Last night I dreamt that I was dead,
And when the eulogy was read,
All my friends and family said,
“She really tried her best.”
So begins “Memento Mori,” a song by award-winning Christian artist Carolyn Arends, who has been thinking about death a lot in recent years.
Not just anyone’s death. Her own. Though this isn’t her first lyrical brush with mortality.
“I’ve always been a touch death-obsessed in my music,” said Arends, 57. “As a songwriter, I’m interested in exploring ultimate questions, and in many respects, death is the ultimate ultimate question. If you use the process of writing songs as a way of getting inside the big mysteries, you’re going to end up writing about death sooner than later.”
Arends is hardly alone in that pursuit. Artists of faith have always written songs about mortality. In fact, artistic depictions of the afterlife are almost as old as humankind, as ancient as prehistoric cave paintings.
But this music isn’t that. As contemporary artists age, a topic that was once a far-off notion is now a lot more real—and urgent.
Just ask Randy Stonehill, one of the pioneers of Christian rock, who has been wrestling with some serious health issues lately.
Stonehill, 73, says those challenges “have certainly brought my thoughts about mortality into sharp focus. In my younger years, I felt pretty bulletproof, and death just seemed surreal to me.”
But for Stonehill and many others, death now seems increasingly imminent.
Two songs on Stonehill’s forthcoming album, due sometime in 2026, are as straightforward as it gets. On “One Last Song Before I Say Goodbye,” he croons, “It’s really been a thrill. / I’ll keep doin’ it until / They come to place those pennies on my eyes.”
Another, “The Last Day,” is paired with an especially stark music video. A doctor gently shakes his head no as a heart monitor flatlines; Stonehill wanders through a cemetery. Some lyrics:
On the last day, it just might be tomorrow.
On the last day, no one ever knows.
On the last day, time will never tell you.
On the last day, it’s the restless wind that blows.
On the last day, will you hear the angels singing?
On the last day, will you see beyond your sight?
On the last day, will someone come to greet you?
On the last day, down that corridor of light.
Stonehill isn’t the only one of his contemporaries who has imagined flatlining. In 2014, Bob Bennett was scheduled for open heart surgery—“where they flay you open like a carp,” he said—to replace a defective valve.
“And all of a sudden,” he said, “I’m making a will and thinking, What if this doesn’t go the way I want it to? That’s where I began to face my mortality.”
Bennett, 70, will soon release a new album, Everlasting Day. Always an open book in his songwriting, Bennett is especially vulnerable on the new tune “I’m Still Afraid to Die”:
I know who promises I will have a place
Forever with him to finally see his face.
I want to be comforted, but no matter how I try,
I worry and I wonder why I’m still afraid to die.
Bennett, who has been wrestling with health concerns in the past year, said, “It’s been surprising and a little shameful to me to realize how threatened my faith and attitude are just by not feeling well.
“We don’t talk about this much in our culture, even in church,” he continued, “but the idea of dying a good death doesn’t get much airtime. I don’t worry about what’s going to happen after I die. I’m worried, What if I don’t rise to the occasion? You have this fantasy that you’re going to go out with your boots on. Well, what if you go out with a whimper instead of a shout?”
However he goes out, Bennett is confident about what awaits him on the other side. The new album’s title track proclaims, “All I know is that Jesus / Is preparing a place / Where I will come home to stay.”
Like Stonehill and Bennett, John Michael Talbot has had some health scares in recent years. About a decade ago, Talbot came close to dying when his blood pressure soared to a potentially lethal 220/110.
He was rushed to a hospital, where he says “something supernatural” happened: Two angels—his guardian angel and the angel of death, one on each side—“escorted me out of the hospital room and allowed me to view paradise.”
“I was in an eternal realm,” he said. “I could see all of my sins, and I could see all of God’s mercy. And it overwhelmed me.”
Talbot said the angels returned him to his bed and doctors got his blood pressure under control with medication. But he’s thought about death a lot since then.
“For a couple years, I thought death was imminent,” said Talbot, now 71. “I’m better now, praise God. But ever since then, I’ve been ready to go.”
His latest album, Late Have I Loved You,shows that readiness. The title track, based on Augustine’s prayer of the same name, reflects a man prepared to meet his Maker:
I have tasted your bread; now I hunger for more.
I drink of your spirit; ever thirst now, my soul.
You touched me so gently; I long now for more.
Late have I loved you, O Lord.
Over the Rhine (OTR), the husband-wife duo of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, have recorded more than two dozen albums over three and a half decades, full of Holy Ghost–haunted tunes.
Their most recent project, 2024’s Hymn Time in the Land of Abandon, overtly addresses mortality on old standards like “I’ll Fly Away” and “In the Sweet By and By.”
But songs about mortality are nothing new to this couple. Detweiler, 60, said the first song he ever penned for OTR, “Eyes Wide Open” on 1991’s Till We Have Faces, had a reference to death.
“From the very beginning,” he said, “the inevitability of my own death was present in my writing. Johnny Cash said something along the lines of ‘There are only three subjects available to the writer: love, God and death.’ I’ve always tried to write about all three.”
“What I’ll Remember Most”—from 2003’s Ohio, recently named one of Paste magazine’s 50 best albums of the 2000s—includes this lyric:
This is what I’ll remember most about dying:
So many moments like ghosts
Slipping through my hands in vain.
Like her husband, Bergquist, 58, often addresses mortality in her own lyrics—perhaps no more poignantly than on “Wildflower Bouquet” from 2013’s Meet Me at the Edge of the World:
Bury my ashes with the dogs I loved,
My faithful companions from God above.
And ’neath a sycamore we’ll grow strong,
And the roots will bear us away.I’ll be singing loud and laughing long,
A blaze of glory and an untold song.
So there’s no need for tears, my friend.
Just bring a wildflower bouquet.
Like Over the Rhine, Carolyn Arends has been addressing death since her first album, 1995’s I Can Hear You. “Seize the Day,” her hit single from that project, includes a verse about a bitter old man who grouses, “One day you’re a boy, and the next day you’re dead.”
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Her self-described “death obsession” has never dimmed. “The practice of medieval monks greeting each other with memento mori (‘Remember your death’) has intrigued me for a long time,” she said. “This idea of keeping our death before us doesn’t have to be morbid. It can be liberating.”
She had a dream about those monks a few years ago, which prompted “Memento Mori.”
Then a monk entered my dream and started laughing.
That’s when the whole thing turned into Latin.Memento mori: Remember you will die.
So live the story you want to tell.
Memento mori: You only get one life.
So don’t be sorry; just live it well.
Bob Bennett first wrote about his own mortality in 1991’s “The Place I Am Bound”:
As my father before me and so now I,
Give pause to reflect on the day I will die.
As they lay me down in the cold of the ground,
Remember I am closer to the place I am bound.
His dad died at 72, so now that Bennett is a septuagenarian himself, he’s reflecting on that approaching day a little more frequently.
“As a kid, you know death is coming,” he said. “But there comes a time where it begins to become very personal. You start thinking, How long do I have? It’s a little daunting to start thinking about that kind of math.”
Daunting, but also liberating, as Arends noted. And even inspiring, said Talbot, who leads a monastic community.
“The classical teaching of the monastic tradition is that you should spend time every day meditating on death,” Talbot said. “Some communities actually recommend sitting in front of an open grave, thinking, I could be next.
“Meditating on death every day isn’t morbid. It’s supposed to inspire you to live every day like it’s your last.”
Mark Moring, a former editor at Christianity Today, helps homeless shelters, food banks, and other nonprofits with their fundraising.
