reminder of mortality

Participants, including the pope, had ashes sprinkled on their heads in the customary reminder of mortality during the service in the Basilica of Santa Sabina on Rome's Aventine Hill.

Updating the classical memento mori, a reminder of mortality, the Tennessee artist depicts toys, ornaments and Halloween decorations.

It was an evolution revealed in “Portraying Pregnancy,” a 2020 exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London that demonstrated how, since the 16th century, “the response to the unsettling physical reminder of mortality and sexuality engendered by pregnant bodies changed.”

The artist Valerie Hegarty wanted to blend fiction with fact: She imagined a Dutch Vanitas painting — a reminder of mortality — had been stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and hidden here, only to be abandoned when the pandemic struck.

An unexpected knock these days can provide a reminder of mortality, as it surely did for the healthy British gentleman who tweeted about answering his door and coming face-to-face with a team of paramedics in full, space-suit-looking protective gear who had come to take him away in an ambulance.