DEATH ACCEPTANCE

What does it mean to be “Death Positive”? This term may feel counterintuitive to many. Death Positivity is about accepting that we will die and making the most of our lives. As Western society has become more secular, many rituals surrounding death and dying have gone away, leading to a cultural “denial of death” as Becker discusses, or what others have called a death taboo. This denial takes many forms; people have a lot of discomfort around death, dying, and grief, and this manifests not only with regards to death itself but also in many sectors of life from personal relationships and healthcare to politics and the environment.

Since the 1970’s, there have been multiple movements aimed at improving our relationship with dying: hospice, a push for advance directives and end of life preparation, the palliative care movement and focus on quality of life, green and alternative burial options, at-home death care, death doulas/death midwives, and other efforts to increase discussions about death (e.g. death cafés, websites, blogs), eventually culminating in what is now known as the Death Positive Movement, a term coined by activists at The Order of the Good Death organization. The death positive movement is about how we can not only have better deaths, but also how we can use the awareness of mortality to have a better life.

Death is unfortunately not the great equalizer that people often claim it to be; mortality intersects with an enormous range of issues – racism, climate change, homophobia, sexism, etc. – and deaths at the hand of these issues are disproportionately higher for the most vulnerable members of society. By opening up the conversation about mortality in multiple spheres, we can have better lives for all. In this issue, we interview Sarah Chavez from The Order of the Good Death, Mandy Benoualid and Jeremy Cohen from TalkDeath.com, Hansa Bergwall, cofounder of the WeCroak app, Susan Barsky Reid, cofounder of Death Cafe, and Claudia Crobatia, founder of website and class A Course in Dying. They all share their reflections on what it means to be Death Positive and why this work and these conversations are important for our world today.