Memento Mori
My paternal grandparents, New Orleans, c. 1956
I’ve been ruminating on death for as long as I can remember. It’s a combination of things - my ancestral home is a city of death, we skipped along the mausoleums to walk the dog each morning. My familial faith is constantly reminding me: memento mori. My living has been pockmarked with losses, saying goodbye to elder after elder, with a few surprising young ones interspersed. For me, the hard part of contemplating death is not so much saying goodbye to my life. It’s keeping my heart wide open to the wonder and awe and joy of living - in this dying world; holding the heartbreak of living simultaneously with the heartbreak of dying and balancing in that liminal space of utter aliveness between the two.
Part of my own spiritual practice is to hold myself dying in my mind. I see my withering body, pale and shriveled, lying under my favorite blanket, hair spread out on the pillow. In this imagining, I am clean and fresh, almost like Sleeping Beauty. I’ve been with enough people nearing the end to know how ethereal my imagining is. I like to picture my delicately declining body in a sacred and quiet room - surrounded by those I hold most dear, my children, my partner, my best friends, my parents, my dear, wise Aunt Hopie. The spirit presence of all those ancestors I speak to daily. The next ring is my guides and angels and the collective dead fill in the space behind them. A room crowded with love and guidance as my soul sheds its body and is companioned through the veil.
Truthfully, I’m at peace with dying if it goes this way. There are certainly ways that I do not want to die and I am working on meditating on these horrors to surrender control. But for me, the biggest struggle isn’t imagining my dying or even being dead. The challenge for me is: If living in the face of my death illuminates the wonder and awe and sorrow of life, then what if I am not strong enough to bear it? How do I keep my heart wide open to as many fleeting moments of aliveness as I possibly can when this world is filled to the brim with suffering? How will I bear the unbearable heaviness of this sorrow-filled, dying world in order to fully reveal the luminescence of its singular defining moments?
It’s true, what I began with, I imagine my death daily. It’s just a part of being a New Orleans Catholic. My ancestral homeland is decaying - I’m constantly saying goodbye in ways big and small: crumbling of the sidewalk I used to ride my bike on, loss of family heirlooms as they disappear with each flood, death of our cultural traditions as we disperse to thrive. And I practice sitting with death again at every mass I attend. I’ve buried so many of my old people in a Catholic church that Sunday mass feels like a litany of goodbyes. If this city that my people have inhabited for five generations can slowly erode before my eyes, what utter ignorance would allow me to deny that I will inevitably do the same?
But this is the moment I distill: sitting in a hard-backed pew, pressed into the heavy arm of my grandmother as she whispered her prayers and slipped her fingers from one crystal rosary bead to the next. Being awash in the utter safety and contentment of feeling tucked into her shadow, like white on rice, as she would’ve said. Craning my neck up to watch the sunlight illuminating the stained glass words below St. Benedict: memento mori. That little girl knew she would die, she’d been exhorted to remember so. Even harder, she knew her Maw-Maw would die too and in the not-so-distant future. That knowing made the warmth and heaviness of Maw-Maw’s snug arm feel truly alive. And this is a truth I know: knowledge of impending death brings senses alive- flickering candlelight in the Marian chapel, frankincense wafting its smoky blessing, shuffling robes as the processional began and the organ piped. The utter divinity of being alive for this exact moment that would never be forgotten for this little girl tucked into the side of her beloved Maw-Maw. And no matter how profound the grief of what would come next - regardless of the suffering of the weight of the world - that moment was worth it. That’s the power of memento mori. My work is remembering living fully with my heart open is my best chance at enjoying every second of this fleeting aliveness. And though the world may be filled with sorrow, hardship, despair, and suffering, being alive for me … it’s always worth it.
