When Death sends you daily texts

I was sitting on the GO train one morning rush hour, last week, headphones plugged in, staring at nothing as it whizzed by at, um, I’m now told 50 km/hour. Ok, so I guess we were plodding more than were whizzing.

In any case, I was minding my own business, as one seemingly does on the GO train during morning rush hour. I’m not a regular on this route but minding one’s own business does seem to be the norm, unlike, say, on a Friday or Saturday eve when alcohol-fuelled conversations tend to traverse seats and rows.

My preference is to sit in the Quiet Zone, the first row in each of the four corners of the upper deck, where one is expected to be quiet — no conversation, no chatting on the phone. Because even though the morning rush hour crowd seems to be fairly quiet anyway, the signs hanging over those four rows make it official. Don’t talk to me. Leave me alone. Go away.

But, alas, the Quiet Zones were occupied by the time I sprinted across the Aldershot parking lot, threw money at the coffee guy, sprinted through the tunnel, then up the stairs and hopped into a car just before the doors eased shut. So I made my way to the four-person seats (two rows facing each other), as far from any other human as possible, even though I knew that in a few moments the car would fill up and I would be fending off at least one man spreader’s knees. I took a couple of puffs off my asthma inhaler, then a swig of coffee and turned up my music.

A couple of stops later, a man stepped onto the car, sunglasses still covering his eyes and, even though plenty of forward-facing seats still remained empty, he chose to sit in a backwards seat across from me. Like a psychopath. And I thought to myself, why would anyone choose to travel backwards on a train? We must all be doomed.

I have, on occasion, been accused of being a bit of a Negative Nelly (apologies to all the Nellies out there who are not at all negative — and I know at least one). At not seeing the positive. For instance, perhaps this man enjoyed sitting in a backwards-facing seat. Perhaps he was neutral about it. Or yes, perhaps he was a psychopath. My point is, there are a gabillion innocuous reasons why he might want to sit backwards with his sunglasses on, and just as many apps out there designed to help people like me see the up side of life. To be mindful, to embrace joy, to choose yay over nay.

Which is why I was interested to learn about an app that sends daily reminders about our impending death. The WeCroak app sends five messages every day, at random times (just like death, as the website points out), as a way to help us squeeze every happiness out of life.

“Find happiness by contemplating your mortality with the WeCroak app,” reads the company’s website. “Each day, we’ll send you five invitations at randomized times to stop and think about death. It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person one must contemplate death five times daily.”

Ya, I do that anyway and don’t need the reminders. Open a new bottle of pills and am not sure how I’ll react to the medication? Keep the phone close by. Was that the carbon monoxide detector I heard beep downstairs? It was probably the dryer finishing its cycle but I’ll just stay awake for the next few hours so that I don’t accidentally die. That time I was sure I was having a heart attack when my back seized up after I lifted a treadmill, that other time I went jogging, drove in bad weather to the mall, and so on.

Sure, the thoughts aren’t swaddled in lovely quotes by Moliere and Marcus Aurelius that help us see the beauty of our own mortality, like the ones the app sends. But they’re free.

The WeCroak app costs $0.99 and I can fill a whole year’s worth of app content with the stuff that swirls around my head on a particularly active afternoon for nothing.

Back on the train, I watched the backwards-sitting guy twitch.

Maybe he was asleep. Maybe that’s why he wore the sunglasses. Maybe he wasn’t gearing up to kill me. Then two stops later he stood up and exited the train.

See? That one was free, too, and it wasn’t even 9 a.m.