Memento mori

“Remember you will die.” Memento mori isn’t just a phrase, it’s an entire theory and practice in the Church of reflecting on one’s mortality. By turning one’s attention to the fragility of this life, and the eternality of the next, one learns to shun worldly things and attractions and in place focuses on God and the soul.

There is a Daughter of St. Paul who has kept a skull on her desk for the past year and tweets about her reflections from memento mori.

Catholics have long been good about memento mori. Modern goths can only best appropriate medieval to Victorian Christian art. Churches built on the sites of martyrs, or using the bones as the building materials. Skulls, skeletons, and tombs carved on churches and tombs. Rubbing ashes on our foreheads. Death itself personified in danse macabre paintings. The memento mori theme also appears in liturgies, music, and poems.

It seems that times of death, such as war and plague, show a rise in memento mori focus. When death is out in the open, one has to address it. But it might be even more important to remember it in times when death is hidden, tucked away from daily life in hospitals and funeral homes.

I read on some forum recently, “The main purpose is to help people die properly. That’s the main reason to practice Christianity; to make sure that when you die, you do so the right way.”

Everyone will die. And we believe that is not the end. There is judgement, purgation, hell, heaven, resurrection, the world to come. So we must prepare. And that starts with death, the frivolity and vanity of earthly-minded things, and the importance of what comes next.

Remember you will die. Remember death. Remember its defeat.