Memento Mori

I remember remarking to my wife a couple years ago as we were driving home from watching the Pixar movie “Coco” that “modernity’s relationship with death sucks”.

It was interesting to me how embedded within that story was the intergenerational memory they had, and dispute all you like whether you think Dia de los Muertos is some Santa Muerte profanation of a genuine devotion, --an actual wackadoodle accusation I’ve heard, --but what struck me was how natural a thing it was to consider your deceased relatives as being close by. People get old, they die, we stick them in the ground, and then we celebrate them. Not just in a one-off mad dash to the booze hall, Finnigan’s Wake style, and certainly not with any morbid fascination. But just as a cultural thing to do, almost because of course that’s what you do, --all the time. You remember them, speak to them, ask them for their intercession, and keep them near you by doing weird things like leave food out for them at the holidays, enshrine them in photographs, and --perhaps most importantly --tell their stories until they become the mirthful stuff of of the family legendarium.

But when was the last time you saw anyone from our culture do anything like that? Think about it; we do everything we can push any reminder of it as far from us as possible. If grandma gets old, she doesn’t move in with her family. No, instead she gets dumped in a nursing home to be someone else’s daily burden and maybe we pop in every now and again with saccharine smiles and a flower bouquet with a cheap balloon attached. And then we leave again and tell ourselves it was nice to see her because it had been awhile. And when the time comes, and it always does, we find a cozy little spot in the cemetery located in some far-flung lot in the middle of suburban nowheresville, --usually just off some lonely stretch of slowly decaying state highway. And as for us, we spend countless hours doing anything but remembering how quickly we approach the same threshold. We occupy our time pretending we’ll live forever, or hoping that by the time we become sagacious ancients, the wonder elixirs of science will have arrived at some breakthrough cure capable of undoing all the bad habits and abuse we’ve inflicted upon ourselves up until that point. The anthem of the profligate used to be “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” but I tend to think we’ve altered and even cheapened that flippant bit of wit to “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow… we do it all over again.”

Ever try and bring up the subject of death with anyone recently? Maybe if you’re a doctor. But if you’re not, most likely people look at you strange, like you’re somehow a morbid sociopath with a macabre fetish of something. They resist the subject at seemingly all cost and treat you like you’re insane.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that back in the day, death wasn’t some cartoonish grim reaper character or, --on the other extreme, --a taboo shibboleth never to be mentioned. It wasn’t mysterious. It was around. Everyone knew about it. It happened and quite often at that. People remembered attending funerals for baby brothers and sisters, for aunts and fathers and friends. And then you walked by the parish cemetery on your way to the grocery store every day, crossing yourself with a quick prayer while you did it. It was impossible to forget about it being a thing.

And if that wasn’t enough, Christian tradition is saturated, even today, --although with diminishing frequency, --with even more reminders. “Remember man thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return” –we used to hear those words every year on Ash Wednesday. We used to make statues of martyrs dying horrible deaths, and make paintings of the four last things – death, judgement, heaven, and hell. For crying out loud, we used to build church sanctuaries entirely out of bones. Halloween used to be part of a whole triduum which culminated in the celebration of All Souls Day and pray for the dead. We surrounded ourselves with reminders of our mortality, --and adorned our churches and our homes with crucifixes, where our Lord is forever emblazoned on the instrument of his tortuous death. The more grotesque the better if some of the medieval depictions are anything to go by. And every time we pray the rosary, we’re called, --if we’ve been paying attention, --to reflect upon that moment for ourselves, “now and at the hour of our death.” Those are sobering words.

This isn’t to say that I cheer on death or get excited about it. Hardly. That would be foolish. But it is to say that something religion, in my case the Catholic faith, gives us is a consciousness of that grim reality which urges us to confront it now, --not tomorrow, not next year, today, --rather than wait until we are too far gone to even want to do anything meaningful about it. But it also reminds us that there are worse things than the death of the body. If anything, death, --when properly prepared for, --is something wonderful, a joyous occasion and the fulfillment of everything we as Catholics believe and hope for, a triumphant entrance into the eternal Jerusalem and greeted at the gates with that most worthy of declarations “well done my good and faithful servant”.

We've had in recent years perhaps the most glaring example of the relationship that modernity has with death. You so much as walked outside in 2020 without a mask on your face and people looked at you like you’re a psychotic serial killer who revels in LARPing as the angel of death in your community. To hear the folks on the news talk about it, every death was a tragedy that must be avoided at all cost, --including your livelihood, your sanity, and that of your family. Certainly opinions differ, --and I'm not suggesting that those should be litigated here, that's not my point. My point is simply that it became obvious, --especially with the revelatory benefit of hindsight, --that that time was a perfect illustration of how we’ve become so disconnected from reality, so successful at erasing all reminders of death form our daily lives, that we actually believe that we can, --with enough screaming and ballyhooing, --cancel death. Or at least we can pause everything until we find out how we can, --an utterly Sisyphean task if you ask me, our own personal bit of self-inflicted temporal hell. We fear it more than anything else and will do anything, give up anything, --even our most basic freedoms, --just to exist for one more day where at least we didn’t “shuffle off this mortal coil”. This from the same people who ingest Plan B by the handful like skittles and cheer uproariously like clapping circus seals as the Empire State Building is lit up in garish pink to herald in the momentous passing of the country’s most egregiously permissive abortion laws.

While in some ways we’ve become entirely desensitized to it, I notice that people seldom apply that perspective to themselves. In fact, I think the opposite is true. I think we, --as a culture, --have developed a profound mortal fear, and are willing to give its expression prodigious license under the guise of unassailable virtue, all for the sake of our own personal preservation, no matter how ultimately futile all efforts are certain to be. “I don’t care what I have to give up, so long as I don’t feel like I’m going to die today” or “take whatever you want, just spare me from my own thoughts.”

Above all, however, I wonder if the genesis of this fear is guilt, --or by another description, the subconscious knowledge that we have not properly prepared ourselves for that singular inevitability. Because if we truly believed that eternity was merely a fairy tale for religiously inclined simpletons, what do we care if someone dies? The only real answer could be for selfish reasons, --“this is sad because I will miss them.” That’s a pretty grim way to observe your fellow man, --your only worth is insofar as you’re useful to me and make me feel good. I don’t suspect that anyone would consciously claim that viewpoint, but at the very least I do mean to expose the irrational dissonance most people live with and how the reasons for their values are ostensibly arbitrary.

If anything, what recent events have shown us is just how significant and far reaching the consequences of this forgetfulness of death truly are. It should be something that changes the way we live. It should embolden our natural fear and transform it into courage. It should be something that reminds us of our purpose and who we are as persons, --from whom we come and to whom to we truly belong. Perhaps this is what the gospels mean when they say “he who seeks to save his life with lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake, will have it to abundance” (Mt 16:25).

Naturally, there’s some eschatological implications in that passage, but what if it also has very real consequences on our lives even now? There’s something liberating in casting whatever frets and worries we have against the immense backdrop of eternity, --“as long as have that part right, it could be a lot worse”. There’s something comforting about knowing all temporal suffering has its limitations, and better yet, that a life well lived might be remunerated with the most blessed of all rewards.

I was in a nasty car wreck in May of 2020. I probably should have died. And I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience, but in the very moment before impact, it’s the strangest feeling. You know you’re not in control. Far from it. But in that powerlessness, there’s also this feeling of perfect resignation and peace. It doesn’t last very long and the impact shakes you out of that frame of mind pretty rudely. But that feeling is undeniable, and you remember it. You remember what you saw just before you closed your eyes, maybe for the last time. But most of all, I remember thinking to myself afterwards, “thank God I didn’t die, because I’m pretty sure I wasn’t ready for that mess”.

So maybe there’s good reason to make your peace with it and then live your life accordingly. And who knows, you might just find you’re better off for it, --both now and forever. Memento mori.