We don’t talk about death, but we should. Our culture has pushed death out of sight, making it something to fear rather than understand. But what if embracing death could actually help us live more fully?

In this episode of the Buried in Work Podcast, Joanna Ebenstein, artist, author, and founder of Morbid Anatomy, uncovers the forgotten history of mourning, why we’ve become disconnected from death, and how reclaiming lost traditions can bring meaning back into our lives.

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What about our current culture shapes that fear in a way that maybe hasn't

existed in the past? What is a uniquely 2024 fear of death?

And how is that different than the fear of death that you've spent your academic and

artistic life curating?

It's a death without, without religion, honestly, in mythology or meaning.

You know, I think that's what makes this time unique.

I don't, I have not in my studies found any other time in history where a majority of the

population, or a large portion of the population, let's say, believed that death was

simply the end and that there was no meaning and that we didn't mean anything.

Right, because God is dead for many of us, or we don't believe in that anymore.

But for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our ancestors, there was a spiritual

understanding of life.

And I think that is what creates meaning for many people.

This is the Buried in Work podcast where we share tips and interview experts to help you

simplify estate planning and end of life tasks.

Welcome to Buried in Work podcast.

I'm your host, Jared Rizzi.

Today we have Joanna Ebenstein with us.

She's an author, an artist, designer.

There's, there's a lot of.

We're going to get through all of that.

First of all, Joanna, thank you so much for

spending some time with us.

Barry and Warren, thanks for having me.

It's my pleasure.

I was thinking about this in the context of we never know how much time we have

left.

And so I just, in the macabre tone that I am

embracing for this conversation, I just want you to know how much I appreciate not only you

spending some of the most precious resource that any of us has here with me right now for

this, but also just that you've spent so much time curating and cultivating this to give

meaning to an experience that we all have, but that most of us spend a lot of time.

I really appreciate you.

Thank you so much.

Oh, that's really kind of you to say thank you.

It is, as you can probably tell, it's a labor of love.

That is a perfect launching off point for how I wanted to begin, which is how

do you love death?

That's a great.

No one's ever asked it to me quite like that.

And the why is a question too.

I mean, to say I love death might not be

exactly how I would put it, but I think this material makes me passionate and having

conversations around this material makes me feel very good.

And why that's the case, I can't say.

But I can say from my time sitting in public

spaces that I've arranged that are around death and speaking to people.

When you're in a space where conversations around death are likely to occur and you have

a conversation around death and you're nodding because I think you know what I mean.

There's a sense when you have a conversation like that with another human being that really

cuts through everything and is a real human connection.

And I think I really love that feeling of a real human connection with someone else.

And for me, there's nothing that takes you closer more quickly there than to go into

death.

Everyone has a story.

Everyone has an experience or a fear or something.

And it's so essentially themselves that it's beyond Persona.

It's like soul to soul, human to human.

The mask, really.

I mean, the mask.

I mean, even then I'm thinking of the metaphors here, but the mask comes off really

when we're talking about something so intrinsic to our human experience, I would

imagine.

Yes.

Yeah. So intrinsic.

And something we all share.

A fear we all share, a. A foreknowledge we all share.

And that, you know, many people have thought, and I would argue that foreknowledge is what

even creates the sense that life has such great value, is that it ends right.

So it's a part of all of our awareness, whether it's conscious or unconscious.

That's a different question.

While people are still feeling, if they are like me, that kind of back of the

neck prickle as we're having this conversation, let me take that and point them

to your work online, which is@morbidanatomy.org

and also I know a book that you have that's.

That's really just.

Just out, which is Memento Mori A let's see, the Art of Contemplating Death to Live a

Better Life.

And I'm so grateful for that.

This is.

This is out.

People can get this.

Now, when we are contemplating this, when we're talking about that universal experience,

the way you just said it a minute ago, that we have that foreknowledge and you talked about

fear.

When you are creating art or writing your book or what are the things that you are trying to

include that are wide in that experience, the things that, you know, that people, whatever

their cultural tradition, wherever they've come to, they're going to think about death,

what are the widest parameters that you can set for talking about and making art about

death?

Yeah, for me, at least, as I'm understanding your question, I think the

widest parameters for Me are history.

And for me, that's my background.

I studied intellectual history at college.

And a historical lens onto looking at death in

different times and places, and that includes now, basically from prehistory to the present,

helps for me to relativize fear of death and to relativize how we think about death in this

particular time and place.

So you'll see pretty quickly if you start looking at the historical record that as

recently as the 1800s, right.

Death was a very visible part of everyday

life.

Women dressed in mourning bodies were

displayed in the home parlor.

This is only 150 or so years ago.

Right.

So to me, using that lens and thinking about, how is it that we have gotten to this

particular place? How is this different than it's been at

different times in the past?

Is this the inevitable way that it needs to be?

Is this something that's just kind of a flash in the pan?

Are we gonna go back to other ways of thinking?

That kind of larger cultural context for me, helps me to look more critically at our own

attitudes about death.

And by critically, I don't mean necessarily

negative.

I just mean to see it as a product of the time

and place we were born with a culture we happen to be born into.

If I'd been born 200 years ago, I'd be in full mourning, probably, if my husband died, you

know.

So, again, it's just.

That's so much of it for me, is the cultural aspect that we're born into and tend to see as

inevitable unless you pull back and look at other times and places.

The metaphor that I always think about is, you know, the fish don't know that

they're in water kind of thing.

It's like, exactly.

We don't know that.

The way we think about death is really just

now the ph, the temperature has all been set by the water that we're all in, this cultural

water that we're all in.

And that brings me to where we are kind of the bookend of the other side of this conversation

is the work that we do at Buried in work, which is, I think, a lot of it on the

logistics side, but really just helping people kind of get through that hump of, I've got

this to do.

I don't want to be buried in work.

I want to get through this.

And I imagine that you have a lot to say about the cultural moment we're in right now and why

that work is so much and so onerous and so emotionally poignant in ways that are

different, I imagine, than even I don't know, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago.

Yeah. You know, looking at history, I began to see that a lot changed

around the late 19th into the early 20th century.

That was what I studied at university, too.

I studied intellectual history of that time.

And as I studied it, I began to think, oh, this is really the birth of our type.

And I think right now we're transitioning to something else.

So ask me in 50 years.

I don't know what I would say.

But right now, the culture that we're in is

the same culture that was created in the early 20th century in this kind of the end of the

Victorians and the beginning of modernity.

Right.

And what you have at that time is you have,

first of all, you have a lot of mass death.

You have World War I, and then you have the

influenza epidemic, which is even more pertinent now after we've gone through Covid.

Right.

And you'd see almost nothing written about

that.

Even when you're reading the modernist

writers, they're writing about World War I, but the influenza epidemic no one really

writes about, and many, many people were lost.

So Western culture went through, like, this really intense one, two, you know, and then

simultaneously, you have the development of hospitals.

So people.

There were hospitals before, but they were

more like charitable institutions.

And then it becomes a place where you go when you're sick and when you're trying to combat

death, essential, you have death kind of disappearing.

Until this time, death is taking place at home, surrounded by your loved ones, including

your friends and family, including the children.

This was seen as an appropriate, kind of an important thing for children to be at.

So you can see how much in 150 years that idea has changed.

Right.

And so then, in addition to that, you have

something really interesting going on, which is the change over from a religious to a

secular culture.

And of course, that's not complete.

You know, there are still very religious

people, and bless them, they're very lucky.

But for many of us, we no longer have a belief

system that explains why we die, where we go after we die.

And so the scientific model is the assumption that death is simply an end.

So I think the fear of death is also much greater because it's not kind of blended with

this idea of heaven and hell and being able to communicate with your ancestors after they're

gone in some way.

Really.

It's this idea of materialist science is it's

over.

That's it.

Right? Game over, brain off, game over.

Which is actually a pretty terrifying thought.

So I think you have this kind of perfect storm

of all of these things.

And then what they say is, you know, in the 19th century, women were making all these

incredible crafts to commemorate the dead.

They were making things out of human hair.

They were taking photos of the dead and putting them in the parlor.

This all disappears because women also are going to the workforce, right.

So because all the men are gone.

So all of these things are happening at the same time.

And to my understanding, like, the number of deaths is just so great that the old systems

cannot hold anymore.

There is no time to mourn the way they were when there's so many.

So many.

If you imagine between World War I and the

influenza epidemic, people dying.

Right.

I'm allowing myself to feel the things that I think sometimes I

intellectualize, you know, my background.

I. I'm used to talking about a lot of things

that are easier to intellectualize.

I'm really trying in this conversation right now to feel the things and to kind of allow

that cultural memory to pass between us as we're having this conversation.

And I'm fascinated by these objects that you've just described.

And I want to know.

I know that a lot of the work that you've done

in this study, this very academic study, has also been about curating and art.

Can you just talk about some of the pieces that you've held, You've displayed, curated,

and some of the ones that have really made a difference to you?

Because I know that experience of being.

I've never curated an art museum exhibit, but

I know that feeling of.

Of finding something that really does speak to

me and just allowing it to change, you know, really just write a line of.

In the register of my life.

Yeah.

Can you talk about some of those objects?

Because I. They're gone in so many ways, as you've described, and I want.

I want to know more about them.

Yeah, well, I'll backtrack a little bit and say, the first time I really

started thinking about death in the way that has now manifested through Mormon anatomy.

And ultimately, this book is.

I went to Europe for the first time after I graduated college, and I had studied

intellectual history, I'd studied European history, but no one had talked about the kind

of things that I saw in the churches and museums of Europe.

And so I saw paintings of saints who had been decapitated, who were holding their heads up,

pictures of whole fields of saints, you know, in crucifixion scenes with dripping blood.

And then these objects that are called memento mori, which is what I named My book after.

So I have a photo I took on that trip in 1994 of this very strange wax figure.

It's about a foot long maybe, and it's hyperreal.

And it depicts a decaying corpse that is also Jesus Christ.

And so you lift the breastplate off and you.

I mean, I grew up Catholic.

Ah, you grew up Catholic.

So this is very familiar to you.

This is very familiar.

You're a. But for the people who didn't, like

you will be shocked at the amount of detail that they've included in this wax figure

that's just there in the middle of an otherwise very beautiful and not death

obsessed building.

Yeah. And the focus on the corpse, this like beautiful human corpse.

And so growing up in suburban California, my introduction to death was like in the goth and

heavy metal subcultures and horror movies.

So I was into all that stuff.

But seeing beauty mixed with death was

something I had never even suspected.

And I had studied art history in college and

high school.

My teachers never said a word about this tradition, you know, but they filled the

museums, they were everywhere.

And they, you know, so there are many other

memento.

More there.

If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they have this incredible ivory

there.

It's a set of ivory rosary beads.

And the center bead is.

You're nodding.

I think you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Half living, half dead, centerpiece.

And then all of these were meant for very

wealthy people to contemplate their own death so they could live a life true to their own

values.

Right.

So that's like the older stuff, that kind of

baroque and beyond.

But then in the 19th century, our first

exhibition at the Morbid Anatomy Museum was called the Art of Mourning.

And so we were really thinking about the intersections of art, beauty and mourning.

And what we showed in that exhibition.

We had death masks.

So death masks are when, you know, before photography, but then also long after

photography, when someone died, people would take a cast, a plaster cast of their face and

then make little copies of it, sometimes in bronze, sometimes in plaster that you could

own.

And so we had a few of those.

We had memorial photographs.

So from the beginning of photography until.

Well, it seems like it's coming back now.

But certainly up until the early 20th century, it was very, very common to take staged

professional photos of the dead, often in poses that were called Sleeping Beauty,

basically looking as if they were just asleep in bed.

And there are many, many photographs.

We worked with an amazing collector named

Stanley Burns, who maybe you've heard of he runs an archive where he specializes in these

photos, and he very generously lent us many of them.

And then we also had pieces of memorial jewelry.

So people would make jewelry in the shapes of a dove ascending, which was to commemorate a

soul, or clasped hands, which meant the everlasting bonds between the living and the

dead.

And in black, often in jet or other sort of black stone.

And then you have hair art, which is probably my favorite.

And so this is a tradition that goes back to the 18th century, but really goes popular in

the 19th century, where people would make objects and artworks and jewelry out of the

hair of the beloved.

And this could be the dead beloved, often was the dead beloved.

But it could also be someone you were separated from or someone you had a strong

bond with and you just wanted a sentimental token of them.

And we actually have at Morbid Anatomy a woman named Karen Bachman who kind of reverse

engineered how the Victorians did it, and she teaches it for us.

And I took that class.

Really?

Yes, really.

And it's fantastic.

And I took this class and I was really struck by how difficult it is to work with human

hair.

You really need to concentrate, you need to go

slow.

It's a very finicky medium.

And doing this for a long period of time, it

was so meditative that I began to think.

I think these morning arts were also about

mourning itself.

You know, it was a way of soothe, like in a very quiet, gentle way, working with this

material piece of your loved one.

In a way, you have to go slow and you have to

take your time.

And then you have this beautiful object at the end.

But I really think it's also about the process.

This is literally under the.

The category of morbid fascination.

So forgive the follow up question, but would the hair traditionally be taken before or

after the person had passed?

After, if you were commemorating the dead.

But then there was also, like I said, a lot of stuff with the living.

And there were even these family trees made out of hair.

So while someone was.

While the family was alive, you see all these

pieces that are labeled, all these different colors.

So you have the children, the adults and the dead all woven together.

If your listeners look up hair art and look on Google Images, you'll see incredible,

incredible things.

Joanna Ebenstein is with me.

Memento Mori is the book.

Morbidanatomy.org is the website.

I'm Jared Rizzi, and this is Buried in Work,

the Buried in Work podcast.

The way you've described this arc of the, you know, this entrance into modernity and all the

objects you've just described, I'm thinking about.

We spend so much of our modern lives scrubbing and perfuming and clipping and doing things

just to kind of denature, you know, the.

The kind of soft animal of our.

Of ourselves.

And yet I feel like whether it's the worn finger.

Well, of a rosary bead or the, you know, brittle hair that has been intricately woven

over time, there's this real understanding and appreciation of the kind of the grist and bone

and just oil and grease of being a human being.

That is powerful stuff, and it is not in the culture right now.

How do you deal with that disconnect when you're talking about something that is so

present and then so absent?

I think it's a great point.

I think we've become very uncomfortable with

the materiality of the body, and maybe that is part of the reason why we've turned away from

death, because it really does bring up unpleasant materialities, too, sometimes.

Right.

Smells or watching the face of your loved one

transform from a human to something that does not feel like them anymore.

Yeah.

And maybe there's a sense in which, because we

don't really trust our own materiality and other materiality makes us uncomfortable.

That might be part of why death has moved off stage a little bit as well.

Have you ever done or worked with, like, a death doula or someone in that

capacity as part of how you're thinking about either the pieces that you're curating or the.

Or creating or curating or the work that you did for the book?

Yeah, for sure.

So for the chapter on.

Is it just the chapter on grief? There were a few chapters on the book that I

realized I wasn't really qualified to write without help, and so I did.

So the Morbid Anatomy community is full of death doulas, which won't surprise you.

And so I was friends with a lot of them, and so I interviewed them and asked them questions

about what they would recommend people do and what they thought people most regretted on

their deathbed.

So I have the wisdom of death doulas, and also my husband.

He is a death doula and also a. He has a lot of experience with meditation in India.

So he's kind of bringing those two things together.

He does a.

You are like a stygian power couple.

That's like, I don't understand.

I want to go to one of these parties that

you're throwing.

That's.

That's all I've decided.

Hong Tu is weekly death meditations are Fantastic and beloved.

And so basically what he explains, which I think is super interesting, is that in the

Indian tradition he studied in embodiment is really seen as an opportunity to prepare for

death.

And so by becoming aware, you know, meditation itself is to try to help you through the death

process.

Because basically from this perspective, when

you die, you leave the body.

And this is like an unprecedented experience for us.

And so this being able to stay calm in any circumstance is what meditation allows you,

the ultimate circumstance being disembodiment and having to make the choices that will

decide what your next destination is after death.

Right.

So yeah, he does this for us every Sunday

morning at this point.

And they're really fantastic.

And so, yes, death doulas.

And I would also just say, and I wonder if you

feel the same.

Thank God for death doulas.

You know, like, I definitely, when I'm dying

or sick, will make use of a death doula, whether that's my husband or someone else.

I think what they're offering is amazing.

There's this concept that I talk a lot about in the book called the psychopomp.

And the psychopomp is literally, it's Greek for soul guide.

And a soul guide is a figure that guides you from the end of this life into whatever is

next.

So in ancient Greece, Hermes was a God who would escort you, et cetera, et cetera.

There are all these different psychopomps that could be animals, that could be deities.

Also priests, of course, work as psychopomps.

If you think of the last rites.

Right.

And you think of shamans and rabbis and all of this.

And I think that what's so beautiful about the death doula is they've taken over this role of

being a psychopomp, but in a secular way.

You don't need to be religious to have the services of someone who will be by your side,

who will help you prepar, who help you be ready to let go.

I think what they're doing is just incredible.

I have to ask, because you had the temerity to mention your own kind of end

is.

As someone who's thought a lot about this,

what do you want to include? What do you want to exclude?

And how have you.

Given the nature of that process, how have you organized your thoughts.

Yeah.

And your emotions about something.

That obviously takes up a. I mean, not many of us get to get to do this in our professional

time.

This is, this is mostly an off clock

experience for most, but this is really something that, that I imagine you've put in,

you know, kind of, you're in the top 1% of all people who've ever lived who've thought about

how they're going to go.

I don't know about that.

I'd say maybe in our era, I would say.

But I think the Egyptians spent well, think of the Egyptians.

They spent a lot of time thinking about how they were going to go.

Right.

That's what the pyramids were about.

That's, you know, so for us, yes, probably today I'm one of the people who thinks about

it the most.

Well, first of all, I would say I have gotten

so many great ideas from.

So I started at the beginning of COVID I started teaching a class, the beginning of

lockdown.

I should be more specific, teaching a class

for morbid anatomy called make youe Own Memento.

Befriending death with art history and imagination.

And I taught many, many iterations of this.

And I worked with people around the world and

I got so many great ideas from my students.

And one of my students was someone who had a terminal illness.

And her final project was to create the room she wanted to die in.

And she took a picture of it and it was beautiful.

And that really inspired me.

So that's her idea that I've taken into my own

life.

I would love to create the room I want to die

in.

I don't want it to be in a hospital.

I want to die at home with my friends and family.

That's what I can tell you.

That's what I feel very certain about.

And I will say I don't want to have a traditional.

Well, I would say if my family members feel different, I think it's really.

They trump it because it's really about their act of closure.

But left to my own own device, I would rather have a Green Burial of some sort, be buried in

a forest and have my body decompose and become other life.

That would be my preference.

Well, as someone who has spent a lot less time than you and yet has arrived at

a similar conclusion, especially about the Green Burial, I only feel like I must be

doing.

I've done a lot less work and yet I'm getting to the same answer.

So I can only hope that I've done a good job of looking at your paper during the exam.

I think it's a bigger thing, though.

Let's look, you know, go back to what we were saying about how much things have changed in

the last 200 years.

Embalming didn't even exist until.

Until around 1870, you know, so this is.

I think this is A flash in the pan.

And it's not good for.

We know it's not good for the earth.

We know it's not good for nature.

You know, I really feel there's something

perverse about taking and taking and taking from nature and not even giving back in that

final where we could give our body.

Not even that.

You know, like there's something so small

minded and petty about withholding the final gift that we could give back that could

generate new life.

So I think it's fascinating.

Yeah. To talk about it in that context of like, why I want to ask about a way

in which there's a socioeconomic component to this too, which is that you mentioned ancient

Egyptians, this giving back so much of what we know.

And I imagine this has informed the scholarship.

Part of what you've done is about what happens to wealthy people.

You know, the pyramids aren't made for regular, you know, Egyptian schmos.

I really, really struggled with the word there.

But now we're thinking about it.

There's a cultural awareness of all of these

strata of how we want.

And for people who are thinking about buried

in work, you know, they know that wherever they're coming into this process, they have a

lot of money.

They have a little money, they have a lot of time.

They have a little time.

They, they don't want to get into a deep

philosophical conversation or they desperately do.

They want to be able to enter this process and exit it and be better.

They just want to do a process and be better.

How much has that democratization changed

death and how much do we know now about poor people and middle class people dying that we

just don't even know about anything older than, I'm guessing, 150 years ago?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, the first thing I thought of when you asked that is thinking about the idea that we

now have of a cemetery being a place of permanent interment.

Right.

And that's.

Which is an American thing in some ways.

Right.

Like that's a European thing.

Well, I think it's, I think it might have started in England, I can't

remember anymore.

But it's like definitely a Western world

thing.

And it's a recent thing.

I want to say it's 1840s or 50s.

And until then, unless you were very wealthy, to your point, unless you were pretty much a

king or a queen or a noble person, you were just thrown into a, you know, you were thrown

to the churchyard and then you were dug up to make room for new burials.

Right. And Then those bones would be used to create these ossuaries or charnel houses,

where I'm sure you've seen them in the Catholic world, right, that were anonymous.

This is one of the better things that we're known for.

I think it is a wonderful thing.

You're noticing the art is pretty much, you know, we could talk about the art

all day long.

Oh, and the death culture.

I think Catholic death culture is pretty

profoundly great.

But, yeah, this idea that normal people would

even have a permanent internment is super new, you know, so like the last 150 or so years or

200 years, I guess we could say at this point.

So, again, I think people didn't.

If you were a commoner in the Western world, I

don't know about the east, but I will also say, like in the indigenous world, like, I

know that when the Spanish came to Mexico and tried to establish Catholicism, right.

And abolish the old ways in the Mayan area that I live in in the Yucatan, people would

bury their dead under the thresholds of their homes, and they would continue to consult them

as ancestors.

And this was one of the main things that the Spanish complained about, is that that people

were very, very resistant to the idea of putting them in cemeteries and would actually

go back, dig them up, and take them back home again because they felt they were lonely and

in this cold and dark place.

So I don't know about every culture, but I think probably a lot of indigenous cultures

have a more personal relationship with the bones of the dead.

They're not just in some space that they go and pray to or visit with once in a while that

it's much closer to home.

I want to ask about this process.

And now, you know, for people who are thinking

about this from the perspective of their own future passing or trying to advise a loved one

who might be thinking about this.

In many ways, the people who come to Buried in work and have these questions kind of burned

in the back of their mind with a lot of urgency, I imagine.

What are some cultural or philosophical jumping off points?

You know, I think about, you know, I. I had.

I had to officiate a friend's wedding

recently.

And before I did, just to kind of vent some steam, I watched the.

The Fleabag episode, the last episode of Fleabag that includes a wedding.

And I was like, as long as I don't.

I don't do some of those things, I'll be fine.

I'm just.

What are.

What are some launching off points that you

would recommend for people who want to delve into this a little bit more intentionally.

Yeah, well, first, I mean, that's really what I wrote the book to do.

So I'll just say, you know, the book that we're here to talk about today, I had a bunch

of early readers read it.

And one of them is a historian, Catholic historian of religions named Diana Pasulka.

And when she responded, she said, what you've done is you've written a modern book of the

dead.

And so basically, what is a book of the dead? A book of the dead are books that have helped

people navigate a good death experience.

And I would say, traditionally, also a good

afterlife experience.

This is a secular version.

Right.

So we're not talking about an afterlife, but basically there were different times in

history when these books were needed.

So for example, during the bubonic plague,

when there were so many dying and there weren't enough priests to go around.

And as you know, from the Catholic tradition.

Right.

To die properly in the Catholic tradition, you need to have the final rites by a priest.

And when that couldn't happen, people began to produce these books.

They were really popular books.

Some of them were almost like comic books.

They were for the illiterate that would tell you what to do without a priest in order to

navigate a good after, you know, a good death and afterlife experience.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is another example, and there's also the Tibetan Book of

the Dead.

So my book is really trying to provide.

It's like a 12 week program that is meant to help people get over their fear of death and

also help move towards what they think is a positive death, clarify what that is for them

and move in that direction.

And in that I also draw on the wisdom of death doulas, as I mentioned.

And what my husband would say is death doulas have this acronym they use, I think that's the

right word, called rugs, which is basically the things that hold people back from a good

death can usually fall under these four categories.

So R is regret, U is unfinished business, G is guilt, and S is shame.

And so one of the jobs.

Yeah, right.

Of a death duel is to help people work through that.

And so this book is also giving you prompts that will help you kind of at least start to

think about those things.

And for find a way to reconcile your life and

what a death doula also provides sometimes, which I think is really inspiring.

And I make.

One of the prompts is to create your own

legacy project, which is a project that sums up your life as you see it kind of it could be

left for your loved ones, it could be for yourself.

But I think these are beautiful things to do to help people see the bigger picture and to

forgive themselves and to, you know, I think so many people, again, without a religious

tradition.

And again, for those listeners who have a religious tradition, I envy you.

It's wonderful, you know, but for many of us in the modern world, we have to struggle and

find our own meaning around something that culture has provided no meaning for.

And yet it is something that each of us faces.

Right.

With very little preparation, emotional or spiritual or even material, as you're dealing

with, with your business.

Right.

So that would be my advice, is trying to have an honest reckoning with yourself and start

looking at what might be holding you back and what you might be afraid of.

And that's, again, what this book is meant to do, is help you in a very gentle way through

12 weeks of reading.

And then also writing these journal prompts

and doing exercises, help you figure out if you are afraid of death.

What is that fear? Exactly.

And how could one face that or how could one think about it differently?

How one can prepare in, like I said, through kind of this way of dealing with psychology.

But also there's a form in the back for filling out to leave to your next of kin that

has, you know, you know, there's lots of practical advice as well.

So there's all these things that you can do that I think can make you feel less anxious

about it.

Yeah, I hope it's hard for me to sum up

because it really is like the meat of the book is like 12 weeks of exactly that question.

Let me ask one final question about that fear and the anxiety, I think,

around this kind of how we began the conversation, and I'll end the same way, which

is, what about our current culture shapes that fear in a way that maybe hasn't existed in the

past?

What is a uniquely 2024 fear of death? And how is that different than the fear of

death that you've spent your academic and artistic life curating?

I don't know if I could say it's 2024, but I could probably say the last

50 years, probably.

And I think it's a death without religion,

honestly, in mythology or meaning.

I think that's what makes this time unique.

I have not in my studies found any other time

in history where a majority of the population, or a large portion of the population, let's

say, believed that death was simply the end and that there was no meaning and that we

didn't mean Anything, Right, Because God is dead for many of us, or we don't believe in

that anymore.

But for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our ancestors, there was a spiritual

understanding of life.

And I think that is what creates meaning for

many people.

So another thing that I really draw heavily on

this book is the work of Carl Jung, because I feel like he did a really beautiful job of

bridging kind of the old ways of thinking into the modern age into a more scientific

perspective, but at the same time acknowledging the importance of myth and

belief and not ever knowing that that could be capital T true, but nevertheless, living your

life according to your beliefs and your myths.

And so I think we're in a much more difficult time, and we all have to come up with our own

meaning.

And that's a big job.

It takes time.

You know, Jung would say it took suffering,

you know, like that.

The answer you come to, to this question of what happens after death comes from your own

suffering, your own struggles, and then ultimately you come up with your own answer.

And again, that can't be proven in this world, but it.

It can be lived into and died into and give your life meaning and death meaning.

I think about the creation of that meaning and the work that we all have to

do and how we live in a culture that is not just averse to that fear of death, but also

very averse to suffering.

We've tried to eliminate.

Just like we've tried to eliminate all the bad

smells and ointments that come out of ourselves, we've also tried to eliminate so

much.

And it's, you know, we consider it a great

success as a society where we've eliminated, you know, poverty for so many people and

lifted.

But there is a grist that is provided there that allows us to feel that satisfaction of

meeting at the end of.

Is hard work.

It feels hard because it is hard.

And I just, I'm so appreciative of the.

The work that you've done, the curation, the

scholarship, and this book, the.

The book Memento Mori, the Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life.

Again, I would point people to morbidanatomy.org which is your.

See some of the art there and a lot of the other work that you've.

That you've worked on.

Joanna, I really appreciate you.

I desperately want an invite to one of your

dinner parties to talk about death.

Next time you're in Mexico, let me know.

We'll have you over.

But most importantly, I just thank you for

providing a little bit of context for the place that we are both on, on this river right

now.

So I just really appreciate it.

And I just like to say one final thing, which is it is hard work.

But what I've really tried to do with this book is also make it fun.

It can be fun.

If we can be open minded and think of the mystery of death as both kind of astoundingly

fascinating and terrifying, then at least we can have a different entry point.

And so, you know, it's not scary work.

It doesn't need to be scary work to look at

this stuff.

In my opinion, at least that's what I've tried

to do in the book is make it gentle and fun.

So that I just want to say that don't be scared.

It's not that bad.

Well, it's, it's actually this is where the two missions really do dovetail.

Because whether it's Joanna Ebenstein and her book Memento Mori or the Buried In Work

website, which has of course not only the free resources but also the games, the, the, the,

the booklets, everything that you can provide, we want to make it easier, we want to make it

fun if we can, with the games to have these, these really challenging conversations.

I think this is one of the reasons why I'm so grateful for this, is that it does feel hand

in glove that what we're trying to do, although from very different perspectives and

hopefully people will come to either or both and feel that as well.

Again, the book Memento the Art of Contemplating Death to Live a better life.

Morbidanatomy.org I'm Jared Rizzi.

This is Buried in Work.

Thank you so much much for spending some time with us, Joanna.

It was so much fun.

Thanks so much for having me for the great

conversation and thanks everyone for listening.

I hope you enjoy.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the

Buried in Work podcast.

Remember, you can save 10% on our estate preparation package and Games with Code

podcast 10@boundedinwork.com.