Dear Readers,

As I have written in these pages before, I lost my mother-in-law and my mother within ten months of one another. A year later, I lost the only grandmother I knew. Losing someone close to you is an experience you can grasp in only one way. The utter finality of death is something we rarely encounter otherwise—the person we once knew and touched is, as J.C. Scharl puts it, “Not Here Anymore.” When Death comes calling, we human beings find that we are indeed frail, helpless, and without power over our own fates.

That is what this issue of Fare Forward is about. Given that each of us will someday die—rich or poor, gifted or clumsy, popular or obscure—we firmly believe that this great enemy of humankind ought to be looked firmly in the face. Generations before us called this posture memento mori—remember that you will someday die. We moderns sometimes think that we might outwit death, as Alex Sosler writes in “Needing to Die.” But in the end, this is only hubris. To acknowledge the eventual end of all our strivings is the better way.

Refusing to face the reality of our deaths only gives death more power over our lives. Charlie Clark explores what a real life in our long-lasting, increasingly fragmented existences could be in “Delete Your Account: Why Canceled Is the New Dead.” J.C. Scharl wrestles with how to walk the road that acknowledges the reality of both death and life in “Memento Mori, Memento Vitae.” And in “Quality of Life,” poet Patricia L. Hamilton recalls her mother’s last days and the release of the end.

In “Getting Acquainted with Death,” Sara Holston interviews two Dominican priests who have, between them, ushered hundreds of dying souls out of this world. “It’s funny,” Father Timothy Danaher said during their interview. “People are looking to me to be an authority on this—but they’re about to know far more about what happens after death than I do.” Yet, he says, to those who are about to die, the great fear of death that most of us experience seems to recede in the face of the mystery before them.

We shall all die, friends. Until then,

Fare forward,

Sarah Clark

Editor-in-chief