A couple of months ago, our year-long Memento Mori project drew to a close. Memento Mori – remember that you will die. A year of acknowledging death – even celebrating it, as the originator of the project, Lauren McMenemy, had suggested. It ran from the shortest day in 2024 to the shortest day in 2025. The connection between death and dark days felt apt.
It’s quite a revelation to look back now on the writing. People tackled the brief, vague as it intentionally was, in wonderfully varied ways. Many 26 projects are limited by wordcount and a necessarily specific brief, and their preferred form is often poetry. Yes, there are some wonderful poetic responses in Memento Mori, but also essays, speculative fiction, flash fiction. There’s elegy, philosophy, humour – and even playful experimentation with AI.
Death is an age-old subject for writers and it may seem difficult to come up with anything new. But after Lauren kicked off the project with her passionate carpe diem appeal: Follow the white rabbit… Live for the moment. Live in the moment. Live the moment, 26-ers responded enthusiastically.
Regina Beach revealed what goes on in a death café (more interesting conversation than you’d think). Vivien Jones and Margaret Kenna reflected wittily on ageing and mortality, and there was more humour wrung from death as Lindsey Dawson grappled with the business of disposing of her husband’s ashes.
Stephen Potts produced a very fresh short story in which a dog accompanies his lonely master on a cliff-edge walk (with a pun on Memento Mori – the dog’s called Murray – I’ll say no more). Lilith + Eve similarly had someone pulling back from death, or ‘transition’, but this time in a cold alternative reality. Julia Webb-Harvey and Stephen Barnaby both wrote superb poems revealing very real beliefs and death customs in fishing villages and in Vietnam, and I explored the links between sleep and death (with help from Shakespeare).
There was writing that felt very personal. Sue Heggie remembered seeing the body of her very young husband in the mortuary – O the pity of it. Richard Axtell reflected on the way music can connect us so memorably with those we have lost. Sarah Elliott described a disturbing memory interrupting the happiest of moments and Regina wrote from personal experience of the euphemisms found in obituaries.
Especially strong, in my opinion, were one contributor’s writing on the inadequacy of funerals and Skye Sclera’s requiem for the brother who took his own life. You lived. You were real. You mattered, and you are missed. The world will never see your like again, and nothing will ever be the same again.
Two writers made use of AI to their triumphant advantage. Nick Carson produced quarterly Seasonal Transitions (for the two solstices and two equinoxes), rich speculative fiction on death, memories and grief, with AI being allowed to engineer the structures and themes but the real experiences supplied by the human writer. (Hard to explain I agree, but take a look.) Mark Fiddes’ brilliantly titled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Artificial Intelligence offered a stultifying and telling exchange with AI when he asked it to produce images to match his poem, using Baudelaire as a prompt.
Towards the end of the project, John Simmons seemed to pick up some of Lauren’s initial premise with his poem Sayings in old age and offered some sound advice. I say only this: do not become close friends / with Death. While you may, close the door / and send him on his way.
If you didn’t spot the pieces as they were published, take a look now. They’re all there in the archive on Substack and they’re a great collection. I leave you to decide on your own favourites.
– Wendy Sacks Jones