6/17/2023 0 Comments Memento mori art![]() Two recent interviews for the Art of Dying Well podcast (episode 17) focussed on other more imaginative – and, yes, beautiful – reminders of our mortality. Memento moriĪ will is perhaps the starkest, most pedestrian even, of things reminding us of death. Read more about the importance of forward planning and how to prepare for a good death. Of course my mother was not lying but lovingly deferring the truth, knowing as she did that the comforting fictions we must sometimes be told as children will all too soon give way to those harder-edged realities we must face as mature and responsible adults. Moreover, I know equally that, for a similarly fearful child in Syria right now, or for a refugee family on an open boat in the Mediterranean, everything is emphatically not fine. In short I know, contrary to my dear mother’s assertions, that I am going to die. Because, fast approaching my three score and ten, I know with absolute clarity that there is only so much sand in the upper chamber of the hourglass and that it is running away at an alarming rate. ‘Am I going to die?’ I wailed inconsolably to my mother who assured me that I wasn’t and that everything was fine.īut, given that I am and it isn’t, I then wondered troublingly whether she had been lying all along. The memory still clear, I compared (and gratifyingly contrasted) my present feelings with those I had experienced as a fearful child about to be admitted to hospital for the removal of my tonsils. Putting our worldly affairs in orderĪnd then, even before the ink had dried, my mind went back in time to the child I had been over 60 years earlier. More than a feeling of ‘job done’, ‘provision made’, or ‘duty performed’ it was the satisfaction I derived from confronting the inevitable after years of delay and deferral. I experienced a moment of quiet contentment. And then, as I signed the document, something rather wonderful happened. ![]() ![]() Being of sound mind and body (quiet at the back) I did wilfully and voluntarily declare that, in the event of my death… etc etc. The phrase reminds us to be prepared for death, as journalist and award-winning presenter, Trevor Barnes explains: The Latin words memento mori mean to remember your death, or to keep mortality in mind.
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