Memento Mori as Practice

Definition

Rather than treating death-awareness as a psychological threat to be defended against, some traditions build it into daily or ceremonial life on purpose — displaying skeletons at feasts, meditating on corpses, dressing as death, keeping a skull on the desk — and report that the constant, deliberate presence of death sharpens rather than dampens the experience of being alive. This is a designed practice of confrontation, not the unconscious avoidance of mortality that dominates most modern life.

In the Book

Burkeman travels to Mexico for the Day of the Dead, where he finds "celebrations of death" integrated into a modern city — sugar skulls and bone-shaped bread sold in the Zócalo, office desks in banks turned into altars, people dressed as "La Catrina," and a childhood tradition Francisco (his guide) describes of visiting neighbors to joke about exactly how they'll die (bringing cigarettes to a smoker, for instance). He traces the holiday's roots to Aztec and Mayan festivals of the dead that Spanish colonists tried, incompletely, to replace with the more sombre Catholic All Souls' Day. He widens the lens with Montaigne's praise for ancient Egyptians who had a dried skeleton carried into feasts as a memento to guests ("a writer's working space... ought to have a good view of the cemetery; it tended to sharpen one's thinking"), and with the Buddhist Satipatthana Sutta, in which the Buddha sends monks to charnel grounds to meditate on decomposing corpses so they grasp "this body of mine also has this nature." Burkeman sets all of this against Ernest Becker's terror-management theory — the idea that most of civilization is built from unconscious denial of death via "immortality projects" — arguing that these traditions represent the opposite strategy: instead of defending against mortality salience, they habituate it until it stops triggering terror.

Why It Matters

This distinguishes two responses to the same fact: managing mortality through unconscious avoidance (which requires constant, exhausting defense) versus managing it through deliberate, repeated, often communal confrontation (which appears to require less defense over time). The pattern generalizes beyond death: for any threat too large to solve, ritualized, shared exposure may do more to defuse dread than either suppression or reassurance.