Jane Shilling: Death and the smartphone

There are apps for everything, from taxis and takeaways to life partners - why not an app for death? Photo / 123RF

Opinion

"The long habit of living," Sir Thomas Browne observed in 1658, "indisposeth us for dying." Some 360 years later, little has changed - except that a latter-day Sir Thomas would find us even less reconciled to the inevitability of dying than our 17th-century forefathers.

Why this should be is something of a mystery. Our newspapers and television screens offer a daily chronicle of death.

Confronted with the stark evidence of the fragility of life, we recoil, we empathise, we might offer up a brief prayer for the souls of the departed - but we continue our stubborn indisposition when it comes to entertaining thoughts of our own mortality.

Everything in Western culture encourages us to maintain our long habit of living.

Inside the newspapers whose front pages are so much possessed by death we find a multitude of charms against the common fate of man (and woman).

Exercise, superfoods, eschewing intoxicants and keeping your brain snappy with sudoku and crosswords - not to mention the advances of medical science - are promised to keep us in a perpetual limbo of youthfulness.

Then again, if you are really lucky, you might turn out to be a "super-ager" - a group identified in a paper presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

"Super-agers" apparently drink and smoke with impunity, yet manage to keep active into advanced old age, thanks to a combination of a resilient personality and a high proportion of a brain cell called a von Economo neuron.

Perhaps the time has come for something more direct. There are apps for everything, from taxis and takeaways to life partners - why not an app for death?

WeCroak was launched last year by Brooklyn-based publicist Hansa Berwall. For just 99 cents, it will send you five daily invitations to contemplate Last Things "at random times and at any moment, just like death".

Each reminder contains a "quote about death" from authorities including Emily Dickinson, Lao Tzu and Margaret Atwood.

"We find that a regular practice of contemplating mortality helps spur needed change, accept what we must, let go of things that don't matter and honour things that do," the website promises, reinforcing its spiritual message with a range of competitively priced merchandise, including a WeCroak T-shirt, tote bag and mug.

Getting an alert on your phone while washing up, or planting brassicas, might seem an eccentric route to an easy intimacy with the grim reaper, but as Montaigne, the great demystifier of death, pointed out, the best way to draw death's sting is to keep it in mind, remembering it whenever a tile falls or a pin pricks.

"We must always have our boots on, ready to go," he urged. Or, as it might be, our WeCroak T-shirt.