Memento Mori: Death Changes How You Live, If You Let It

Embrace mortality to live with intention. Explore the history of Memento Mori, the Grim Reaper, Liberace’s legacy, and why facing death changes everything. https://bit.ly/434ASy3

Memento Mori. What Does it Really Mean?

You are going to die. What if remembering that is the key to actually living well? Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about death. But when we do, something interesting happens: we start to see what matters. This week, Marianne and Charlie kick off a brand-new series exploring the humanities and the art of dying. 

From the lavish life and hidden cause of death of Liberace to the driving funk of The Rolling Stones’ "Dancing with Mr. D," we explore how history, art, and myth use mortality not to create fear, but to bring ultimate clarity to life. Tune in, grab Liberace's recipe for Singapore and Malaysian Satay, and learn how to carpe the heck out of your diem.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro: How Can Awareness of Death Change Our Life?
03:18 - Recipe-Liberace's Singapore and Malasian Satay Appetizer
04:32 - Liberace's Obituary
10:23 - The Meaning of Memento Mori
13:45 - The Origin of the Grim Reaper
16:50 - The Guides of Souls: Psychopomps and Charon's Boat
19:57 - "Dancing with Mr D" - Rolling Stones
22:24 - Outro - Carpe the Heck Out of Your Diem!

#MementoMori #EmbraceMortality #LiveWithIntention #CarpeDiem #DeathPositive #GrimReaper #EveryoneDies #PodcastLife #Liberace #RollingStones #EndofLife #DeathAwareness #GriefEducation #ArtOfDying #HistoryOfDeath 

Related Episodes:

• S3E43: How Accepting Death Can Improve Your Life – If you want to dive deeper into how breaking the culture of silence directly transforms your day-to-day choices, this episode is the perfect next step.
• S4E10: How to turn Aging into a Superpower – Discover how embracing your mortality strips away the trivial noise of daily life, leaving room for a vivid, beautiful, and highly intentional perspective on the time we have left.
• S7E04: An App That Predicts Your Death Date: Would You Want to Know? – If you want a modern, high-tech twist on memento mori, this episode explores what happens when we give death a digital face instead of a historical one. It looks at how a real-time countdown clock can either trigger data anxiety or act as the ultimate motivator to choose better, live deeper, and actively reclaim your time.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies. Relax and settle in for our podcast about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. Because even though everyone dies, no one must face it unprepared.

This week's show starts our new series about the art of dying. We spent a lot of time talking about the science of mortality, and we thought springtime was a good time for everyone dies to focus on the humanities. Most of us don't spend much time thinking about death.

When we do, something interesting happens. We start to see what matters. So we start our series exploring the term memento mori, which means remember you must die, and why it has been used for centuries not to create fear, but to bring clarity to life.

Memento mori is also a category of artistic creations that vary widely from one to another, which all share the same purpose, which is to remind people of their mortality. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarrette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every person viewpoint to our podcast.

We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions. And please remember, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording.

In the first half, Charlie has Liberace's obituary and our recipe of the week. In the second half, I'm going to be talking about the meaning of memento mori. And in our third half, Charlie is dancing with Mr. D and sharing the lyrics to the song by the Rolling Stones.

Also in our studio today, we have Millie. Millie is a four-year-old rescue Australian shepherd poodle mix who lived the first four years of her life as a breeding dog in a puppy mill. We got her about a year and a half ago, and she's just now starting to kind of feel her oats, as they say, coming out of her shell and developing a personality, which has been great fun.

We do a lot of that, you know, new parents do when they say, oh, did you see she did this? She did that. Well, she's in the studio with us. And so you might hear tinkling like Santa Claus walking by, but that's just our little Millie Mouse.

So Charlie, how are you? I'm fine. You showed me Millie, cute little puppy. I know she's not a puppy, but she's our puppy.

Yes. And the little bell will remind me of Christmas. Because, you know, every time a bell rings, I hate Christmas.

Their wings. Yeah, but I hate Christmas. Bah, humbug.

Humbug, I say. You're welcome. In our first half, our recipe this week is from Liberace, who published two cookbooks in his life and one after his life by a ghostwriter.

Liberace took his formal dinners with the utmost gravity, relinquishing his usual accoutrement of bodily bling to let the candles gleam with their ceremonial glow over the intricate handmade lace tablecloth adorned with crystal drops around the edge. Liberace had strict menus for his formal dinners. It's the sauces, Liberace believed, that divide the men from the boys and separate the gourmets from the guzzlers.

Had I known, I would have put more quotes from Liberace. There we are. One of his appetizer recipes was Singapore and Malaysian satay, which are small skewers of marinated beef with a peanut buttery sauce.

We're sure your next funeral lunch attendees will agree that Liberace's glitz and glamour went everywhere with him, even to the kitchen. Now, Liberace's obituary published February 5th, 1987 in the New York Times was titled, Liberace, flamboyant pianist is dead. Liberace, whose glitzy costumes, giant candelabra, and extravagant showmanship made him almost as famous as his piano playing, died yesterday at his home in Palm Springs, California.

He was 67 years old. The cause of death was cardiac arrest due to congestive heart failure brought on by subacute encephalopathy. Encephalopathy is a degenerative disease of the brain.

The contributing cause was aplastic anemia. Oh, wait a minute. Hang on.

This note just in from Mary Ann, Liberace died from complications related to AIDS. Many obituaries at this time listed causes such as these when the actual cause of death was AIDS. Now, back to the obituary.

Lazzui Valentino Liberace was born in West Allis, Wisconsin on May 16, 1919. Liberace, whose friends called him Lee, was a son of a specialty grocer who had played the French horn in John Philip Sousa's concert band. Liberace's mother played the piano, and Liberace began piano lessons when he was four years old.

He appeared with the Chicago Symphony in 1936 under Frederick Stock, playing Liszt's Concerto No. 1. Three years later, Liberace stumbled onto the musical formula that made him famous. It happened at a recital in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The audience yelled for Liberace to play the popular novelty song, Three Little Fishies, as an encore. Do you know that song, Charlie? Maybe. Hum it.

Give me a few bars. My father used to sing this all the time. Down by the meadow, by the itty bitty pool, swam three little fishes and his mama fishy too.

Swim, said the mama fish, swim if you can, and they swam and they swam all over the dam. Boop, boop, diddum, doddum, waddum, shoo. You don't remember this song? Oh, don't stop.

I think the Andrews sisters did it, didn't they? I'm going to say yes. The title's familiar, but it doesn't... I can't picture the two. Okay.

All right. Well, that was the Three Little Fishies. Very good.

Well, this break with concert tradition really shook him up, Liberace said later, and he realized he was on the road to riches, rhinestones, and Rolls-Royces. He spent his teenage years playing piano in silent movie houses. Under the name Walter Buster Keys, he played honky-tonk tunes in a cocktail lounge in Wausau, Wisconsin, when he was 14.

Throughout Liberace's long and lucrative career, his income averaged $5 million a year for more than 25 years. Geez Louise. Yeah.

It was hard to make fun of him because he seemed to have so much fun making fun of himself. With his megawatt smile, his furry, feathery costumes, rhinestones as big as a Ritz, piano-shaped rings, and a unique blend of Beethoven and beer barrel polka, Liberace charmed millions with a flashiness that was almost too much to be believed. But a Liberace performance was not all baubles, angles, and bright shiny beads.

Unbowed by years of critical scorn and 175-pound fur capes, he worked hard. During a typical show, he was on the stage for more than two hours, with only short breaks for costume changes. His audiences loved what he called Reader's Digest versions of familiar melodies.

Liberace whipped through Chopin's Minute Waltz in 37 seconds and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, which usually fills both sides of a long playing record in four minutes. His secret, he said, was cutting out the dull parts.

Liberace's wardrobe eventually filled rack after rack in his mansions and included a silvery plum lamé cape with an eight-foot train of pink feathers, a $300,000 Norwegian blue fox cape with a 16-foot train, and a sequined drum major's uniform, complete with hot pants. His Las Vegas home began as an unpretentious buggalow and grew, at an estimated cost of $4 million, into a block log palace. As a pianist lay on his huge white bed, he could stare at a $50,000 imitation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

In the center, surrounded by cherubs, is Liberace's smiling face. Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe for Singapore and Malaysian Satay and additional resources for this program. This is the part where we ask for your financial support.

Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our non-profit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone. You can donate at www.everyonedies.org or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies. Marianne? We spend a lot of time in our podcast not only talking about death but also actions we can take for healthier living.

And it may be easier to eat our vegetables, not smoke, exercise, and get eight hours of sleep a night if we focus on decreasing our chances of dying prematurely. Today we're going to talk about another way we can make our lives better by thinking about death. Memento mori is a Latin phrase that can be translated as remember you are mortal, or remember you will die, or remember your death.

It has been used to remind people of their mortality. We might think we don't need to be reminded that everyone dies, but it's part of our humanness to try to ignore this fact. In ancient Rome, the phrase is said to have been used on the occasions when a Roman general was parading through the streets of Rome.

Standing behind the victorious general was a servant, and he had the task of reminding the general that though he was up on the peak today, tomorrow was another day. The servant did this by telling the general that he should remember that he was mortal, that is, memento mori. Although it was more likely that the servant said, Respisposte hominin temento, look behind you, remember that you are but a man.

The primary implication of memento mori was the theme of carpe diem, seize the day, which would have led to the advice to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The Christian origin of this quote is from Isaiah 22.13, eat and drink for tomorrow we die. This idea also appears outside the Bible in the oaths to Horus, with the well-known line, now is the time to drink, now is the time to dance, footloose upon the earth.

Horus goes on to explain that now is the time because there will be no drinking or dancing in the afterlife. This is the classic carpe diem theme. The Rubiat of Omar Khayyam put it this way, then to the lip of this poor earthen urn I learned the secret well of life to learn, and lip to lip it murmured, while you live drink, for once dead, you shall never return.

But the thought came into its own with Christianity, whose emphasis on heaven, hell, and salvation of the soul brought death to the forefront of consciousness. In the Christian context, the memento mori was a moralizing purpose quite opposed to the theme of classical antiquity, now is the time to drink, now is the time to dance, footloose upon the earth. To the Christian, the prospect of death serves to emphasize the emptiness and fleetingness of earthly pleasures, luxuries, and achievements, and also as an invitation to focus one's thoughts on the prospect of the afterlife.

Many cultures have incorporated a god of death into mythology or religion. Because death, along with birth, is among the major parts of human life, these deities may often be one of the most important deities of religion. In modern-day European folklore, death is known as the grim reaper or the grim specter of death.

Death personified is a figure or fictional character that has existed in mythology and popular culture since the earliest days of storytelling. We humanize death to give a face to this faceless entity. Because the reality of death has had substantial influence on the human psyche in the development of civilization, the personification of death as a living entity is a concept that has existed in many societies since the beginning of recorded history.

Many modern ideas of death come straight from the Middle Ages. The skeleton as a personification of death began around the 16th century. Sometimes they hold an hourglass to remind us of the brevity and vanity of life.

This single universal death image reinforces the idea that death comes to all, no matter what your place in society is. In the United States, death is usually shown as a skeletal figure wearing a midnight black gown with a hood, while in Europe he is often depicted similarly but dressed in white, which in many places is the traditional color worn at funerals. The garb of death, or the black mourning robe, is very close to the robe of a priest or a bedbed.

A good example of the Grim Reaper is in Monty Python's 1983 film, The Meaning of Life, Part 7, Death, in which a group of people at an isolated country house are visited by the Grim Reaper, who knocks on the door. When the host answers and sees the Reaper with his enormous scythe, he says, is it about the hedge? And the dinner guests then spend a lot of time arguing with him before finally being persuaded that they are in fact dead. Spoiler alert, it was the salmon moose.

The scythe also plays an important traditional role, often appearing as weapons in the hands of mythical beings such as Father Time, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the Grim Reaper. This stems mainly from the Christian cultural interpretation of death as a harvest of souls, and the Grim Reaper does the harvesting. The scythe is an image that reminds us that death reaps the souls of sinners like the peasants harvest corn in their fields.

Each movement of the scythe brings thousands of souls. Once the Grim Reaper harvests a soul, the dance macabre takes place. This is a medieval dance, or procession, which a skeleton, representing death, leads other skeletons or living persons to the grave, also called the dance of deaths.

The dancing Grim Reaper carries off rich and poor and passes them to a psychopomp who escorts them to their destination. Many religions have a particular spirit, deity, demon, or angel whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls to the afterlife, such as heaven or hell. These creatures are called psychopomps, a Greek word literally meaning the guide of souls.

In modern literature, the title character of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is said to act as a guide for children. Quote, at first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood, she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies. There are odd stories about as that when children died, he went part of the way with them, so they should not be frightened.

In Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman of Hades. Dante incorporated Charon into Christian mythology in his Divine Comedy. He is the same as his Greek counterpart, being paid a coin to cross Acheron.

He is the first named character Dante meets in hell, in the third canto of Inferno. He was depicted as a cranky, skinny old man or winged demon with a double hammer. He took the newly dead from one side of the river Acheron, sometimes called the River Styx, to the other if they had an ombulus or a coin to pay for the ride.

Corpses in ancient Greece were always buried with a coin underneath their tongue to pay Charon. Those who could not pay had to wander the banks of the Acheron for 100 years. So what did we learn today? We are going to die.

Not today, most likely, but someday. And most of the time we don't think about that. We stay busy, we focus on what's in front of us, we put off the conversations, the decisions, the things that make us uncomfortable.

But there's a reason that this idea has lasted for centuries. Not because people were focused on death, but because they were trying to understand life. Memento Mori was never meant to make things feel heavy.

It was meant to make things clear. Because when you remember that life is limited, you start to notice what matters. The conversations you've been putting off.

The time you thought you had more of. The people who matter now, not someday. We don't mean to create fear.

It's meant to help you live with intention. Because we don't have forever. And that's exactly what makes today important.

So carpe the heck out of your diem. There we are. What was the last thing you said? Memento Mori is not about fear.

Make things, or to make things clear. Then what else did you say with that? Because when you remember that life is limited, you start to notice what matters. Conversations you've been putting off.

The time you thought you had more of. The people who matter now, not someday. Okay, cool.

Our third half finds us dancing with Mr. D, which opens the Stones' 1973 album, Goat Head Soup. It's a funk-inspired rocker that serves as an introduction to a new Stone sound, a more mellow sound influenced by soul and funk. Down in the graveyard where we have our tryst.

The air smells sweet, the air smells thick. He never smiles, his mouth merely twists. The breath in my lungs feel clinging and thick.

Now I know his name. He's called Mr. D. And one of these days he's gonna set you free. Human skulls is hanging right around his neck.

The palms of my hands feel clammy and wet. I was dancing, dancing, dancing so free. I was dancing, dancing, dancing so free.

Dancing, Lord, take your hands off me. Dancing with Mr. D. With Mr. D. With Mr. D. Will it be poisoned in my glass? Will it be slow or will be fast? The bite of a snake, the sting of a spider. A drink of belladonna of a Tucson night.

Hiding round a corner in New York City, looking down a 44 in West Virginia. Lord, I was dancing, dancing, dancing so free. Dancing, dancing, dancing so free.

I was dancing, dancing, Lord, keep your hand off me. One night I was dancing with a lady in black, wearing black silk gloves and a black silk hat. She looked at me longing with black velvet eyes.

She gazed at me strange, all cunning and wise. I saw the flesh just fall off her bones. The eyes and her skull was burning like holes.

Lord, have mercy, fire and brimstone. I was dancing with Mistress D. Lord, I was dancing, dancing, dancing so free. Dancing, dancing, dancing so free.

I was dancing, dancing, Lord, keep your hand off me. And so ends this week's episode. Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening.

You can find more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Follow and subscribe to the show and share it with someone. This is Charlie Navarrete, and the last words of musician and songwriter Lou Reed said to his wife, the composer and performance artist Laurie Anderson, Take me to the light.

And I'm Marianne Matzo, and we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift. This podcast does not provide medical advice.

All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast.

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