"Morris lived for many years with her gravestone standing in the corner of her library, the ne plus ultra of memento moris."

"She was an inveterate traveler but also prized her house in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy; she wrote often about its snuggly, hyggelig qualities. Death for her may be something akin to merely being in, to borrow the words of the novelist Joshua Cohen, a bed with a lid. 'I am attracted to decline, to the melancholy spectacle of things that get old and die,' Morris told Leo Lerman in a Paris Review interview. She also joked that when she departed, the headlines would read, 'Sex Change Author Dies.' Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on Oct. 2, 1926, in Somerset, England. From 1964, when she began taking hormone pills, to 1972, when she had the surgery, she transitioned to female from male, a process documented in 'Conundrum' (1974), her critically and commercially successful memoir. She wrote more than 40 books, the bylines nearly evenly divided between James and Jan.... She wrote a fair amount of doddle later in her life; not all of her stuff is worth the investment. (If you can make it through her books on Lincoln and Canada, you are a hardier person than I am.)"

From the obituary by Dwight Garner in the NYT, which distinguishes itself with a headline — "Jan Morris, a Distinctive Guide Who Took Readers Around the World" — that does not say the thing that Morris joked would be the one distinction in the headlines for her obituary. In place of the distinction "transgender," the Times gives Morris the distinction "distinctive." 

I was intrigued by Garner's phrase "the ne plus ultra of memento moris." One's own gravestone is indeed the ne plus ultra of memento moris.

I mulled over whether "ne plus ultra" and "memento moris" should be italicized as foreign language words and looked them up in the OED. 

"Ne plus ultra" — the furthest attainable point or peak of perfection — has been in use in English since the 1600s. A restoration era play has the line "Now Madam, you have seen the ne plus ultra of Art."

"Memento mori" has the distinction of appearing first in a work of William Shakespeare: 

Bardolph: Why, Sir John, my face does you no harm.  

Falstaff: No, I’ll be sworn; I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death’s head, or a memento mori. I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire and Dives that lived in purple – for there he is in his robes, burning, burning’. (Henry IV, Part 1 3.3. 24 – 28)

Falstaff makes good use of Bardolph's face. It looks like the face of a man burning in Hell and thus serves as a memento mori, a sobering reminder of death.

ADDED: I was fascinated by this quote from Morris: "What I can’t stand is being patronized by men.... Treated as a second-class citizen. Just because I’m a woman, there are people now who think I haven’t got a mind any more. Sometimes even those who’ve known me before." Presumably, "before" refers to the various treatments she received, including hormone therapy. Did the hormones change how she wrote? "She wrote a fair amount of doddle later in her life," the author of the obituary opines, and I imagine that sounded okay to write because the decline seems to have to do with age and not the hormone therapy. It's politically incorrect even to ask the question whether the female hormones had a negative effect on the writing.