Memento Mori -Joanna Ebenstein

Memento Mori
Many of us in the contemporary Western world view death as purely negative—something to be pushed out of our minds, shunned, and avoided. Thinking about death, particularly one’s own, is seen as morbid, if not downright pathological. But, not long ago, contemplating death was widely used as a powerful tool that helped us fear mortality less, put the difficulties of our lives in perspective, and live according to our higher values. (It still is, in some places.) By coming to terms with our own death, we were understood to become wise.

This richly illustrated talk—based on Morbid Anatomy founder’s new book Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, will look at a number of the ways that people in different times and places have befriended, imagined, pictured or related to death. We will look at psychopomps—literally, “soul guides”—understood to help people move through the dying process. We will learn about the “books of the dead,” guides to preparing for a good death and afterlife experience. And we will investigate the memento mori (Latin for “remember you must die”), which are objects, works, or practices meant to remind one of their death in order to help them ascertain their true values, and live them out in the world, so as to die with the fewest deathbed regrets. 

Joanna Ebenstein is the founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy. An internationally recognized death expert, she is the author of several books, including Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy, Death: A Graveside Companion, and The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death and the Ecstatic. She is also an award-winning curator, photographer, and graphic designer, and the teacher of the many times sold-out class Make Your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Art, History and the Imagination. The descendant of Holocaust survivors, she traces her lineage back to Judah Loew ben Bezalel, credited with creating the Golem in sixteenth-century Prague.