memento mori

Not even “Orange Grove Estates” as a memento mori.

“All photographs are memento mori,” as Susan Sontag wrote in “On Photography.”

The intoning of memento mori seeds a joyful duty toward the pursuit of human longevity as an act of grateful humility before the wonder of life.

The death trip is a memento mori, that old medieval art tradition, which reminds us that we all die.

A dire bout with esophageal cancer, with its attendant brutal treatments and radical reprioritization of life, seemed to force memento mori and carpe diem into an urgent competition for dominance — and the latter clearly won.