> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.countermarch.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Melancholy and Memory - URL: https://www.countermarch.org/melancholy-and-memory/ - Published: 2026-11-06T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-06T16:00:32.000Z - Description: Tempus fugit; memento mori. - Author: Scott P. Richert - Tags: Faith Incarnate, From the Archive My Aunt Liz, my mother’s younger sister, passed away unexpectedly on October 30, 2021\. The death of a loved one at any time of year is emotionally tough; but there’s something about a death in the fall, when nature itself seems to be passing away (at least here in the Midwest, where I’ve lived nearly all of my life), that leaves me even more somber and melancholic. As I write this at 8 PM on All Saints Day, it’s as dark as midnight outside my window. It will be just as dark at 6 AM tomorrow — All Souls Day — when I wake up for my morning run. Fr. Tony Steinacker will offer Mass for the Holy Souls at SS. Peter and Paul here in Huntington, Indiana, at 7:30 PM —once again in the dark, after, perhaps, a typical gray November day. I don’t mind being melancholic on All Souls Day. If melancholy is good for anything, it’s for stimulating the memory. And tomorrow there will be a lot to remember — good times and some not so good; holiday joy and family fights; and the golden threads running through it all, our shared history and heritage and, above all, our shared faith. My Catholicism comes from my mother’s family, and Aunt Liz remained a Catholic to the end, not simply despite but even, I suspect, because of the trials and pains and sorrows in her life. As fall darkens its way into winter, we retreat indoors into the warmth and the light. Here in the Midwest, these months are a time for family, a time when, whether we want it to or not, the world forces us closer together. Many of my most fond memories of Aunt Liz and my mother’s family center on Thanksgiving and Christmas, from my earliest recollections of holidays in my grandmother’s old house after my grandfather passed away nearly fifty years ago, to turkey dinners around makeshift tables at Uncle Paul and Aunt Molly’s, or Aunt Liz and Uncle Denny’s — all now gone to their rest, along with the first of my cousins, Ted (the eldest son of Uncle Paul and Aunt Molly), and all before their time. The rest of us will gather this coming Saturday at Aunt Liz’s parish in Essexville, Michigan, to say our goodbyes and to pray for the repose of her soul. In the years since my grandmother passed away the day before the First Sunday in Advent 2002, we’ve celebrated fewer holidays together and spent more time reminiscing at wakes and funerals. That is the way of all flesh: Where Aunt Liz has gone, we will someday follow, and some of us sooner than we expect. *Tempus fugit*; *memento mori*. Time flies; remember death. Or as Isaac Watts put it in that most melancholic and yet hopeful hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past”: > Time, like an ever-rolling stream, > Bears all its sons away; > They fly forgotten, as a dream > Dies at the op’ning day. We cannot stop time, but we can choose to remember death and, in remembering our death, to remember those who, in the words of the First Eucharistic Prayer, “have gone before us with the sign of faith,” which the Third Eucharistic Prayer, in Masses for the Dead and on All Souls Day, reminds us is baptism: “Grant that he who was united with your Son in a death like his, may also be one with him in his Resurrection.” This is the reality of the Communion of Saints, bound together in baptism in a bond that even death cannot break. We, the living, pray for those who still live, but we pray also for the dead, “that they may be loosed from their sins” (2 Maccabees 12:46). And they, in turn, pray for us, that when the light fades from our eyes and the world slowly forgets our name, we may not be forgotten forever but, in the glorious dawn of the everlasting day, enjoy eternal memory. *A version of this essay was first published on November 2,2021.* ****The Countermarch** is a labor of love. If you found this essay thought-provoking or useful, [please consider supporting the site](https://www.countermarch.org/#/portal/support).