Mariam Vahradyan writes for Psyche: Many cultures around the world actively maintain relationships with the dead through storytelling, prayer and ritual. In Japan, for example, the spirits of the dead are welcomed during the Obon festival. For four days each year, families remember their ancestors by tending to graves, lighting small fires, and making offerings. … Read more“Why you should talk to your dead ancestors”
Click here to listen to any of the first 14 episodes of Memento Morbid, a new podcast series from our friends at Morbid Anatomy: Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries.Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend … Read more“Memento Morbid”: new podcast series from Morbid Anatomy
Sally Hayden writes for the Literary Hub: The road wound upwards, past a sloping graveyard and cedar trees. We passed another hamlet of houses, and I started to spot various signs pointing towards the drifting post. Through a final flurry of trees, it at last became visible. There was a rectangular yellow post box—the “real” … Read more“Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead”
Based on the bestselling novel by Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
Rage against the dying of the light with Fall Out Boy’s memento mori/carpe diem anthem; a worthy addition to the canon.
‘Let it be like a lullaby that holds you.’ Threshold Choir is an international charity that provides people who are dying with soothing, non-religious songs of peace and comfort, sung by three-person volunteer groups. This short documentary profiles one Threshold Choir chapter in Devon in south-west England.
I can’t recall the first time I saw the countercultural classic movie Harold and Maude, but I’m sure that I was too young then to pick up on the film’s bittersweet, positive existentialist message except in very broad strokes. Sometime around 2020 – peak pandemic – I became aware that English author Lucy Coleman Talbot … Read more“The Little Book of Maudism” (2016)
Living in the future … the first wildflowers are appearing in the park and along the riverbanks, trees are budding or starting to leaf, and so another Floralia has arrived. I’ve repositioned the skull on my vanitas shrine – facing to the right, symbolizing “looking forward” – and re-dressed the flowered caplet in honor of … Read moreFloralia 2026
In the 28 Days franchise, much of the world is laid to waste by an accidentally-released pathogen called the Rage Virus, which reduces human beings to almost mindless biting and eating machines. The third installment is set 28 years after the original movie and takes place in a radically re-wilded England. Nature has largely reclaimed … Read moreMemento Mori Religion in “28 Years Later”
Japanese conceptual artist Aya Kichi describes “After the Rain”: (…) incorporating a series of optical prisms into the centres of tombstones, which as a result, create a spectrum of light on the ground where the grave would be situated. Influenced by rainy days and the grieving process, the project takes these elements and translates them … Read more“After the Rain”