I was first made consciously aware of the art of ‘memento mori’ in 2014 while volunteering at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, NY. This Latin phrase translates to ‘remember you must die.’ In its purest essence it can serve as a reminder to be mindful of one’s mortality and live life to the fullest. Memento mori have their different expressions in various cultures, with many roots in the Middle Ages during the Black Plague. They had a brief resurgence during the Victorian Era when grief & mourning were honored and care for the dead still practiced in the home.
El Día de los Muertos, All Souls’ Day and Samhain are a few of the beautiful holidays that honor the ancestors & those who have passed through various traditions, rites and remembrances. However, ‘memento mori’ are about the everyday acknowledgment of one’s mortality with an intention to motivate, inspire and enliven a person here on Earth in their daily existence.
In modern Western society we tend to avoid the subject and deny the reality of this simple truth. We distract ourselves, look away, hide it behind closed doors, sanitize it, and resist it at every turn. We fight aging, worship youth and spend copious amounts of money to fend off the process yet death is a part of our everyday, always walking with us. We are constantly experiencing it as well as regeneration, decay, birth and rebirth.
Some of us are in a movement to normalize the death conversation by bringing all aspects of it into the open through death work, art, education, the funerary world, hospice, rights advocacy & activism.
Many of us contemplate what could be on the other side, some of us are certain we know what will happen and others, what will not. Some of us have come back from death to tell the rest of us what they experienced. Many are reclaiming their natural connection to this ever present part of being human. It is our birthright. It’s no wonder the word earth and death have so many letters in common since we come here to die.
As Jim Morrison said “No one gets out of here alive.”
It’s only natural.
~ Courtney Wynn Sheets
artist, deathworker, gallerist & curator of Mementomorium
