why love?

How are people supposed to fully face the horrors of the world if they can’t even face their own death? How can someone fight for a better world if they don’t see the precariousness of it? How are we to envision and create radical futures if we are distracted with the losing battle of immortality?

To turn and face death is to turn and face life.

To honor the inevitable is to honor the gift of each given day.

To open to the unknown is to open to another world.


Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart - Psalm 90:12

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A blessing: May you count each wrinkle as a privilege of living on this earth. May you greet each day knowing how many others did not get the chance to do so. May you honor your own inevitable demise and celebrate that you have made it this far. May death be a catalyst for birthing new worlds. Amen.

Sending love and blessings,

Binyamina Aisha