Mortality has a way of sharpening the lens through which we see the world. The moments we take for granted, like watching sunlight filter through the trees or the quiet rhythm of a loved one’s breath, become profound when we realize they are fleeting. Awareness of death isn’t morbid; it is clarifying. It strips away the noise and asks us to consider what truly matters.
In The Last Unicorn, the unicorn’s transformation into a mortal body reveals this tension between impermanence and beauty. At one point, she says, “This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?” Her words echo a universal fear: the fragility of the physical form and the difficulty in reconciling its impermanence with the idea of meaning. Yet it is this awareness of mortality that gives life its depth.
For those of us living with disability, chronic illness, or bodies marked by pain, this awareness is not theoretical. Mortality and the reality of decline are present in ways that many are able to ignore. But this proximity to impermanence offers its own kind of wisdom. It teaches us to prioritize care, connection, and compassion over ideals of perfection or productivity. It invites us to find beauty not in spite of change and decay, but because of it.
When we stop resisting the fact that our bodies will change, falter, and eventually die, we reclaim something powerful. We reclaim the right to exist as we are, without shame or apology. This reclamation is an act of self-compassion, a refusal to see our worth through the lens of societal standards that worship youth, health, and invincibility. Instead, we find meaning in the ways we nurture ourselves and others, in the ways we live fully with what we have, even when it is imperfect or impermanent.
Death awareness doesn’t diminish life. It deepens it. By confronting what we fear most, the inevitable end, we free ourselves to be present in this moment, in this body, in this messy and fleeting reality.