Nickie Muir: Rich and famous also die ...

Nickie Muir.

I've been thinking about death.

I do this every now and again, despite the fact that in a youth-obsessed culture, any consideration of the full course of our lives as humans is often seen as morbid wallowing.

We weren't always like this and I wonder if the blame can at least partly be attributed to the belief that the Pakeha mix of Anglo-Celtic culture is the same thing as the soulless consumerism that "the West" has propagated, like a global religious cult over the last half century.

The mantra of: "Gain is always good and loss is always negative." It's not. As a visiting friend mulled as we trawled rock pools tailing after a couple of excited kids with sticks and pockets full of shells and dead crabs. "Unrestrained growth is not culture, it's cancer."

Buddhist cultures don't have the same death-defying avoidance of considering the ends of our lives and in their temples, murals constantly encourage visitors to dwell on their own deaths in order to better consider what is really important in life. We did the same with our "memento mori" art works in medieval times and even brooches in Victorian times that included some reminder of death so that we could bear in mind the transience of our lives and gain some focus on where we might best spend our energy. In some ways my own collection of bones, started in childhood from a fascination of how the natural world worked; is my own memento mori, and a reminder of long hours of happy beachcombing.

Picking up physical remnants of once impressive creatures and wondering how they came to their end is one form of walking meditation that I've found more soothing for a busy soul's down time than channel surfing for unwanted products or trawling for click-bait. A seal skull and dolphin beak, a falcon's claw and what could be a dugong's rib bones sit alongside a feral cat's jaw and a paper nautilus. I like them better than any Lladro.

What is particularly fascinating is the delineation that Pakeha culture has between private and public displays of grief.

The huge outpouring of purple balloons and flowers and general flagellation in the streets over Prince's death is a lot more strident than what it sounds like when doves cry.

The same would apply to the deaths of Michael Jackson and Bowie, almost as though we were somehow convinced that in our "more is better" religion that are celebrity's fame and wealth should somehow protect them. Almost as if we've forgotten that the rich and famous must also, die.

Twenty years on, I'm still amazed, that as a young widow, I witnessed people crossing the road in order to avoid talking to me because I had become their memento mori and my very presence was confronting. And yet one year later, one still invited me to light candles in a public park to mark the passing of Princess Di - a woman neither of us had ever met.