I caught the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” last week and found myself unexpectedly moved — fascinated, and then drawn in to the strange tale of a life lived in reverse, and a love that refuses to let go.

It’s really unlike anything else I’ve seen — “Forrest Gump” comes briefly to mind, written by the same scribe, Eric Roth — but “Button” is richer, more mysterious, less sentimental, infinitely wiser and sadder. “Gump,” for all its thematic similarities to “Candide” and some ideas about the randomness of life and destiny, ended up being all about gimmicks. You couldn’t quite get past the technological achievements that made it possible. “Button” is visually and thematically subtler. It’s getting at something else entirely, something about life and how we live it.

It’s hard to pin down the movie’s enigmatic allure. But then I came across this quote by Richard John Neuhaus over at Amy Welborn’s blog. Fr. Neuhaus is very sick, and believed to be near death. Family and friends are gathering to be near him, and to pray for him. But this is what he had to say on the subject of our mortality some time ago:

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.

“Benjamin Button” seems to understand all that, and places it at the center of the film. It’s hard to shake.

Meantime, please remember Fr. Neuhaus and those who love him in your prayers.