Professor Ross Menzies, 62, and his daughter, Dr Rachel Menzies, 33, are clinical psychologists and specialists in death anxiety. Skulls, mummies, coffins and gravestones are all grist to their existential mill.
RACHEL: When I was about five, Dad found a rat’s skull in the basement. He put it inside a clear display box and gave it to me. I kept it for years. It was a very touching gift; he understood just how fascinated I’d be by it.
From a very young age, I was obsessed with Egyptian mummies, so Dad took me to this holiday workshop where we learnt to mummify bits of fruit with salt. He bought me lots of books about mummies and helped me to learn hieroglyphics. Later on, I started to “mummify” my younger siblings, getting them to lie really still, pretending to remove their organs and wrapping them tightly in blankets. Later on, when I started at uni, Dad and I started to talk about death from a more academic perspective.
In 2018, we wrote a book about death anxiety for other academics and clinicians and then decided to write one for the general public [Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society won the 2022 Nib People’s Choice Prize]. I’ll write one half of a chapter and he’ll write the other half, then we edit each other’s work. We’ve worked together for so long, and know each other’s thoughts so well, it ends up sounding like one person.
Dad can be an easy person to fight with because he’s very stubborn and, being a professor, he thinks he knows everything – a touch of that classic academic narcissism. The whole family takes the piss out of him a bit for that.
We travel a lot together for work and this is when his anxiety comes to the fore: he has to be at the airport about three business days before the plane takes off. If his bag isn’t one of the first out, he’s convinced it’s been lost. He’s fine on the plane itself: it’s just the transitions. He’s more worried about shirts going missing than the plane crashing.
But that doesn’t stop us talking about practical things to do with his funeral. He’s prepared a photo montage to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. And the desk in his office will be converted into a coffin. One day, he’ll be sitting at it; the next, he’ll be inside it.
It doesn’t upset me: I like knowing that things will be the way he wants them. It’s about practising what we preach: facing death because, whether you face it or not, it’s coming. It makes life more meaningful somehow. Dad and I share the view that death is the end of consciousness, so when we die, there’ll be no “us” left to speak of.
The main thing we disagree on is my career. He’s always wanted to guide me, which I’ve benefited from, but I’ve also needed to go out on my own. It was important for me to build something independently of him, which is why I opened the [Menzies Anxiety] Centre [in Sydney’s inner west]. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t just want to join him.
I love my dad a lot. We’ve always been close and he’s someone I can turn to. We still like to go on holiday together – our next trip will be to Egypt – and we both love the Beatles.
The happiest I’ve ever seen him was on my wedding day in March 2021. It was a very generic wedding: nobody wore black and, fortunately, nobody died.
ROSS: Rachel was a very easy child, well-behaved and always wanting to please. She was also a prodigiously talented pianist who was playing in conservatoriums in Germany when she was five. I thought she’d become a concert pianist, but she lost interest when she was about eight. She always had a deep interest in ancient history and, as an undergraduate, thought about becoming a historian.
I have a photo of her mummifying her siblings. Her fascination with ancient Egypt is what sparked her interest in death and its rituals. She was asking the big questions from an early age; it never worried me. I remember for her HSC English, she wrote a suite of short stories. One was about a man who couldn’t cope with the passing of time, the notion that moments come and go, never to be remembered, so he photographed every sunset.
“Reminders of death can help us to lean into life.”
Gravestones, and what you like to have written on them, is an idea in psychology for dealing with existential issues, but I’ve never known anyone want to have one under a tree in their backyard, which is what Rachel wanted to do. I love the idea – reminders of death can help us to lean into life – but she was worried about what her young daughter, Evelyn, would make of it, so it hasn’t happened yet. She regularly sends me links about methods of burial, though, such as putting a body in a pod and growing a tree out of it.
Her history background has been so useful as we write our books together; it allows her to bring a broader view to our work. And, of course, the fact that she still wants to do stuff with her dad is very nice.
Was I hurt when she decided to build her own practice? It took me by surprise. It seemed crazy to me at the time because I know how hard it is to bootstrap a private practice from scratch. I thought it was a mistake to be honest, but I’m so proud of what she’s achieved.
I can definitely take liberties with her that I wouldn’t with other colleagues. We were speaking in Canada recently and I asked her to send me her slides to take a look at. I really liked a few, so I stole them and they appeared in my talk before hers. The next day, she told the audience they might recognise a few of them!
I don’t have a fear that Rachel will die before me, but I do think about it. It seems our inner voice haunts us when it comes to those thoughts that are the most distressing for us to entertain.
I love Rachel dearly. I think of her not as my best friend but my teacher. I certainly never expected that someone whom I once had to show how to put shoes on would ever be correcting ideas I hold in psychology. It’s a very strange thing.
At a world congress of CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] in Melbourne in 2016, I got chatting to the professor who’d be hosting the European conference. I found myself eagerly awaiting an invitation when he said, “So, can you give me your daughter’s details?” I remember being shocked; it was an absolute turning point.
