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During Halloween, we surround ourselves with images of death, but how often do we picture our names on the gravestones? Far from playful decorations, memento mori – Latin for “remember you must die” — are objects and images designed to remind the viewer of their own mortality.
Ancient Romans once handed out small skeleton sculptures to party guests, presumably as a way of saying, “death comes fast, so live while you can.” The Halloween skeletons of today — inflatable or 12 feet tall with glowing eyes — are so far removed from this reminder they seem like creatures in their own right rather than parts of us.
This shift extends beyond symbols; death is more abstract than ever before. In the United States, it was once common for people to die in the home, and people kept and cared for the bodies of their loved ones there prior to the funeral. The advent of the funeral home in the Civil War era removed this direct access to the deceased — and the familiarity with death on a personal level that came with. Embalming, designed originally to preserve the body for transportation or funeral planning, has also become about making the dead appear as alive as possible.
Medical advancements, while vastly improving the length and quality of our lives, have also rendered our mortality distant. People die older, and whole industries have formed around the desire to erase any sign of aging in the living body. Even if we are constantly exposed to death in the abstract, in the media and during global catastrophes like the pandemic, it has become much easier to avoid facing the reality of our own deaths.
People like Bryan Johnson, the millionaire who made headlines a few years ago for going to bizarre lengths to avoid death and appear younger, are extreme examples of a more widespread phenomenon. Of course, most of us understand our mortality on an intellectual level, but for those of us not facing imminent death, does the reality of it really dawn on us? Shortly before his death in 1981, writer William Saroyan told the Associated Press: “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”
The thought of our deaths may cross our minds, but we rarely linger on it. It scares us, it depresses us and it’s not exactly a good thing to bring up at parties. Having spent our entire lives alive, we struggle to grapple with the fact that we won’t always be. It’s an understandable tendency, and a profitable one.
The longevity industry, estimated to be worth $8.5 trillion next year by the Global Wellness Institute, promises to extend customers’ lifespans. Some have claimed a future in which these industries could do so indefinitely is well within reach. But these claims far outpace scientific reality. What they’re really selling is a delusion.
And this delusion isn’t harmless. Avoiding confronting death means not planning for it. According to a survey from Pew Research Center, only about a third of Americans have done any estate planning. A similar number have living wills, which detail what healthcare decisions — like whether to use life support or a do-not-resuscitate order — should be made if the person is medically unable to do so themselves. Only a fifth have specified what they want done with their bodies after death. For the rest, friends and family are left to make these big decisions on their own, while also grappling with the intense grief that often follows the death of a loved one.
Avoiding our deaths also allows us to feed into the intense individualism that leaves Americans isolated from one another. When you die, your body no longer belongs to you. It transforms, becoming a part of something else. That can be a poignant reminder that you are, in fact, intertwined with the world around you. The hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that make up your body will become part of some other living thing. Resisting that reality means losing a sense of connection that ties us to the world around us and to each other.
Denial is not the only approach to death. It has only recently become this widespread, and even then, it’s not universal. Every year, people in Mexico, the United States and around the world celebrate Día de los Muertos, a holiday centered on celebrating the lives of loved ones who have died. The often heartbreaking reality of death is approached with joy, remembrance and connection.
Many celebrants dress up as La Calavera Catrina, another iconic skeleton who can represent the beauty of accepting death. She was created in the 1910s by José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican political cartoonist who spoke of death as democratic: something that comes for us all regardless of our social standing.
While it is human to fear death, we don’t have to let that fear rule us. We can confront its painful reality through humor, art and connection, celebrating its role in our lives as a force that connects us and renders us all equal.
The brain that stores vocabulary you’ll surely forget and memories you won’t or the body that drags you to your 8 a.m. classes will all die. We could deny this obvious reality; we could fear it, resist it and distract ourselves as this universal, immutable truth gathers dust in the neglected corners of our minds.
But we have a duty to embrace it. Rather than treat the fact that we are alive as a given, we must recognize our short lives — and all of the love and pain that accompany them — as the miracles they are.
