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We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance. We hide it behind hospital curtains, euphemize it in conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living.
But my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to fully embracing life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discuss practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at memento mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Article: What Man Understands That He Is Dying Daily? (This Is Your Life)
- AoM Article: Memento Mori — Art to Help You Meditate on Death and Become a Better Man
- AoM Article: A Primer on Advance Directives
- AoM Article: How To Protect Your Legacy — A 3-Step Guide to Estate Planning
- Sunday Firesides: Look Into the Tomb
- Sunday Firesides: As I Am Now
- Victorian Memorial Hairwork
- The Dance of Death
- Vanitas art
- The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by Martín Prechtel
- Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America by Stanley B. Burns
- Death: A Graveside Companion by Joanna Ebenstein
Connect With Joanna Ebenstein
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance while we hide behind hostile curtains, euphemizing a conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living, but my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to a fulfilling life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. In today’s show Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discussed practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at Memento Mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure. After the show is over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/mementomori. All right, Joanna Ebenstein, welcome to the show.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here.
Brett McKay:
So you founded a project called Morbid Anatomy that explores the different facets of death. You also wrote a book called Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, which is about how thinking about death, meditating on it, making it a part of our lives can actually improve our lives in the West, particularly in America. I think we’re not particularly comfortable with talking about or thinking about death. But what’s interesting, and you talk about this in your book, that wasn’t always the case. There was a time in America where we did have a relationship with death, and this was largely before the 20th century. So what happened? Why did people lose this relationship to death?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, that’s a great question and a really important one. And what I like to say, and I always say this to my students at the beginning of class, the idea that we can deny death at all is a luxury unique to our time and place. So until the late 19th to early 20th century, people butchered their own animals. People died in the home. The idea of a good death was to die at home surrounded by friends and loved ones. The parlor was a place to lay out the body of the dead in the home, and life expectancy was much shorter and many children died before reaching adulthood. And on top of that, we have wars and the Civil War, World War I, and the influenza epidemic. So I think this idea that death is something exotic and far away and something that is possible to ignore just wasn’t present in the 19th century.
That’s brand new. I don’t think any other culture has had that situation in our culture. When someone gets sick, they go off to a hospital, which is where they usually die. We put our old and old age homes. So these are all new developments that push the idea of death and aging further and further from our daily experience. And this was very much not the case in the 19th century. I think watching the movie Gone With the Wind, which many of your listeners out there probably have watched is a great, great example of how death was a part of everyday life in Victorian era in a very prosaic way.
Brett McKay:
My family, we just finished watching Gone With the Wind.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Ah, it’s wonderful. Right, and that scene, I think when we talk about mourning practices, I love to show that scene where Scarlet accepts the dance offer of Rhett Butler when she’s in mourning right. And shocks, everyone’s like, oh my God, you can’t possibly do that. So that shows not only death practices, but also the rigor of mourning for women especially.
Brett McKay:
Well, let’s talk about that. That’s interesting. You talk about it in the book, the rituals and culture that we had around death in 19th century America. It seems like we imported that from Victorian England.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yes, I think that’s true. And from what, I’m not a specialist in this, but from what I have read, it seems to me that death practices in the West had not changed substantially between the ancient Greeks and the Victorians until the present. So this idea of anointing the deceased with oils and dressing them and laying them out in the parlor or in the home for viewing, this was also done from my understanding in the ancient Greek world. So I think in the Western world, the Victorian traditions were very, very longstanding traditions that were probably part of all of Europe is my guess. And that’s how they made their way to the United States. It’s really only with modernization, the beginning of hospitals, the rise of hygiene. And then what many historians also point out is the kind of twin mass death events of the influenza epidemic in World War I that kind of wipe out those old traditions of mourning.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So before the 20th century, death was just part of the home life. When someone died, they died in their home, and then the funeral and the body preparation, it happened in the home. It didn’t get sent off to a funeral home.
Joanna Ebenstein:
To a professional. It’s that professionalization. Absolutely.
Brett McKay:
And something I learned while reading your book, sort of this transition from the 19th century to the 20th century in our relationship to death, why living rooms are called living rooms.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Isn’t that amazing?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Tell us about that.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, I read about this in, there’s a man in my community called Stanley Burns who is a collector of postmortem photography. Actually, I found his book when I was about 17, I think was a really life-changing event. So postmortem photographs are part of morning practice where people take pictures of their dead loved ones and keep them either as little keepsake say as a locket, maybe with some of their hair or maybe put it in the family photo album or maybe send out to friends, whatever. And he wrote a book on this tradition of postmortem photography where he talked about this. And so yes, I believe it was Ladies Home Journal. I can’t remember exactly the name. It was something like that. And it was in the early 20th century. Somebody wrote an article and they were basically agitating for people to change the name of the parlor to the living room because the parlor had traditionally been a place that you would lay out the bodies of the dead. But now with these new funeral parlors, the parlor was becoming a room for the living, the living room. And that’s where we get the name.
Brett McKay:
And you mentioned hair lockets another weird, I mean, not weird, but it’s interesting for us or weird for us, people would make wreaths out of the hair of dead loved ones.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yes. Living and dead. So if you look up for those listeners who are curious, if you look up Victorian hair art or Victorian hair work, you will see this. There were many, many practices that, again, as far as I’ve seen women did in the wake of a death as part of mourning. And I think of it as both memorializing the dead, creating a work that keeps the memory of the dead alive, but also is a form of mourning. So one of these is working with human hair. And actually here at Morbid Anatomy, we have a teacher, Karen Bachman, who has reverse engineered how hair art was created, and she teaches it for us. And I took this class, and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, but when you try to work with human hair, it’s really hard and it takes a lot of concentration and it’s very meditative actually.
And by doing this class, I began to think, well, I think all of these women doing this in the wake of a loved one’s death, it wasn’t just about the final product that the final product is beautiful. It’s also about this meditative act that you’re doing with the mortal remains of your loved ones. And interestingly, we think about bone and hair being the two things that live on from our bodies when we die, and these hair works to speak to what you’re saying, these beautiful wreaths that are people create flowers or designs with human hair, sometimes in lockets making different kinds of designs. This hair that was made in the 18th or 19th century still looks beautiful today. So there is this immortalizing aspect to working with hair.
Brett McKay:
So in America, there was a period when death was just part of everyday life. You saw it every day. If you worked with animals, there were sicknesses where people just died, children died. That was a common occurrence. There were wars and people would die there. And in the 20th century, we had this shift where death became something we just hid. It became professionalized. And when you’re sick, you went to a hospital and then you die in the hospital and then your body would get carried off and a professional will take care of it. And it’s all very sanitary, but also impersonal at the same time.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And I am glad you brought up the sanitary because I think that’s really part of the drive too, is of course, one of the things that’s happening in the late 19th into early 20th century is changing ideas about what is hygienic and what is safe. So people start to be a little afraid of bodies where maybe they weren’t so much before. And this idea of getting rid of them as quickly as possible, which I think we continue to have today.
Brett McKay:
Okay, so death, we kind of hide it. We pretend like it’s not there. What have been the psychological consequences of having an aversion to thinking about and acknowledging death?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Well, from my point of view, I think there are a lot of very unhappy unrealized people. I know we’re going to probably talk a little bit later more about these kind of practices of how people kept death close at hand. But in my experience, from the different practices that I have spontaneously developed or learned from history, if you are able to come to terms with the fact that your time on earth is limited, it is much easier to make decisions about what you want to do with the time that you have and to live a life that is true to you so that you don’t die with a bunch of regrets on your deathbed. So my husband is a death doula, and so death doulas are practitioners that work with the dying to help them through the dying process. And what death doulas say is that, well, they group it into four different categories.
If you have regret, if you have unfinished business, if you have grief and shame, I think those are the four major categories. But essentially these things hold you back from a good death, from an easy death. Perhaps you haven’t said the words you want to a loved one. Perhaps you’re in the middle of a feud with someone and you wish you’d resolved it, whatever. And so death doulas help work with people who are on the verge or starting to see their end in sight to resolve these things so that they can let go and die peacefully. So I think there’s this not dying peacefully thing. And also in my experience, I think many people that I have seen die suddenly realizing that they wish they had done certain things in their life that they didn’t. And this is regret. And so for me, I feel like by contemplating death and by having practices where I’m constantly saying, okay, what do I want to do with my time on earth rather than What do I want to do?
If you just phrase it with my time on earth, suddenly you can feel that immediately, right? It’s like there’s an urgency and it kind of cuts through the model where everything is clear, that knowing there’s brevity helps, at least for me to see what it is that I prioritize, what my values are, how I want to live my life on earth. So I think when we neglect to do that, we neglect living a full life which might make us bitter or angry or sad or unrealized at the very least. And I think there’s a lot of fear around it, and that fear is really easily manipulated by others, I think.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. What are the benefits of making friends with death? I mean, that’s kind of the whole premise of your book. It’s like, well, if we get more familiar with death, it’ll help improve our lives.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell a story from my own past, which I think illustrates it. So I have always loved to travel. My family are all travelers. I really enjoy it, but I hate to fly. And anytime there’s turbulence, I freak out. And this is true to this day. And by freak out, I don’t mean jump up and down, I just mean my heart’s beating really fast. I can’t relax. And I used to be so afraid of flying that when I was waiting in line to get onto the plane, I would have these kind of intrusive thoughts where I would imagine the people around me and how they’d be acting if the plane was plummeting down. But I love travel and I wasn’t going to stop because I was afraid of flying. So the way I dealt with it, and this was a spontaneous ritual that I developed, is this is from about the time I was 13 on or something.
I would sit on the plane, I’d fasten my seatbelt, stow my overhead thing, close my eyes and think to myself, okay, if I die on this flight, what do I wish I had done differently with my life? And I’ve been doing that since I was 13. And I was really surprised to find when I was doing research for this book that Steve Jobs had a very similar ritual. So he did a commencement speech for, I think it was Stanford, right after he’d been diagnosed with a certain kind of rare cancer. And he revealed that he did exactly the same thing. He would look in the mirror every day and say, do I want to do what I’m doing today? And if the answer was “no” too many days in a row, he’d make a change. So I think Steve Jobs was saying and did say that by contemplating death, he lived this incredible life that we all remember him for. And I am no Steve Jobs, but I will say that I’ve lived a life that is true to who I am. And so although I do not want to die and I’m not seeking death, I hasten to say that if I did die tomorrow, I’d be okay with it because I did what I wanted to do. And I think that’s the gift that contemplating death gives. It helps one realize with clarity what one really wants to do with one’s time on earth, and also helps you have the courage to achieve it.
Brett McKay:
Something I was struck by is how the work of the psychologist Jung has influenced your philosophy of death. Can you tell us about that?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Sure. I love Carl Jung, and when I first read Carl Jung as a, I guess in my early thirties, a friend of mine, my friend Susanna McDonald, gave me a copy of man and his symbols. And when I read it, I was just thunderstruck and I just thought, wow, this person thinks exactly like I do, but he’s way smarter than me. So what I love about Jung is I feel that Jung creates a bridge to our ancestors. He has real respect for the way people have thought about the world, and he has a wisdom. And part of his wisdom to me is about wholeness, or I would say complimentary duality rather than binary duality. So the way that Jung looks at the world, there are these archetypal polarities. And so you have on the one hand life and on the other hand, death and the mark of a balanced healthy culture would be that we give equal primacy to both sides of that polarity.
And he has this idea of the shadow, which probably everyone’s heard of, and this is the idea that there’s a part of ourselves or part of our culture that is unacknowledged, unrecognized and pushed into the unconscious, where then it can create fear and dis-ease essentially from his point of view. The important thing to do with these polarities is to find balance. And it’s important to go into the shadow and bring it to consciousness. So rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, rather than saying, oh, no, I’m not like that, that person over there is like that trying to say, where is there a part of me that is in what I recoil from? And that just speaks to me. It feels very true and very balanced and young thought that he shared my view that contemplating death is essential to being a mature adult. And that’s something that instinctively, I think I always felt this idea that there’s a real, to me, immaturity, to pretending that we’re not going to die. Everyone who has ever lived has died and every single person will die. And so rather than deny it, it just seems to make better sense to look it in the eye, and then by looking it in the eye, it ceases to be so frightening.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. It sounds like you had to come to terms with death and embrace death in order to become fully human.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Exactly. And that especially as you got older, this is one of the things he said when you were from middle age on that one of our main tasks in life was to prepare for our own death. And part of that was to figure out what we think happens after you die. And he was quick to say that whatever you believe doesn’t mean it’s capital true. And it also doesn’t mean that your opinion won’t change later, but you must have, in his opinion, you must have your own idea of what will happen after you die. And that is part of what will ease you through the death process.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Jung said you had to develop your own myth of death, and it didn’t mean you invented a fairytale about death to comfort yourself, but it was about creating this symbolic framework for yourself. It’s kind of like an inner narrative about what you think about death that will help you approach mortality with meaning rather than fear.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And it has to be what I think is so beautiful about what he said, it can’t be received wisdom. He would say, you can’t be on your deathbed and say, Dr. Yung thought this or that. You have to believe it. It has to be something that comes through your own struggle.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. What you do in your book is you offer readers, practices, exercises that they can do and also suggestions on films, books, art to look at, to help them develop their own myth of death. As you said, it’s not something you can just be told, you have to live it. You actually have to do this stuff. So let’s talk about some of these practices. Let’s talk about the title of your book, Memento Mori. This is a practice that has been done throughout the world and throughout time. For those who aren’t familiar with the practice, what is Memento Mori?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, so a Memento Mori is a practice or an artwork or a ritual that reminds you of your own mortality, your own personal death, so that you can then live the best life possible. That’s how I see it. And there are many, many forms of Memento Mori. The oldest that I know of were in ancient Rome, I’m sorry, in ancient Egypt. That’s the oldest that I’ve heard discussed where I’ve read that at the height of a feast, people would bring out a skeleton or a mummy as a reminder to those feasting that life is short. In ancient Rome, you might be gifted with a larva convivial, which were these little bronze skeletons at a banquet and also some banquet floors. I’m sure many of your listeners will be familiar with. These have skeletons of sorts. And this idea in the Roman tradition is carpe diem, like eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow, you might die.
Then in the Christian tradition, the meaning is a bit changed, right? It’s kind of the opposite. In the Christian era, you have rosary beads that are half living, half dead, or you have paintings of a skull in an hourglass, which probably many, many of your listeners have seen. And these were intended to remind the viewer that you might die, but in this case, not so you could eat, drink, and be merry, but rather so you could be ready to meet your maker. So a reminder to resist sin and resist temptation in order to live a holy life.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, Memento Mori is Latin for remember, you will die. And in Roman culture and ancient Roman culture, sometimes this is used to push to enjoy life while you had it, the whole carpe diem thing. But other times, especially with the stoics, Memento Mori was more of a moral check for virtue because it was a reminder time short. So be good. And people probably heard this story, which it’s not exactly true, but I think it captures the spirit of this Memento Mori idea that when a Roman general was paraded through the streets of Rome, after a victory, he’d have a servant next to him who would whisper in his ear, Memento Mori, remember your mortal? And the idea was that it was to help him keep humble, despite having this big victory. Later on in art, you sometimes see carpe diem and Memento Mori paired together like you’d have a skull next to a blooming flower reminding people that life’s brief. So you got to make it count.
Brett McKay:
And I want to talk more about Memento Mori art, which has been a theme in art at different times. Any examples of momentum, moori art that really stand out to you?
Joanna Ebenstein:
So there’s many art traditions that draw on this. One is the dance of death. So this was something that came to prominence during the Black Plague, and this is when you see this whole series of images where death is leading off people of different genders and social stations. So you have death in the maiden, you have death and the priest death and the child. Those are really amazing and often these really wonderful looks at a culture at large. There’s another tradition called Death in the Maiden, which comes from what I can understand, not just the dance of death, but also the story of Persephone in ancient Greece. And Persephone was the goddess of the dead, but she started life just as the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She was kidnapped by Hades, the king of the dead, and became his queen in the underworld, and she was basically abducted from her life.
And so this idea, again, of death in the maiden, there’s this image of a deathly figure taking a very beautiful young woman. Those are pretty amazing, and some of them are quite erotic and very strange if you’re interested in those. I have a book called Death: A Graveside Companion, and I collected as many of those as I could because they’re quite surprising. And they’re from around the 1600s or 1500s. They’re very, very graphic. But then probably my favorite Memento Mori genre are what are called Half Living and Half Dead. And these are images. If you look up half living and half dead on the Internet, you’ll find these as well, half a beautiful young man or woman with clothes that are fashionable in the time it was made and half either skull skeleton or decaying cadaver. And so the idea here is the inextricable relationship between life and death.
Brett McKay:
My favorite genre of Memento Mori art comes from the Dutch Golden Age, the Vanitas.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Oh, yes. Those are wonderful.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, tell us about that.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, so vanitas are kind of a form of still life, and I think it’s really interesting to note that still life in French is nature mort, which is dead nature. So there’s already a memento mori aspect built into the still life, which is shocking. But these are still life that are very explicitly about mortality. So you have skulls or glasses, you have decaying flowers, and you have all these symbols of things that you won’t be able to take with you into the next life. Globes and jewels and card games and all the pleasures of life. So these are beautiful oil paintings very beautifully rendered that you would hang in your home as a reminder of the brevity of all of the things you love.
Brett McKay:
And then you also mentioned that aristocrats in Europe, they would often just acquire skeletons or human skulls and just display them somewhere in their house.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Absolutely. And again, it was a sign of a memento mori. It was a reminder. And you see these in paintings of saints too. You see a saint holding a skull and contemplating it. So this idea of using human remains as a way to remind us of our death, that’s something that continues for a very long time. And I think it’s worth remembering too, that before we had these cemeteries where people would be buried forever, people would be dug up after a certain number of years so as to make more room for more people in the church. And then those bones would be kept often in artistic arrangements or in piles that would then act as a memento Mori as well.
Brett McKay:
That’s something I’m struck by whenever I read history books, even in America in the 19th century, how frequently people just unburied dead people to either move the body or sometimes just to look at the body.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, yeah. Or there’s that wonderful story of the pre-Raphaelite, was it Rosetti? I think it was Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti, who buried his favorite muse with some of his poems, and later in life decided to dig it back up to take the poems, but they decay. So yeah, I think that again, it’s coming back to this idea that I think we’re really afraid of the dead body now. We’re afraid of the dead, and that was not the case for most of human history.
Brett McKay:
An example of that, of a person in 19th century America who unburied a dead loved one that really sticks with me is Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Joanna Ebenstein:
I didn’t know about that.
Brett McKay:
His wife died and he was just distraught, and he decided one day to go to her tomb and open up the casket to look at her, and no one knows why he did it, but it was after he had that encounter looking at his dead wife, and I’m sure she was decomposing at that point. That’s when he quit his job with the church he was at, and he struck out on his own and started doing his essays and lectures on self-reliance and all that stuff.
Joanna Ebenstein:
That’s such a great story. I’ve never heard that, but that speaks to everything we’re talking about. His direct contemplation with death changed the course of his life, and he left the safe comfortable world behind and became someone we remember today.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I think, I mean, we’re psychoanalyzing a guy that’s been dead for almost 200 years, but I wonder if he looked at his wife and just looking at her dead body, he realized she’s not coming back. I have to move on with my life. That’s over. I have to move on.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And it also reminds me in the Christian tradition and in the Buddhist tradition, there are meditations, death meditations that revolve around contemplating the decomposition of the body as a really strong momentum mori as a reminder that you will die of the impermanence of everything that you base your life on. There’s something really profound about that.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I was speaking of cemeteries. I love going through old cemeteries that were built in the 18th and 19th century because a lot of the gravestones were Memento Mori, my favorite one. You’ll see it every now and then. A gravestone will say, here lies so-and-so, the date of birth, date of death, and then it’ll have a skull or something, and then it’ll say, remember me as you pass by as you are now. So once was I as I am now, so you will be prepare for death and follow me.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And so again, that just shows how long standing the sentiment and the idea that the sentiment is useful to us in some way is
Brett McKay:
Okay. So you recommend people make or collect their own memento mori, put it somewhere in their house and just it’s a reminder of death that you can look at. I think it’s a great practice that people can do. But you mentioned this death meditation as another way of doing Memento Mori. You mentioned the Buddhists have a death meditation, Christianity. There’s a history of death meditations. Walk us through what a death meditation looks like.
Joanna Ebenstein:
There are so many different kinds of death meditations, but one thing I’ll start with by saying is my husband is a longtime meditator, which is how he became a death doula. And what he tells us is that in the eastern tradition, meditation itself is a preparation for death. So the idea is that after the death of the body part of us lives on, and it has to navigate a series of confusing spaces in order to get to the next stage of existence, whatever that might be, many cultures that believe that I should point out on some level or another. But meditation is supposed to help us keep our wits about us in a moment of complete upheaval. So I think that’s a really interesting thing to point out. First, he teaches a death meditation for morbid anatomy, which is really about leaving your body in your mind and then coming back and also talking about what happens to the body as you start to die.
There are these meditations in the Christian and Buddhist tradition in which you meditate on different levels of decomposition of the body, and the Buddhist would even go to the charnel grounds and look at these bodies as a form of meditation and have artworks around it. My personal favorite death meditation comes from the Jungian tradition, and it’s by a woman named June Singer. And I found it so calming to do it, and I still come back to it in times of stress. It’s basically a slow letting go of everything you’re attached to in your daily life. So what really stuck with me is think of your desk and all of the piles of things that you’re working on right now. You can let that go one by one. You let the things you’re attached to go. And by doing that, there’s such a sense of, for me at least, it’s not fear, it’s relief, and it’s this reminder that the things that we find important right now, there’s so many things I imagine, Brett, for you, certainly for me, I have to do this and I have to do that, and I can’t wait.
But when you start to let go, that disappears. It’s not important anymore. You’re moving somewhere else. And if you’ve ever read any near-death experiences, which I really enjoy reading, this is what these people say again and again. So near-death experiences are when people who technically are dead, their brain is dead. They’re flat lining on an EKG. These are often people that are brought back from heart attacks or put into comas for surgery. And while they’re in this state, they have these different experiences and they all, or many of them, report this kind of feeling of letting it all go. And maybe it’s painful to let it go, but then when they have to come back, they really regret it. I think there’s just something really nice to think about that all of the things we think are so important right now that we’re so attached to the feeling of letting it go is a really beautiful feeling.
Brett McKay:
I think one of the scariest things about death is that we don’t know what happens after death. It’s the biggest mystery in humanity. So yeah, we always wonder, do we move to a different realm? Do we get reincarnated or is it we just cease to exist? How have different cultures throughout time thought about what happens to us after death?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, there are so many different particulars, but I’d say the overwhelming feeling of every, it seems to me, every culture until modern scientific culture is that there is some continuation where we go on in some way. And so in ancient Egypt at different time periods, there were a different number of souls, but as many as 12 different souls we had, which all went to different places, one of them goes into a statue, another goes into a mummy, another goes into an underworld. So there’s this tradition of more than one soul. And that’s pretty common. There is the tradition of reincarnation, which is really strong. The idea that we’re reborn or transmigration of souls, they also call it reborn into another human or animal form. There is the idea that we become ancestor spirits, so many, many cultures around the world continue to cultivate a relationship with the dead because it’s believed that they are in a realm where they can continue to assist the living and protect the living.
And I was just talking to a friend of mine who’s an archeologist about, I think he was talking about an African culture where they believe that if you’re separated from the bones of the dead, then you lose this vital protection that is part of how you can successfully live your life. So again, there’s different particulars, but I think the commonality is that we continue on in some way, and I think that’s what makes the last 150 or so years when this idea that I think many elites might’ve had but really trickles into the mainstream, that that’s it, that when we die, it’s zero game over. That’s when that idea really, really comes into our lives. And I think what Jung said, coming back to Carl Jung is that’s why it is our obligation to come up with our own myth of death because maybe for our great great grandparents, those questions were answered by their culture, by their religion. We don’t have that, or I shouldn’t say that. Some of us do, but more of us don’t have that than probably ever before in human history. So whether we’d like it or not, it’s our obligation to come up with our own belief and our own understanding.
Brett McKay:
And I think both beliefs, the idea that the soul continues on or it’s just you cease to exist when you die, whatever idea of death you take, both can be motivating here now as we’re living.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think another thing to that point that I include in the book is information about nurses and death, doulas who have worked with those who are dying and what their biggest regrets are. And I think that’s really interesting to think about. There’s a death doula in our community who says that when she’s working with a dying, the regret she hears the most is, I wish I had said I loved you more. And when you think about that, that’s a really simple thing to remedy if you keep in mind the fact that you’re going to die. So I think there’s so much we can do, again, using this as a God and as an encouragement to live a really good life unique to ourselves.
Brett McKay:
One of the interesting sidebars you had in that chapter about the afterlife and trying to think about what we think happens developing your own myth of death is idea psychopomps. Is that how you say it?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
What are psychopomps?
Joanna Ebenstein:
I love that word. Psychopomp is one of my favorite words. It’s from the ancient Greek, and it means soul guide, literally. And so a psychopomp could be a deity, it could be a shaman or a priest, and basically a soul pomp is someone who helps you make your way from one realm of existence to another. The figure that I end the book with is a figure called Latote, which is a new folk saint in Mexico, and she takes the form of a female grim reaper. And she is also seen as a psychopomp. She’s not the one who creates death. She’s not the agent of death, but rather she is your guide who takes you to the next realm.
Brett McKay:
We did a podcast back in 2022 with this guy named Christopher Kerr who has researched this phenomenon that happens. You talk about this in the book, I think it’s related to psychopomps, is as people get close to death, they start seeing visions or dreams of people who have passed away before them.
Joanna Ebenstein:
This is true. There’s so much anecdotal evidence or anecdotal suggestion that these old traditions are true, and that’s one of them. Yes, this is very common that people, I hear this from hospice nurses I know too. And not only that, but they say that this is partially how they determine how close to death a person is when they start to talk about loved ones coming to them and their dreams or visions, they know that they don’t have too much time longer.
Brett McKay:
And these people, they talk to them, they talk to these people in the room. And so if you’re in the room with a loved one who is dying, you might see them talking to their grandparent or their parent and you’re looking around and I’m not seeing anything but that person sees that person. This happened with my aunt. She passed away recently. She had some degenerative disease, and a week before she passed away, she started talking to herself, but she was talking to someone else. And when her sons asked her mom, who are you talking to? She’s like, well, it’s the lady in black over there. And they’d say, what are you talking about? And she’d say, well, that’s just between us and we don’t know who the lady in black was. It could have been an aunt, it could have been a grandmother. And what’s interesting is Christopher Kerr guy, he’s a doctor, and he’s not trying to explain like, oh yes, there’s life after death. He’s just trying to report on the phenomenon in an objective way. This happens. And one thing you notice when children are passing away, they typically don’t have anybody that have passed away yet, but if they had a pet that passed away, the pet will show up.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Isn’t that interesting.
Brett McKay:
And be their little guide.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And I think this speaks one of the main principles of my book that I start with some main principles, and one of them is, I call it practice versus belief. And this is what I love about these stories. I think there’s a way we can listen to these stories like you’re telling, which are amazing. And tell us something really interesting, and this is what I love about the union end approach as well, is we can say that those stories, whether they’re capital true, whether they reflect in actual reality, we can never know, or at least we can’t know at this realm, but we can know that they’re common and they happen to people, which means they’re real and means they mean something. So whether they’re happening in the psyche or happening with something beyond the psyche, almost doesn’t matter. It’s still a human situation, a human truth towards the end of life. And my feeling is even if that is an illusion from the perspective of science, what a beautiful illusion to have at the end of life. What a beautiful gift, right?
Brett McKay:
Oh, for sure. And it’s comforting to me, and this is something you mentioned earlier, that oftentimes when people have a near death experience, it feels so good to be transitioning out that when they’re brought back to life, a lot of times they’re really disappointed and sometimes just kind of angry, really angry about it. I didn’t want to come back. So it’s nice to know that whatever’s beyond getting there seems to be a really pleasant passage. So let’s talk about how we respond to the death of others. Do we know how long humans have been using mourning rituals when someone dies in their community?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, I think that that number changes all the time. But when I was working on the book, I think at least the Neolithic era, they found graves that have different kinds of offerings for the dead and the dead put into fetal position. So this seems to suggest that we have been mourning for at least that long.
Brett McKay:
Okay, so it’s been a long time.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah. I think it’s a human universal as far as I can see, that we have rituals around ushering the dead into their new realm of existence, however we perceive of that or conceive of that. So
Brett McKay:
How do these mourning rituals that we developed, how do you think they help us process the grief that comes when someone dies?
Joanna Ebenstein:
I think having a ritual that’s held in community helps create meaning around something that can seem chaotic otherwise, and also creates a place where we can share our feelings and our grief with the community, which I think is really essential. Some people think that our lack of proper grief rituals is a real epidemic in our particular culture. I talk in the book about Martine Tel, who unfortunately he’s passed away. He grew up in a Native American tradition and then end up being initiated into Mayan shamanism in Guatemala. And he wrote a book called Grief and Praise, which is really all about where he sees the shortcomings of the affluent Western world’s mourning practices, and in his traditions and indigenous traditions, the ones that he’s from, the ideas that we have to mourn fully to the extent that he says, you have to look bad when you’re done.
That’s what mourning properly means, bawling, shrieking, going through it all in order to get it out of our body, to literally express it, to push it out, because otherwise from their tradition, it can become disease, it can become tumors, which they call solidified tears. So I think there’s, between him, and then I was reading also a lot about, oh my goodness, it’s been a while since I wrote the book. I can’t remember his name, but he was an activist who was in Columbine, and he had been with his best friend when his best friend was shot, and he ended up becoming an opioid addict later in life due to prescription drugs. And he was saying the same thing in his mind, our lack of proper grieving is part of what creates the violent culture that we live in.
Brett McKay:
I’ve noticed this going back to this idea that we’ve tried to hide death in American culture, and we’ve lost a lot of the elaborate mourning rituals that we had that sometimes would take a week, two weeks, months, years even.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Look in Gone With the Wind, right?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Gone with the wind. And now what we do instead is like, all right, we got to get this funeral done. And then if you’re feeling sad, well then here’s an antidepressant or sedative. And sometimes people need that for their pain, but oftentimes it seems like they take it because they feel like they have to drug themselves to interact with other people. They feel like they can’t fall apart in front of others. You definitely can’t or scream. So they feel like they have to keep their composure and just move on. And so they need to take the drug to do what’s expected just to get on with life.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And I think to get people back to the workforce, I think people don’t really tolerate staying out of the workforce for too long. And it’s also worth mentioning that there’s a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that this has helped cultivate.
Brett McKay:
So grieving over a loved one feels awful, but what can that grief teach us about love?
Joanna Ebenstein:
And that’s something that I turn to other people in my community because that’s not the kind of grief I’ve experienced yet. The people that I love and have lost were older, and I got to say my goodbyes, and I was there when they died, et cetera. But there was a woman in our community called Karen Montgomery, and she would come to a lot of our meetings. She was in a lot of my classes, and she was talking about the Treasures of grief. And so I asked her, could I interview you about this? And she was going through a situation where her father was dying of a disease that ultimately meant that he would drown in his own mucus, I think, in his own fluids. And she was watching him become closer and closer to that state. And what she told me that I think was really interesting and really beautiful, that her grief at times was absolutely horrible, but it felt like a cracking open also, and that cracking open allowed in other things.
So she said that she would have these incredibly moving experiences. It felt like she was feeling emotions much more closely. She would cry when someone said hello to her on the street. There was just a sense of the beauty of the world that I think was part of her very real reckoning with knowing she had a limited time with this man that she loved so much. So I think from what I understand, as someone who has not again, experienced that kind of grief, it can be a both and, right? I don’t think it means the grief isn’t present or there’s no pain, but it’s more like that pain opens you up. And I always think of, there’s a Rumi poem that I put in there that Leonard Cohen also drew on the imagery, which is the idea that it’s the crack in us that the light gets in, that the beauty comes in through the wound, through the crack, through the pain.
Brett McKay:
The grief makes the love more poignant. It accentuates it.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yes. And I think this is the other thing that we lose when we lose a contemplation of death. And going back to the vanitas paintings that you love. Part of what makes things so heartbreakingly beautiful is knowing that we will lose them. That’s our condition. That’s the earthly condition. But without that knowing, we would lose it is the beauty is intense.
Brett McKay:
You have a chapter where you talk about how humans have a tendency to communicate with their dearly departed, and even people who don’t necessarily believe in the afterlife will do this. What do you think is behind this desire to stay connected to the dead?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, I love that. And I was really surprised by that research myself. So there’s a guy up at Columbia called Nando who did this research. And what he says in his book, which is called The Other Side of Sorrow, I think, or the other side of grief, which I highly recommend, is that he was a scientist studying grief. And after his father died, he found that he was talking to him and he had no belief. He didn’t believe that there was a man in the afterlife that he could talk to. It was more just like a visceral response to the death. And what he found in his interviews is many people said the same. And in fact, they said, whether it’s capital T, true or not, doesn’t really matter, but they talk to the dead and it makes them feel better. And again, this is what I always want to come back to is this idea of practice over belief.
I spent a lot of time in Mexico and I was talking to a Mexican friend about his grandmother who has died, and I said, tell me about your grandmother. What do you do on Day of the Dead? And he said, oh, on Day of the Dead and on Simon Santa, I go to the cemetery and I talk to my dead grandmother. And then he’s like, well, I mean, I don’t know if I’m really talking to her, but that’s what we do. And I heard this again and again, it’s not, at least with young, educated people, the sense I get is it’s not about belief. It’s about tradition and practice. And I think that’s something we can all learn from. I think one of the biggest challenges to living at this particular time in human history is we have this voice inside us that’s always saying, is that real? Is it not real? Is that true or is it not true? And I don’t think 300 years ago, most of our ancestors had that voice. So I think it estranges us from experience. I talk to the dead, I talk to my cats, I talk to everybody. If I had to answer, do I really think I’m talking to the dead? I don’t know, but I know it makes me feel good. And I think that’s, again, coming back to our own myth of death.
Brett McKay:
I just love the idea of just staying connected to the dead. They’re still with you, even though they’re bodies in the ground decomposing, or maybe it’s been cremated. I mean, that’s why I love the movie Coco so much.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Oh my God, right?
Brett McKay:
It’s my favorite Disney movie. That movie destroyed me when I watched it. The thing that got me was when that one skeleton ghost guy who was about to be forgotten, because there’s only one person in the living world that still remembered him, and then that person died, and then that guy, no one on earth remembered him. And so he disappeared. And I was like, I don’t want that to happen to my grandparents, my ancestors. I want them to be their memory still to be here some way. So I want to stay connected to them somehow. So that’s why I like genealogy. I like looking at old pictures of my family that have died. I just love that idea of making sure that their memory still lives on in some way.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And I think that’s a deep, deep human drive. Again, in an age of rationality, we might question it, but that’s what people have been doing for millennia all around the world. It’s a natural part of being human, whether again, there’s an external truth that we’re responding to or it’s just what our brain wants to do. It’s real and it’s comforting, and it’s beautiful.
Brett McKay:
So one thing you recommend people do is to start thinking about their own death. So through Memento Mori, these different practices, getting comfortable with death, coming to terms with it, but also thinking about your own death and what you want it to look like, and there’s this idea of the good death that’s out there. What is the good death?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Well, I think that’s a very personal question. Typically, during the Victorian era, the idea how people wanted to die, what they called a good death was to die at home surrounded by their loved ones, including the children where they could then tell people what they wanted done with all of their property and things, and then dying peacefully. Now, it can be lots of things. I hear a lot of people saying that for them, a good death would be dying in their sleep without pain. So I think that’s a question one needs to ask themselves. What is a good death to you? If you could choose how to die, what would that be? For me, I’d like to be conscious. I’d like to go into the mystery with consciousness. I don’t want to be drugged. I want to experience this mystery, but I think that’s a very personal question. How about you, Brett? What’s a good death for you?
Brett McKay:
I was actually thinking about this while I was reading your book. So I’d like to be aware that I was going and I’d like to be surrounded by loved ones in my house. That’s how I’d like to die.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And I think it’s wonderful that more and more people through hospice, et cetera, being able to do that, right? I think that’s wonderful.
Brett McKay:
And then you also talk about different rituals that people have done on different cultures to prepare for their death. One is the Swedish death cleaning. What is Swedish Death cleaning?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah. So Swedish Death Cleaning is, I think it’s amazing, and it’s part of the Swedish tradition from what I understand, where as people grow older, an act of care and love and practicality is to start to get rid of their things. And I can say as someone who’s been on the other side of death in this culture, my ex-boyfriend, his mother died when we were together and emptying out her house was terrible for him. He had an estate sale, and it was so brutal to watch people picking over and trying to bargain on the things his mother loved that are now completely worthless. So the idea is to save your loved ones, this trauma of having to deal with all of your stuff. And so my mother’s going through this right now. She’s emptying her house. She’s going through every bag and every box and getting rid of things. So I think it’s a natural part. It can be at least a natural part of getting older and preparing for knowing that you don’t have that much time left.
Brett McKay:
And then you talked about this too. Even if you’re young and healthy and death is not anywhere near you, you can start preparing, doing your own Swedish death cleaning by taking care of the practicalities of your own death. And it’s just basic stuff that people talked about, life insurance for your family and make sure they’re taken care of when you’re gone. An advanced directive,
Joanna Ebenstein:
Absolutely.
Brett McKay:
What do you want? Want that to look like? A will. Estate planning, that practicality stuff. You don’t think about that, but it’s like the gift you can give your family before you go.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And just to piggyback on that, there’s a member of our community, John Troyer. He’s at the Center for Death in Society in Bath, and he lost his sister and his mother and his father, I believe. And he said if he could have changed anything, it would’ve been having their passwords. So I say that to all your listeners, leave your passwords somewhere for your loved ones. That’s something that I’ve done with my husband as well, a will and your password so that person can get into your bank account. And all of those things, you’d be shocked at how hard that can be once you die.
Brett McKay:
So after years of studying and teaching about death, how has your own relationship to mortality changed?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Well, I would say I’m not afraid of it anymore. And in retrospect, I would say that’s probably why I started this project. I started to have this obsession with looking at the way death was dealt with in different times and places as a way to understand things that could be complimentary to our own view. Growing up in a culture as many of us many are, listeners have, I’m sure, where we’re not given a whole lot of tools on how to deal with death or how to prepare or how to live our lives, really. And I think doing all this work, I’m ready to go. I mean, don’t want to, it’s not my dream, but whenever I start freaking out too much, I just go back to that Jungian dream meditation. And I imagine myself emotionally divesting myself from everything that I care about and how good that feels. And I just come back to that again and again in these times where so much is uncertain and we can only do the best we can and hope to die with the fewest number of regrets.
Brett McKay:
And it sounds like it’s improved your life now you’re happier, you’re more content. It puts things in perspective.
Joanna Ebenstein:
And I would say to an even greater degree, the reason that I’m ready to die is because I’ve lived the life I want to. I’ve taken a lot of risks. I don’t have a huge bank account. I don’t have a lot of security, but I’m doing work that I absolutely love that feels important and vital and meaningful to me and to my community. And that gives me a sense of meaning and satisfaction where I feel like this is what I wanted to do with my life, and I did it. And I’m really, I don’t want to say please, because it’s almost just satisfied. I have satisfaction and I have good relationships with people that I care very much about, and I hope to hold their hand, one of their hands as I go into the next stage of existence. That’s it.
Brett McKay:
Well, Joanna, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Joanna Ebenstein:
Yeah, you can learn more at morbidanatomy.org if these are the sorts of things that interest you. I do encourage you to come. We have a really vibrant community of people from all over the world who are having conversations about this. We have classes, we have lectures, we have many books, and if you’re in Brooklyn, we have an open to the public research library. I’m sitting in it right now. You can also find us on social media at Morbid Anatomy on Instagram and Facebook.
Brett McKay:
Fantastic. Well, Joanna Ebenstein, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Joanna Ebenstein:
Thank you so much, Brett. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book and it’s been a pleasure for me too.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Joanna Ebenstein. She’s the author of the book, Memento Mori. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about our work at our website, joannaebenstein.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/mementomori, where you’ll find links to resources where you can dive deeper into this topic. That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast.
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our Art of Manless newsletter. You got your daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you could take one minute to give a review of the podcast. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. As always, thank you for the continued support. This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.