When 28 Years Later came out a few weeks ago, with my partner we treated ourselves to a date at the horror movies… and we quite liked it! The part that stroke me the most and left me contemplating on for a while was the sequence following Isla’s and Spike’s meeting with Dr Kelson. A highly emotional part with phenomenal acting.
Isla comes to terms with what she was suspecting all along. She’s dying from terminal cancer and with the UK stack in a post apocalyptic limbo there is no treatment available.
Spike full of hope that Dr Kelson will be able to ‘fix’ his mum, is now left to face the inevitable loss of his mother in such a young age.
The grief before the grief
28 Years Later brings us face to face with our own mortality and inevitable death, sooner or later.
Life is just a dream on the way to death. James O’Barr said cynically in his graphic novel, The Crow.
Are we just slowly dying the moment we born? Are we just doom to an endless cycle of eventually losing everything we have ever loved and cared for?
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that although Eru’s personal gift to the Elves was their immortality, for us humans was our mortality. Only after they believed Melkor’s lies humans started to be afraid of death. This is something I contemplated on for many years.
Death, taxes and internet trolls are the only three things guaranteed in life, and death predates the other two for a few hundred of thousands years.
The great leveller!
As a child, death anxiety kept me up at night crying. Scared shitless about my own inevitable end, sooner or later. And I’m not Lemmy, I’d love to live forever!
All of these thoughts flooding my brain since we came out of the cinema.
Momento Mori, remember you must die. A phrase that may sound very depressing to most of us but we like it or not we all going to die at the end. Sooner or later.
But there is also an African proverb who says, ‘When death finds you, may it find you alive’. This can mean many different things for each one of us. For Isla maybe it meant that she can meet her end in her own terms, with whatever cognitive capacity she has left still intact. While she still remembers how much she loves her son, Spike. Before the cancer in her brain takes it all away.
Death Anxiety, The Fear Beneath All Fears
Irvin Yalom called death anxiety the root of all other fears. It often hides behind other unhelpful patterns in our lives like avoidance, addictions and numbness. In Staring at the Sun, Yalom urges us to bring our fear of death into conscious awareness, not to be morbid but to be free.
Yalom doesn’t see death as a problem to be solved, but as a reality to be faced with honesty and courage. He believes that the more we try to repress our awareness of death, the more it contaminates our lives in indirect and destructive ways through anxiety, midlife crises, broken relationships, and the sense that life is passing us by. Instead of hiding from death, he invites us to ask how we want to live in the light of it.
When we can look death in the face, Yalom says, we often live with more purpose, presence and connection. Facing death doesn’t diminish life, it intensifies it. It’s a reminder to cherish what we have, to forgive faster, to speak honestly and to take the kind of risks that make life worth living. Under this light, grief therapy becomes not just a place where we equip ourselves for healing, but also a place where we learn how to live fully, even in the shadow of mortality.
Mortality, Death Rituals and a Final Choice
Isla’s illness and her choice to die creates an intense moment. Spike is thrown into a world where loss is unavoidable and memory needs to be ritualised. Dr Kelson’s skull totem is a grim shrine, a reminder that life ends, we like it or not, and that those left behind must make sense of it and find new meanings for their own lives. His totem is also his own way to ritualise memory in a world that falls apart (does it though?)
The phrase memento mori, “remember you must die”, is a call not to despair but to live consciously. Death gives life purpose. In forgetting death, we risk living without purpose or presence. Maybe this is why we need to make sure when death finds us, finds us alive!
Grief and the Living
Dr Kelson is the memory keeper of a fallen world that is trying to be reborn. Radical change always comes with pain and maybe this is what he is trying to keep alive. The memory of a world going through the pains of death and rebirth (or resurrection). After all, death always needs to come first before rebirth.
It’s all part of life’s rituals and Spike’s role in this ritual is to find the best place for his mum’s skull on the totem and let her become part of the collective memories of the old world. The ritual may feel grotesque, yet it mirrors something deeply human. Our need to honour and remember the dead, to find some way to mark their place in our lives.
In grief therapy, people may need to be helped to create meaning after a loss. We can’t change the finality, but we can shape how we live with it.
For Yalom, grief is also existential. When someone dies, we are reminded of our own mortality. That’s why grief can feel so disorienting, it’s not only about who we’ve lost, but also what their absence says about our own life and a reminder that we also going to die.
The Gift of Loss
Yalom once wrote: “Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.” When we remember death, we wake up. We take more risks. We say what matters. Isla’s death wakes up something in Spike. It pushes him beyond innocence into awareness.
The totem becomes more than a monument. It’s a way of saying, I remember you. You matter. I carry you with me.
In a moment of directorial genius, Spike place’s his mum skull facing East, and in that very moment the Sun rises. A reminder that life goes on, and although a life cycle closes three new ones start.
Spike’s cycle as he embarks into the lonely path of self-discovery, Isla’s cycle as her essence is now part of the wider cosmos taking her in a journey through eternity and new born baby girl’s that through the ‘‘miracle of the placenta’’ was born healthy from an infected mother. The first born of a new world that no one knows how it is going to form.
What This Means for Grief Counselling?
In therapy, especially with clients facing grief or existential dread, they often explore death not always literally but of what it may symbolise. We ask, what would you do if you had five years to live? One year? One week? These questions aren’t meant to scare us but to help us focus.
Spike, in his childlike way, is doing what many of us try to do in adulthood, find a way to carry our grief and live on. Dr Kelson’s “Memento Mori” isn’t just an edgy phrase we make into a meme for our Instagram stories, it’s a way of living. One that invites us to stop passively doing life petrified of our mortality and become active participants and co-creators.
Learning to Live with Loss
Death doesn’t just happen at the end of life, it shows up in our dreams, our fears and our anxieties. For many men, especially those raised to be “strong” and stoic, death anxiety often hides beneath anger, disconnection and workaholism. But the fear of not being enough, not being remembered, not having mattered is still there, slowly eating us alive.
Spike’s ritual although strange and harrowing gives him something many of us need, a way to name the loss and continue living. He doesn’t move on, he moves forward, carrying his mother’s memory in a world that’s still dangerous and uncertain.
That’s often the work of therapy too. To hold space for the rawness of grief, the strangeness of facing death, and the possibility that even in the face of finality, there’s meaning to be made.
''Memento mori'' shouldn’t make us to obsess over death. We need to see it as an encouragement to live and remember. To be present. To speak truth. To mend what’s broken. To risk being known.
In a world where loss is inevitable, to choose this is a subversive act. And remembering, even with pain, can be an act of deep love.
Or as Yehuda Halevi put it a thousand year ago,
Tis a human thing, love
A holy thing, to love
what death has touched
George Papachristodoulou