Not as a morbid fascination, something out of a cabinet of horrors or a part of a Halloween spoof, but as a part of an essential decor, as a constant quiet hollow eyed reminder of the passage of time and the limited span we have on this earth – a memento mori, a perpetual souvenir of transiency, reminding you that someday, not so far down the time line, your skeleton will join that of your ancestors and share the common faith binding all life together – death.

There is nothing sad or disturbing about it, no despair or angst, just a quiet buzz of melancholic acceptance of the natural course of things. Melancholy is a comfortable feeling, a way to deal with inevitable personal and collective tragedies, a peace of something fully processed in its inevitability. Death always comes as tragedy and a release, allowing space for new things and new life to flourish from what was left behind. We need to be reminded of our own mortality to not get lulled into a false sense of security and a delusion of grandeur of our own person, to keep us firmly grounded and impose immediacy and haste onto our actions because, if given forever, no one would ever do anything. We’d know that there was infinite time and that things can simply be postponed indefinitely, and in this forever would become a burden, a noose never really tightening enough to snuff u out but leaving us gasping for air.

We do things exactly because we are limited by an expiration date, exactly because we don’t have forever, and exactly because we don’t know how long any one of us or the people we love get in this draw. You might watch the sun rise and set in three digit ripeness of deep old age or go away in a day, month or year, and this imposes urgency to move, act, do, create, love, care, leave something of value when your number is up. Poets, writers, painters, philosophers and thinkers put skulls on their desk for a reason – not to be weird or macabre dramatic misfits, but to remind themselves to continue creating because the current feeling of immortality and not being able to imagine the world going on without you is an illusion of the sensed and faculties. And as a slave stood behind the emperor with a laurel crown above his head and earthly bounty prostrated before him, he whispered in the Emperor’s ear, so we should repeat each day when hubris begins to take over: “Remember you are mortal”.