3 ideas
Knowing only the year of death, without the day or the cause, splits life into two zones. In every year before the known one, a person is effectively guaranteed survival, so risk and caution lose their usual meaning. The known year becomes a concentrated field of dread. Partial certainty does not remove fear of death but relocates and compresses it.
Once a person holds a fixed endpoint, deferral stops working. Plans, loves and work get re-ranked by whether they can be completed or honored in the time that remains. How someone spends a known, limited span shows what they actually value more clearly than an open-ended life does.
The title comes from Hemingway's image of a frozen leopard found near the summit of Kilimanjaro, where no one can explain what it was seeking. Read as a lens, it treats a human life as striving toward a height with no external justification. The value of the climb does not depend on surviving it or on anyone understanding why it was made. Applied to a known death date, it shifts the question from 'how long do I have' to 'what am I climbing toward.'