Happy Reaper Jacket Button

I’ve collaborated with the amazing designer Clark Orr to make a very special memento mori. A memento mori is an object designed to help the owner reflect upon their mortality. It’s part of the ancient tradition of ars moriendi – the art of dying – and is designed to help free the individual from the oppression that comes from the frenetic denial of death.

Traditionally a memento mori defines death as that which marks the end of our life, and has been connected with a philosophy that advocates a type of detachment from the world. However philosophers as powerful as Heidegger, psychoanalysts as great as Lacan and theologians as brilliant as Tillich remind us of the ancient insight that death is not something that simply marks the end of life… but is an essential element of it.

What they mean is that a sense of lack, or non-being, is part of what it means to be – that we are human (non)beings. More than this, they guide us into the insight that the lack which clings to us, if it is faced, is a gift. A gift that helps us muster up the courage to truly affirm existence and shout out an amen to life.

With this in mind I we created this “Happy Reaper” jacket pin that people can wear, an object that not only reminds us that death walks with us, but that this death is a possible friend to embrace rather than a somber specter to flee from.

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