Hag Stone Journal

Memento Mori

Memento Mori

Issue 002
September 29th - October 6th (Free Issue)
In This Issue: Journal Prompt | Meditation | Nature | Poetry | Home | Outdoors | Magic | Moon Phases | Craft | Activism | Recommendations | Next Week

For me, the month of October is all about Halloween. Throughout the month we go to pumpkin patches and haunted houses, watch horror movies, and make our homemade costumes. Every year I host a huge Halloween party with elaborate decorations, Halloween themed food, playlists, games, and fun scares. It is true that many of my Halloween decorations are actually just my witch aesthetic, and stay up all year, but October, and Halloween, is when I really indulge myself. Yes, for me, October is all about Halloween, and Halloween is…?

Hallowe’en, a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve, the first night of the three day Christian holiday, Allhallowtide, a time to remember and pray for the dead. Halloween, the descendent of the pagan Celtic holiday, Samhain, a potent and liminal time when the boundaries between our world and the Otherworld was porous and spirits would walk among us. Halloween, secular holiday where people enjoy dipping a toe into the darkness and giving themselves a good fright. On Halloween we touch death with a fingertip and dance back again to safety.

Memento Mori– Remember We All Must Die. The Romans gave us this phrase, but the Christians turned it into an art form. Medieval Christians lived closer to death than we do today. Death came for their children; it sat at their hearth; it laid, cold and incomprehensible, in their bed. They washed their own dead, dressed them, buried them, and prayed for their souls. Now we are once, twice, three times removed from the old ways. But death hasn’t changed. It comes for us all in our own time.

Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland

We have a fear of and a fascination with death. The medieval Christians created art– murals of Judgement Day, woodblocks of the Danse Macabre, skull necklaces like morbid rosaries, and paintings of skulls, hourglasses, and rotting fruit– to remind them that we all must die. Though many, in practice, may have reacted to the reality of their own mortality with an “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die”, the church’s philosophy was to prepare your body and soul for heaven, to get right with the Lord, and to live a good and virtuous life every day, because any day could be your last. When we are forced to think about the inevitability of our death these days, which philosophy do we adopt? For me, it is a little of both.

I joined the ranks of people who have had to contemplate their deaths in a serious and up close way when I was 37 and diagnosed with breast cancer. For a week I didn’t know what stage it was and I spent that week, and many moments over my six months of chemo and five years of treatment, becoming more familiar with death than most people my age have to be. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 42, and again I had to go through days of not knowing whether death was knocking or was waving as it rode by (“Catch ya later”). Because of my medical history, little bumps and pains that most middle aged bodies experience are often multiple hospital trip ordeals for me. Better safe than sorry, better check it out, better get comfortable with needles and MRIs. And waiting for results. The waiting is the worst, of course.

Memento Mori– Remember We All Must Die. Okay! I remember! What good is it to remember? This life is fleeting. This beautiful life is a miraculous gift. Everything I see with my eyes, and hear with my ears, and taste and touch… every day is a gift. Every warm hug. Every raucous laugh. Every night’s sleep and every new day dawning. Memento Mori is a philosophy, an art, and a true reminder to really see the magic that is ever-present in the world. Remember We All Must Die is an essential ingredient in my recipe for creating the sacred in even my simplest, most mundane moments.

Memento Mori is all about experiencing this life as a sacred gift. You never know, when you go to sleep, if you will wake up, or, once you wake up, if you will sleep again. How beautiful does the morning song of the bird sound to your ears when you don’t know if it is the last time you’ll hear it? How sweet the kiss of your love if it is the last time you’ll touch? How much kindness and generosity do you have room for in your heart when you let petty issues and vanities fall away?

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA

Sometimes when I am feeling anxious about my own death I think about how I will be joining the host of humanity– Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare and Marlowe, Prince, my grandmother– they are all dead, and I will be too. That is the right order of things.

Other times I think about the Carl Sagan quote that we are all star stuff. I like the idea of being another form of the essence that created the universe. I am also fine with being food for worms and mushrooms. I am part of the natural order of things. I, and everything else, will die.

Halloween is the season when our spirit is attuned to the universal truth of death. Death is frightening. It is okay to confront our fears with laughter and merriment, to have parties and surround ourselves with friends and loved ones, to dance and dress up and remind yourself that, tonight, you are alive. It may also be part of your tradition to light a candle and pray for the dead, to center down with some seriousness and make a welcoming space in your life for death, to be able to say “I know you will come and I feel prepared. I am living my life. I am living well.”


By Heather Gray

Journal Prompt

Life is too short to hold onto petty grievances. Forgiveness, either asked for or given, can release a great burden, and make you feel lighter and hopeful.

Write a letter to a person that you want to forgive or that you want to forgive you. It is up to you if you want to send the letter or communicate it in real life. (This is not for a person who actually harms you, life is too short to waste it on toxic people.)

Meditation

One of the practices that I began when I was diagnosed with cancer was daily recitation of the Metta Meditation: the Loving Kindness Meditation. I was taught it at a Yoga for Healing class and these are the words I was taught:

Thinking of yourself and really feeling the meaning of the words in your body, repeat three times:
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.

Then, thinking of someone you have positive feelings for and feeling the words for them, repeat three times:

May ___ be filled with loving kindness.
May ___ be well.
May ___ be peaceful and at ease.
May ___ be happy.

Now, thinking of someone you feel pretty neutral towards and feeling the words for them, repeat three times:
May ___ be filled with loving kindness.
May ___ be well.
May ___ be peaceful and at ease.
May ___ be happy.

Thinking of someone you have some difficult or negative feelings for and feeling the words for them, repeat three times:
May ___ be filled with loving kindness.
May ___ be well.
May ___ be peaceful and at ease.
May ___ be happy.

Now, thinking of the whole world, starting around your location and growing and growing throughout the entire world, feel the words for all humanity and repeat three times:

May all be filled with loving kindness.
May all be well.
May all be peaceful and at ease.
May all be happy.

Lastly, thinking of yourself again and really feeling the meaning of the words in your body, repeat three times:
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.

Breath in. Breath out. Slowly come back to the present moment.

Nature

This week, as you walk and go about your day, look for signs of mortality– a dead animal by the side of the road, even a dead insect– read the obituary page, remind yourself that all this is transitory. Whether that feels okay or not, it is still how it is.

Magic

The rituals of mourning, established over centuries or millennia, are magic spells that transport you on a river of tears from the point of absolute confoundment to some kind of integration of our feelings to the shore of healing. The old ways are rich with meaning, and, I think, psychologically healthy rituals. Many of the traditions hold mourners in community and shared cultural heritage, as well as caring for the body and soul of the deceased.

Research the traditional death practices of your people. Did your people practice the Judaic mourning ritual of sitting shiva and wear a torn garment or ribbon for a week? Or did they practice the Japanese cremation ritual, which includes family members picking bones from the ashes with chopsticks? Or the Muslim custom of same-gender family members bathing the dead? Or the New Orleans ceremony of the Jazz Funeral? Or the Irish wake, where, in olden times, wailing women would cry and keen at funerals?

Is there any resonance for you in these practices?

“And you as well must die,” – Edna St. Vincent Millay

And you as well must die, belovèd dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell, this wonder fled,
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how beloved above all else that dies.

Moon Phases

October 2nd is the Last Quarter Moon.

Home

Think of a few treasured items and who you would like to give them to, when you die. This doesn’t have to be only morbid, like when my grandmother asked me to go around her house and choose the things I wanted when she died. I really couldn’t do it at the time, but I finally chose a little wooden doll from a cupboard of fancy figurines. I used to make up stories about that little wooden man when I was a child. I have it on my bookshelf now.

The women in my family have passed down quilts. I have ones from my great grandmother, my grandmother, and several from my mother, a fabric artist. They will go to my daughter when it is time. This reminds me that I have a box of my daughter’s baby clothes that I was going to turn into a quilt. Maybe that is the next craft I should learn.

Outdoors

Does your town or neighborhood have a lovely cemetery you could visit? Philadelphia has a gorgeous sprawling park-like cemetery, Laurel Hills, with crypts, marble angels, and famous residents that you can learn about on guided tours. I also love to visit small churchyard cemeteries, just to read the names and dates, see groupings of families, and read some lovingly written epitaphs.

Charter Street Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts

Craft

Create your own memento mori art with symbols like skulls, hourglasses, flowers, worms, gravestones, worms, or decaying food.

Share it at #hagstonejournal #hsjmementomori

Activism

The Jewish word tzedakah, which means justice, is understood to be charitable giving. It is a religious obligation to give tzedakah, regardless of your income. There are many religious laws and observances about how and when to give tzedakah, including giving tzedakah for the dead. It is a Jewish custom to give money to an organization that was important to a deceased loved one, or “be their feet in the world”. Mourners can keep the values of their loved ones alive by continuing their good works.

My mother-in-law loved my daughter so much, and sometimes I try to do something for my daughter that I think my mother-in-law would have done. She was a dancer, world traveler, cat lover, and servant to her community. She taught me how to cook many of our family’s favorite dishes, including the brisket I bring to families that need help with meal prep. This week I will donate to one one of her favorite charities and continue to try to share all the good she gave to me with the world.

Movie Recommendations

Harold and Maude – a cult classic about living and dying. Cat Stevens’ soundtrack is timeless.

Coco – a beautiful, heartfelt, and funny animated movie about family, during Mexico’s Day of the Dead Festival.

Next Week

Next week we will delve into Halloween and let our witch flags fly!