If you carry a heavy load of grief, for dear persons lost, or for dreams long buried. That’s the point of remembering that you will die.Īnd for some of us, just remembering to live is important. The key to living well, and thus dying well, is not to live for these transient things. It means that beauty and vigor and physical strength will all fade. And if the gospel means anything, it means that death is not the end. Live for something more enduring than things, than being in control, than being right. Rather, the way to die well is to spend your days living well. The spiritual guides who wrote treatises on dying well, for sailors and soldiers and expectant mothers and everyone else, were not calling people to a morose, morbid, melancholy existence. This Latin phrase means: “Remember to live.” And this one also caught my attention, because it is the flip side of memento mori, properly understood. Another item on that website (yes, I clicked) was a similar medallion, with a different Latin phrase: memento vivere. Quite the opposite in fact.Īnd that brings me back to jewelry ads on social media. But that’s not the point of memento mori. Memento mori could sound like an invitation to a thoroughgoing pessimism, a worldview of nihilism, a personal attitude of melancholy, or even unremitting depression. One could live a whole life of mourning, reciting lines from Ecclesiastes about how nothing that gives us joy means a thing, in the end. It’s possible to think only about death, only about impermanence, only about decline. Now, it’s true one could be morose about this. I posted a few pictures of the headstones from this walk, and a close relative asked me why in the world I would ever intentionally spend time in such a sad place. One slab marked the final resting place of a Civil War veteran. Many more depressions in the earth betrayed unmarked graves. The simple markers were ordered in the simplest way, by dates of death, which spanned the years 1894 to 1907. But the other day, I took my energetic corgi Blue on a walk, and we stumbled across the rows of minimalist headstones. Years ago, I had heard stories of this hallowed ground, located behind the Lutheran nursing home. Residents were buried on the grounds at county expense. It’s on the grounds of what used to be the “poor farm,” a place for impoverished and even disabled persons a century ago. I was meandering through a little-known cemetery here in Grand Rapids. The other day, I was reminded of how utterly foreign this concept now appears. And they should remember that every single day. Pastors like Perkins reminded their parishioners, and not only those who were sailors or soldiers or great with child, that they were mortal. When the plague could sweep through a region and kill a large percentage of the population (which seems a timely bit of history to remember at this moment, as COVID-19 ravages). You couldn’t deny death when it was an exception for a couple not to have lost a child. Many women, of course, died in childbirth, as did many children.Īnd until modern times, death was much more in people’s faces. Travelling with children might seem to have its own perils but here the word means to travail, that is, to be in labor with a child. Seafaring and warfare are obviously dangerous. The title page listed a few life-threatening occupations and situations: And it may serve for spirituall instruction to 1. It bore the prolix title: A Salve for a Sicke Man: or A Treatise Containing the Nature, Differences, and Kinds of Death: As also the Right Manner of Dying Well. One of the Puritans I have studied, William Perkins, wrote such a book in 1595. Allan Gilbert to be particularly effective.Ī common genre of writing was the Ars bene moriendi, the art of dying well. I have always found the 1892 drawing, “All is Vanity,” by C. In older art, this motif is nearly ubiquitous and one that we today might find morbid simply because we live in a culture that denies and avoids the thought of death. I don’t know a great deal about art history, but it doesn’t take much to know that the image of a skull is a kind of memento mori, a warning against vanity. But why do I have to remember it? That sounds a bit morbid–literally. This verse comes into the liturgy for Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s a fact. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:19 Long before that, the Hebrew Scriptures shatter our illusions of invincibility with this stark and often unwelcome fact: But also because the Christian church has long urged believers to not only be aware of but to actively cultivate a healthy sense of one’s mortality. Not only because I like Latin phrases, which I do.
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