Weird World Adventures Season 2 Spotlight: Episode 5 Memento Mori

Death is the one thing every culture has to do something with. No civilization in recorded history has managed to just shrug and move on. We build pyramids. We erect cathedrals. We mummify our pharaohs and bury our warriors with weapons they’ll never use. We paint skulls on our altars and call them beautiful. We are, as a species, magnificently incapable of simply letting death be ordinary.

This episode of Weird World Adventures was my love letter to that refusal. Memento Mori: Death and Innovation took us across several states, across international borders, and across a philosophical landscape that I’ve been wandering for most of my academic life.

We started close to home, at the Science Museum of Virginia, which houses two exhibits that, in combination, constitute one of the most thought-provoking afternoons I’ve spent in a museum. BODYWORLDS — the internationally touring exhibition created by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, who pioneered the plastination process in 1977 — displays actual human bodies that have been preserved and posed to reveal the extraordinary complexity of what’s happening beneath our skin at any given moment. The science is remarkable. The philosophical questions it raises about the body, personhood, consent, and the display of the dead are even more so. Michael, predictably, had a field day. I married a man who genuinely enjoys looking at human anatomy, and BODYWORLDS is, for someone like him, essentially a paradise.

The Science Museum of Virginia also houses the Discover Steampunk exhibit, which feels, at first glance, like an odd pairing with a body plastination exhibition — until you realize that Steampunk, at its philosophical core, is deeply concerned with mortality. The Victorian era, which provides Steampunk’s aesthetic DNA, was obsessed with death in ways we tend to forget: mourning jewelry made from the hair of the deceased, death photography of the newly departed posed as if still living, elaborate funerary rituals that made grief into a visible, public performance. Steampunk aestheticizes that era’s machinery and fashion while often engaging, consciously or not, with its preoccupation with the boundary between life and death.

From Virginia, we traveled to Las Vegas to visit Real Bodies, another anatomical exhibition in the city of excess (which, now that I think about it, makes complete sense). Vegas knows how to make a spectacle of the extraordinary, and an exhibition of preserved human forms finds an oddly appropriate home in a city built on the premise that nothing is too much.

And then there was Day of the Dead in Puerto Vallarta, which is the most important stop in this episode to understand correctly. Día de los Muertos is not Mexican Halloween. It is not a spooky holiday. It is a profound and specifically beautiful cultural practice rooted in indigenous Aztec traditions of honoring the dead, merged with Catholic All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day traditions following Spanish colonization, resulting in something that is entirely its own. Families build ofrendas — altars — for their departed loved ones. They bring food, photographs, marigolds. They sit with their dead. They celebrate the ongoing relationship between the living and those who came before. It is one of the most genuinely moving cultural traditions I have ever had the privilege of witnessing, and I want anyone who reads this to approach it with the reverence it deserves.

We also visited Centralia, Pennsylvania — the town that has been on fire underground since 1962, where a coal seam ignition created a slow apocalypse that eventually drove nearly all of its residents away. Centralia is a memento mori for a whole community. Steam rises from cracks in the earth. Roads have been closed. A population that once numbered over a thousand people now counts in the single digits. It is strange, and sad, and completely unforgettable.

Memento Mori is streaming now on Amazon Prime, free for Prime members internationally. Watch it free on the Fawesome app via Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and other platforms. And do us both a favor: think about death today. Just a little. It’s good for you.