Dying Well Is Living Well: What a Priest and a Mortician Reveal About the Psychology of a Good Death

William Michael Harnett's 1879 painting Memento Mori places a skull at the center of the canvas beside a spent candle and an emptied hourglass. It does not console. It confronts. A recent commentary in the National Catholic Register — drawing on the lived witness of a Catholic priest and a mortician — makes the same move: the more deliberately a person remembers their death, the more fully they can inhabit their life.

That claim is not pessimism dressed in religious clothing. It has deep roots in Catholic anthropology and is finding confirmation in the psychology of resilience.

The practice secular culture devalued

The Latin phrase memento mori — remember that you will die — belongs to a tradition stretching from the Desert Fathers through the medieval ars moriendi manuals and into the Ignatian exercises of the sixteenth century. For centuries, Catholics understood contemplation of death not as morbid indulgence but as a clarifying discipline. What you value, how you treat others, where you place your ultimate trust: all of it comes into sharper focus against a finite horizon.

The priest and the mortician in the Register commentary represent two vocations that require sustained proximity to death. One anoints the dying. The other prepares the dead. Between them, the full arc of dying is held with care and intentionality — and what they carry is not esoteric wisdom but something with a recognizable psychological structure.

What the research on mortality shows

Social psychology has spent decades studying what happens when people are reminded of their own mortality. Terror Management Theory, developed in the 1980s by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, argued that mortality awareness generates existential anxiety and that much of human culture functions as a buffer against it. On that account, death reminders are destabilizing.

A growing body of research complicates the picture. Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun at the University of North Carolina Charlotte documented consistent patterns in which confrontation with mortality — through illness, loss, or near-death experience — produces expanded meaning, deepened relationships, and renewed purpose rather than defensive withdrawal.[^3] Their research across diverse populations found that a substantial majority of trauma survivors reported positive psychological change following encounters with mortality, including greater appreciation for life and increased sense of personal strength.

That is not a claim that death is good. It is a claim that the encounter with death, when integrated rather than suppressed, generates movement toward what matters most. The Catholic tradition named this dynamic centuries before psychology had a vocabulary for it.

The Catholic anthropological framework

The Catholic Christian understanding of the person is not reducible to psychological categories, but it speaks directly to them. The Vitz, Nordling, and Titus meta-model of the person understands the human being as a unity of body and soul, created for relationship with God, wounded by sin, and oriented toward a transcendent end.[^1] This is not an abstract formula. It is a map of the human interior that takes mortality seriously as a constitutive feature of experience rather than a problem to be solved.

Where secular therapeutic models often treat death anxiety as a symptom to be managed, the Catholic model treats mortality awareness as a teacher. The person who knows they will die is the person capable of asking what life is for. The discipline of memento mori is, in this framework, an exercise in anthropological honesty — it locates the person correctly within the order of things: finite, dependent, loved, and destined for something beyond the present moment.

Viktor Frankl, whose logotherapy emerged from the lived experience of Auschwitz, argued that the capacity to find meaning in suffering — including the suffering of finitude — is the foundational human psychological capacity.[^2] The person who has integrated mortality into their worldview is not fragile in the face of loss. They have already rehearsed it. Frankl's observation that the absence of meaning is itself a form of pathology bears directly on mortality: the person who cannot integrate the fact of death into a meaningful framework is left with anxiety that no coping technique alone can resolve.

What the mortician and the priest know

In clinical terms, the witness of these two vocations functions as what researchers call a corrective emotional experience. When a person witnesses someone who is not destroyed by proximity to death — who carries a quality of peace precisely because of that proximity — it challenges the implicit assumption that mortality is simply catastrophic. Both the priest and the mortician embody, in their professional formation, what psychologists call death acceptance. And death acceptance, as distinct from death denial, is associated with lower anxiety, greater life satisfaction, and more meaningful engagement with the present.

The priest at the bedside and the mortician in the preparation room are practitioners of a form of care that integrates dimensions of the person that clinical psychology has often bracketed. Their presence communicates that death is not unspeakable, that the dying person is not abandoned, and that the body, even after life has left it, retains a dignity that demands reverence.

The gap in clinical training

One persistent gap in contemporary mental health care is the reluctance to engage directly with questions of death and ultimate meaning. Research on the therapeutic alliance — the relational bond between therapist and client that consistently predicts treatment outcomes — indicates that depth of engagement matters as much as technique. Clients who feel met at the level of their deepest concerns report stronger alliances and better outcomes.

Surveys of clinical training programs reveal that death and dying receive minimal formal attention in most curricula. Therapists are trained to manage anxiety, build coping skills, and identify cognitive distortions. They are less often trained to sit with a person inside the question of what death means, or to hold the tension between finitude and transcendent hope. The Catholic mental health framework addresses this gap by taking seriously both the psychological and theological dimensions of the person, refusing to reduce the person to their symptom profile.

Positive psychology and the full spectrum

Positive psychology in its early formulations was sometimes accused of selective attention — focusing on flourishing in ways that bracketed grief, limitation, and death. The field has matured. Martin Seligman's later work on meaning and engagement, and the robust literature on posttraumatic growth, both point toward a more honest account: one in which the full range of human experience, including its darkest registers, is the raw material of flourishing rather than an obstacle to it.

This is consistent with the Catholic approach to good news. Reporting on what is life-giving does not require pretending that death does not exist. The good news, in the deepest sense, is precisely news about what death means and what lies beyond it. A culture that cannot speak honestly about dying struggles to speak honestly about living.

What good care looks like

The work of integrating mortality into a flourishing life is not completed in a single conversation. It is the work of a lifetime, carried out in the ordinary practices of prayer, community, and sacrament. When people are helped to remember their death with faith, with community, and with the sacramental resources of the tradition, they tend to live differently — more presently, more freely, more lovingly.

Harnett's skull, spent candle, and emptied glass are not invitations to despair. They are invitations to attention: to ask, while there is still time, what this life is for. The priest and the mortician, each in their own register, have always kept that question open.

Source: National Catholic Register, "What a Priest and a Mortician Teach About Dying Well," published June 9, 2026.

References

[^1]: Vitz, P. C., Titus, C. S., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). The Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice. Divine Mercy University Press.

[^2]: Vitz, P. C., & Faria, A. A. (2022). The absence of positive psychosocial characteristics in the lives of mass school shooters. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 37, 17–37. Citing Frankl (1978): the absence of meaning is often a mental pathology and higher meaning is needed for a flourishing life.

[^3]: Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. — posttraumatic growth research, University of North Carolina Charlotte — documenting consistent patterns in which confrontation with mortality produces expanded meaning, deepened relationships, and renewed purpose.