Does Death Give Life Meaning?

Then the diary-style essay begins.

I wake to the old question again, the one that sits at the edge of every thought about aging. If life has a limit, does that limit sharpen its meaning or dull it? I look out the window and see the trees along the street, their leaves changing with the season, and I think about time as something that moves like a tide. It comes in close, creating a bath of present moments, then recedes, leaving a quiet shore of memory and possibility. The date on the calendar is not a number but a reminder: there is a boundary somewhere, and I am on the near side of it.

Mortality feels personal, yes, but it also feels common. My neighbors talk about mornings that hurt a little more than they used to, about the small kinds of trouble that used to be nothing and now require a plan. Mortality is not a grand weeping thing in the abstract; it is a series of ordinary tasks that stretch or shrink with the weather of our bodies. The chair that used to be merely a place to rest becomes a sentinel, reminding me that energy can be finite, that the day has an expense called fatigue. Meaning then shows up not in fireworks but in the way a day is kept intact by how I choose to spend it.

Limits taste of two kinds to me: the limits of time and the limits of mind. Time is obvious. It thins the options in the grocery store, narrows the list of future trips, and makes some conversations feel heavier because they have to be had sooner rather than later. Mind limits