Memento Mori part 2

I found a short, interesting essay (by Elizabeth Brunner, "graduate student in English at California Polytechnic") about Hamlet, Yorick and memento mori. A few excerpts:

"Shakespeare's Hamlet wallowed in death -- facing his father's ghost, contemplating suicide, planning deadly revenge, and playing in a graveyard."

"The contrast between the memories of 'merriment' and the realities of disintegrating bodies traps both the audience and Hamlet somewhere between amusement and regret. Shakespeare plays on the appearance of skullbones, the exposed jaw pulled back as grin or grimace."

She relates this grin/grimace dichotomy to her own mother's death. For the funeral, she, at seven, and her sister were dressed up in pink dresses, matching her mother's dress: "We had posed in these matching outfits for a holiday photo just weeks before, with my mother propped up in a hospital bed, wearing a wig to cover the ravages of chemotherapy, and with chocolate bunnies cradled in our arms. For me, death will always be associated with pale pink dresses, a color made horrid but soon faded to nothing in a San Jose cemetery. I remain fascinated by this bizarre and tragic scene from my childhood, by this symbolic joining through shared pinkness of still living daughters with a dead mother."

"...Yorick's skull represents definitive knowledge: bodies rot after death. Religious explanations cannot compete with evidence from the graveyard."

Pic above: Hamlet und Horatio auf dem Friedhof by Eugene Delacroix (1839)