Memento Mori

Colleen Jurkiewicz Dorman • November 30, 2023

Just this week, my husband and I signed our wills, and the lawyer was careful to couch our transaction in gentle, abstract language: “When we lose you” she kept saying, instead of “When you die.”


It’s very uncomfortable to dwell on our death. But the Christian life does not just encourage us to do so: it demands that we do.


I once came upon a prayer consecrating the last two hours of life to the Blessed Mother. I have since found variations of the prayer online with different phrasing, but the sentiment of them all is the same: let me not be caught sleeping. Let me be ready.


“You can’t do all your homework at the end,” a deacon who ministers to the dying once told me. “Good Friday is waiting in the wings for all of us.”


I think of that a lot when I don’t particularly feel like praying, when I think I’m too busy to go to confession or when feelings of resentment fester inside me on Sunday mornings as I pack my family off to church. All our good deeds are like polluted rags, says the prophet. We have all withered like leaves.



You can’t do all your homework at the end. God is faithful. Are we?


“May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’” — Mark 13:36


©LPi

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