For many people, death is a subject that is avoided and most people still aren’t keen to talk about death and funerals. In 2021, almost half of the people surveyed for the SunLife (2022), Cost of Dying Report didn’t know whether their loved one wanted to be buried or cremated. Only 1% knew everything their loved one wanted for their final send off and almost 20% didn’t know anything.
The death-positive movement would like to see this change, believing that it would be much better for society if we spoke openly about death and dying.
Death positivity is most often reported in the context of quirky events like Death Cafes, places where people can gather to discuss death and dying over a slice of cake and a cup of tea or coffee. These clearly share a Death Positive ethos, but they are just one example of how people are trying to change the narrative around death and dying.
Death Positive advocates
One of the leading advocates of the movement, Caitlin Doughty, says being Death Positive does not mean being positive about death. Instead it is about developing a healthier attitude to death that will help people live better.
She began her Death Positive activism more than 10 years ago with a YouTube video series called, Ask a Mortician. In the videos she mixed humour with her expert knowledge as an undertaker to answer common questions about death and funerals. Her aim was to remove some of the fear and anxiety that surrounded the subject of death.
From that starting point Doughty went on to launch The Order of the Good Death, a non-profit group dedicated to changing the social taboos around death. For her and others in the Death Positive movement, society’s avoidance of “death talk” is unhealthy, getting in the way of people preparing for the end-of-life, both their own and their loved ones.
The basic beliefs of the Death Positive movement are laid out on the Order of the Good Death website. Fundamental is the idea that hiding death and dying behind closed doors can do more harm than good to our society. Open discussion is more likely to lead to better regulation and provision of end-of-life care and friends and family being fully aware of final wishes.
Open discussion
The movement believes that the culture of silence around death should be broken through discussion, facilitated at meetings, by art and through study. Fundamental to that is the idea that talking about our inevitable death is not at all morbid.
Doughty says: “Being death positive is saying we want to improve our culture. We want to have more eco-friendly death practices. We want to have better conversations around death and nobody has to hide that.”
Areas of society that the Death Positive movement seeks to improve include environmental concerns, with activists looking to reduce the environmental harm that funerals can do through use of chemicals, non-biodegradable materials and land use. They are also concerned with the rising costs of funerals, advocating for universal access to affordable death care.
The Death Positive movement also wants to see a return to ‘human-centric’ funeral rituals. For some people that means reducing the distance between death and the bereaved. This can mean hands-on participation in the funeral, even preparation of the body for burial or cremation. But for others it is simply about having open and honest conversations that let people make informed choices.
To be Death Positive doesn’t mean looking forward to death or being happy when it arrives. Instead it is an acceptance that death is an inevitable, natural part of living and using that knowledge to make the most of the life we are living.
If we don’t treat death and dying as a taboo, we are free to talk about and plan for our own end of life that will make it easier for those left behind. And, as palliative medicine consultant Dr Ollie Minton puts it: “Put your wishes down, file away, and forget about it. Focus on the important bits of living and getting on with life.”
