Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life

“By learning to live with our fear of death, we also learn to live with our fear of that which we cannot control, to sit with the mystery at the heart of life and still appreciate, and with great joy, the life we have been given.” Memento Mori are objects, works, or practices that remind you that you will die and it encourages you to live the life you truly want before it's too late. This book dives into the history of death related practices and pushes you to think about your own mortality. Each chapter ends with exercises and activities to help you contemplate your own death, what you want from your life, and prepare yourself for your eventual death. This book covers a wide array of information about death practices from around the world. But it also includes the psychology of death practices and death denial, research into near death experiences (NDEs), and many other things around death. I really appreciated all the different aspects of death that the author provided, especially the psychology aspect because I feel like a lot of death positive books leave that out. While the author doesn’t deep dive into every death practice out there, I feel like this was a great overview to provide you with a starting point on your journey to accepting your death. “...despite our illusions to the contrary, we cannot control our surroundings, we cannot predict our future, and we cannot know when we will die.” The exercises and activities at the end of each chapter were very varied and well rounded, so there was something for everyone. I appreciated that the author included a lot of journal prompts and activities, because from my experiences with work books like this, there are sometimes only like 3 prompts, which is always disappointing. But there is a wide variety of prompts provided with every chapter in this and an appendix of extra resources and books for further study. Overall, this was a fantastic death positive book that really pushes you to think about your own mortality and work through your feelings on it. I need to get a physical copy of this so I can work though the activities myself now. Also, I absolutely loved all the quotes about death that were featured in this book! TW: death; child death; grief;