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No one wants to talk about death.
If you think it isn’t that controversial of a topic, try asking people how it makes them feel and what their beliefs about death are. Even in the most neutral settings, the D-word immediately makes people recoil in fear and disgust. Talking about death is a bummer. For the particularly superstitious, even mentioning it attracts bad luck.
So how do you talk about something that no one even wants to name? Many languages have euphemisms to help blunt the sharp reality of death. In English, you usually “pass away”. A straightforward enough phrase for a euphemism. But then you have Danish where the dead have simply “gone away” as if on leave or the more existential “to become nothing” from the Japanese language.
If you ask Caitlin Doughty, a mortician famous for her YouTube channel on everything related to death and the funerary industry, the only way to talk about death in a constructive, healthy manner is to actually talk about death. No euphemisms. No optimism bordering on denial. No gloomy moping. Just acceptance.
Death Phobia: Our Collective Fear of Death
Why do we have such a hard time talking about death?
Most cultures celebrate life openly. Birthdays are one of the most prominent celebrations of life. It’s the day you were born so you commemorate it every year with a cake and a wish for another year on Earth. If you have a relative or friend who is expecting, you might get an invitation to a baby shower or a gender reveal. Maybe someone you know is getting married and offers to make you their best man or maid of honor. Even smaller accomplishments and milestones, like graduating from high school and drinking alcohol (legally) for the first time, are temporal landmarks of life that we celebrate with those closest to us.
Yet we shy away from talking about how to celebrate life and be ready for when it finally ends.
Research conducted by Merill Lynch Wealth Management, a wealth management services provider under Bank of America Corporation, and Age Wave, a firm that researches population aging, found that while 69% of Americans believe they should have their affairs in order by the time they reach 50 years old, nearly half of respondents over 55 years old didn’t have a will ready. Why the discrepancy? Most people just don’t know where to start with planning their death.
There are millions of travel blogs out there that talk about what you need to know about the country you’re traveling to and what you need to bring for your trip. We clearly know the importance of preparing for our departure but that doesn’t quite seem to translate as well when it comes to taking Charon’s boat to the other side.
It’s called the death taboo and it trains us to not talk about and be afraid of death. While it prominently manifests as a refusal to speak about death, either by refusing to talk about the topic entirely or dodging the topic with euphemistic language, it also features death emasculation — a tactic used to take away power from death.
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Death becomes less daunting when we create reasons as to why it isn’t so serious. If you’re Buddhist or Hindu, death is just a speed bump to reincarnation. On the other hand, people who practice a Judeo-Christian religion may choose to see death as just returning to one’s creator. No matter how you call it, it accomplishes one thing: It makes death less scary by erasing, or at least dulling, the realities of its physical permanence.
But when YouTuber and mortician Caitlin Doughty had her first meeting with death, it didn’t spark fear or a need to create ways to avoid the concept. Instead, it lit the spark of a lifelong love affair for everything about death.
Memento Mori: The Woman Behind ‘Ask a Mortician’
You might think of a mortician as someone with a dour expression and a constantly gloomy aura around them but there’s little to suggest that Caitlin Doughty is a mortician by trade. Her upbeat tone, bright silvery-blue eyes, and keen sense of humor only bring one word to mind: lively. Yet according to her, she’s always been fascinated by death.
She was only eight years old when the Grim Reaper first knocked. Well, thudded. Doughty was walking around in a mall in her home state of Hawaii when she heard the dull thud of a body falling from the balcony above onto the mall’s laminate flooring. A girl had fallen off the balcony and was left a pile of shattered bone and spilled blood.
You don’t forget seeing something like that and Doughty didn’t.
“That thud — that noise of the girl’s body hitting laminate — would play over and over again in my mind, dull thud after dull thud.” She wrote in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. Since then, she has thought of death every day of her life to the point that it no longer carries the stigma it usually does for the rest of us. It was just a fact of life. You’re born. You enjoy a few moments in the sun. Later, you die.
It sounds morbid and depressing but according to her, “We can’t escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.”
She went on to study death and culture at the University of Chicago where she majored in medieval history, an era known for a disease that killed millions. After learning why we feared death so much as a society and why it’s important for us to be able to process our grief properly, Doughty decided to take the practical route in advocating for death and the departed.
At 22 years old, the then aspiring mortician was hired to work at a crematorium where she picked up the dead, prepared them and their documents, and returned them to the arms of loving family members.
While she still works as a mortician today, she’s known to 1.65 million YouTube subscribers as the host of the channel “Ask a Mortician,” where she answers our most pressing questions about death, like whether your pets will eat your corpse if your body remains unattended, and talks about the history and politics behind death such as the rights of trans people to have their gender identity respected in death.
You see, when you die, you don’t completely cease to exist. Your existence has legal ramifications even after your soul, consciousness, or however you want to call it departs from this mortal plane. With the years she’s spent working in the funerary industry, Caitlin Doughty has learned that people don’t just fear death — they also don’t know how to protect themselves in death. That’s why she and a number of like-minded morticians, artists, and writers came together to form what they call “The Order of the Good Death“.
A Mortifying Advocacy: Pushing for Death Acceptance
The Order of the Good Death is an advocacy group that pushes for death acceptance and awareness to protect both the dead and the living. The organization sees the way that we think of death and handle death, both personally and legally, as broken in ways that ultimately harm us and those we love.
Few other cases make this as startlingly clear as that of Jennifer Gable. When she died of an aneurism on October 9, 2014, her only next of kin was her estranged father who decided to erase years of her life, passions, and struggles as a transwoman by having her presented in an open casket viewing as a man.
When Gable’s friends came to see her, they didn’t see the woman with whom they shared years of memories. Jennifer’s hair was cut short and they buried her dead body with her dead name which is better left unmentioned here in honor of her memory and in respect for the rule of law. Jennifer Gable had legally changed her name under Idaho law.
The only defense she could have had? A will.
That’s why one of the key tenets of The Order of the Good Death’s push for death acceptance and positivity is for laws that protect people’s wishes in death regardless of their “sexual, gender, racial or religious identity.”
Even if you’re sure that your next of kin will respect your wishes, there’s also the question of how you want to be laid to rest. Believe it or not, the way you’re given a send-off has a massive impact on the environment, thanks in part to the embalming chemicals that a mortician uses in the process of preparing a body.
It turns out that burials are a resource-intensive process that takes up a lot of material and money. Let’s start with the environmental costs. Burials typically result in greater carbon emissions than cremation and require hectares more of space. Each plot dedicated to the dead is one plot less for the living, driving further scarcity in the real estate market. This is without talking about the health costs that embalming takes out on the living. When you bury a body underground, you’re also burying the chemicals used to preserve it and these chemicals find their way further underground where it eventually reaches our water sources.
Traditional cremations aren’t foolproof either. They release mercury and dioxin into the air and take up a month’s worth of energy. That’s why the morticians over at the Order are trying to make people more aware of sustainable death practices that not only help the environment but also reduce the influence of the $20 billion funeral industrial complex that turns the grieving process into corporate profit by guilting families into financially ruinous choices.
Knowing all that, how do you actually take steps to prepare for your death?
A Mortician’s Guide to Dying Well
Mortician’s Tip #1: Your Funeral Shouldn’t Cost $15,000
According to Caitlin Doughty, funerals can be absurdly expensive. The average funeral in the U.S can cost families from $9,000 to $20,000. It sounds outlandish but you can rack up costs pretty quickly if you don’t know what you’re walking into. The basic service fee alone is $2,000 as of 2019 with added costs for transportation, embalming, and preparation of the body and the viewing itself. Add to that the costs of a casket, hearse, grave marker, and flowers and you’re looking at a small fortune.
The way to get around this is with a direct cremation which is the least expensive option available. But if you want to give your loved ones a chance to see you one last time, you can opt to have a simple, natural viewing before the cremation.
Mortician’s Tip #2: Prepare Your Loved Ones for Your Death
Doughty says to be ready for your family and friends to deny the reality that you will die someday, perhaps unexpectedly, whether they like it or not. why have the “corpse chat” with them? Because more likely than not, they’ll be the ones dealing with the aftermath of your death and you want your executors to be ready to do exactly what you want them to. Before you can get to that, they need to get comfortable first.
Mortician’s Tip #3: Have a Death Plan
Death plans are the checklist and guidelines you leave for your family to follow. It tells them what to do with your body after you die as well as what flowers you’d like. Plus, in the age of the internet, another thing you want to mention there is what your more tech-savvy family and friends can do to your social media like deactivation, deleting all your messages, or memorializing your account.
Aside from those three tips, it’s also vital to plan your estate, that is, the money and assets you leave after you die, and write your will even without a lawyer.