Lauren McMenemy came up with the idea of a year long project Memento Mori to explore our relationship with death.
After a fascinating year, and some beautiful writing, the project is due to end at the Winter Solstice. Margaret Kenna, part of the editorial team, offers some reflections.
Image: INSOMNIA by Sophie Cheng (@drawnnnnnnout). Created for Wendy Sacks Jones’s piece: Sleep, death and purgatory.
Do we ever get to the point of accepting the inevitability of death? Or are we permanently outraged by this one certainty in life?
I was a bit nervous about joining Memento Mori. Not because it involved thinking about death, but because it would involve learning to use something new – Substack. This would be a useful challenge for my ageing brain, I thought.
I took the leap and emailed Lauren. And it has indeed proved to be a challenge. But not just for the technical learning.
Life has ebbed and flowed alongside the project during the year, leading to similar ebb and flow in the project team membership, as people had to deal with various life challenges.
We should take a moment now to pause and send very best wishes to all those who have been involved and thank them for their contribution, particularly Lauren, who started the whole thing off.
It is this mirroring of life’s journey, though, that has been the most interesting and (rewarding) part of the project for me.
For example, during a (brief) lull in our collective energy, we wondered if we should bring the project to a close. After all, a year long project was quite an undertaking, perhaps we had taken on too much?
Then one very wise person (Leah Royden, I think) pointed out that the project was merely reflecting the process we go through as humans, when we try to grasp the reality of death:
We make a resolution to think about it, but then, well, life gets in the way, and our mortality is so very, very, very hard to grasp. Easier to put it off, and so most of us do. Until the day we are given no choice but to face it. And then we can be so unprepared.
This reminded me of the funeral of a much-loved elderly friend when I overheard:
“How could this have happened to her? She was so young! And she had an allotment for twenty years!!”
(I mean, she was eighty-three. And I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that working an allotment is the key to eternal life.)
So, it is worth spending time reflecting on mortality now, no?
There is still time to join in and benefit from our collective learning process. We have nearly reached our goal of 26 pieces of writing (of course!) If you’d like to write one of the final pieces, all you have to do is to write and submit it before 7 December. You can email me direct margaret.kenna@myyahoo.com
And in case you missed them first time round, or would like to re-read the beautiful pieces, you can find them here https://26mementomori.substack.com.
Margaret Kenna