ExtractMark Freeman Mark Freeman is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His research interests include narrative psychology, the psychology of memory and identity, theoretical and philosophical psychology, and the emerging field of the psychological humanities. His most recent books are Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (2010) , The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self (2014) , and Do I Look at You with Love? Reimagining the Story of Dementia (2021) . The title of this essay refers to Wallace Stevens’ (1923) poem ‘Sunday Morning,’ when he writes of death as ‘the mother of beauty’. (Stevens 1997 [1923]: 55) Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. A related idea may be found in Freud’s (1957 [1915]) brief meditation,...