Memento Mori

4 ideas

1. The untraceable caller who says 'Remember you must die'

   In 1950s London, the elderly Dame Lettie Colston and her circle, including her brother Godfrey, his wife Charmian and retired Chief Inspector Henry Mortimer, each receive an anonymous phone call saying 'Remember you must die.' Each recipient describes a different voice, and the police can never trace it. Mortimer concludes that the caller is, in effect, Death itself. Lettie, obsessed with catching the caller, is later bludgeoned to death by a burglar in her own home.

2. Response to mortality exposes character

   The same message produces opposite reactions depending on the hearer's relation to death. Those who cling to control, status and money hear it as persecution: Lettie grows paranoid and keeps rewriting her will, and Godfrey panics. Those already reconciled to dying, like the forgetful novelist Charmian and Mortimer, hear a courteous voice and answer calmly.

3. Remembering death as a daily discipline

   Mortimer argues that if he had his life again, he would form the habit of nightly composing himself to thoughts of death. In his view, keeping death in mind is not morbid but a practice that sharpens and intensifies life. People who refuse the reminder do not escape death; they only lose the steadiness that accepting it would have given them.

4. Wills as the last lever of power

   When the old lose physical and social power, the promise of inheritance becomes their remaining leverage, and the people around them reorganize around it. Mrs Pettigrew, the housekeeper, blackmails Godfrey with his past infidelities and schemes over wills. Legacies are rewritten to reward or punish. The result is that the last years of life are filled with the same greed and rivalry as the first ones, not with serenity.

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