What is the mission of TalkDeath?

M: For us, it’s about encouraging people to be able to talk about death more. It’s literally what the name states. And then on the sidelines of that, there are a few things that feed into that mission, such as having really easy-to-understand and easily-accessible resources for end of life planning. Understanding how other cultures handle and deal with death is a big piece of our mission as well. Another major component is opening up the conversation on a political and socio-economic level to talk about the intersectionality around death, and decolonizing it, because even just the study of it is still so white. We talk about the inequalities in death, because a lot of the inequalities in life just translate to inequalities in death. For example, BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) are dying at higher rates than white people, even in North America—even the infant mortality rate is higher—so we can see the disparity there. A lot of the folks doing this work are aware of that and have that lens on now as well.

J: When we started the blog, we would often talk about death practices in the “we,” as if there was a universal general way that people died and people handled death. It didn’t take long for us to be disabused of that view.

That’s why giving space to other voices is so important, because a lot of what is written about on TalkDeath is so far removed from our own experiences, and we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to give voice to those issues. Bringing in as many different writers and people as possible is really important to us. Overall, intersectionality has been at the forefront of TalkDeath’s mission.

Do you identify with the term “death positive?”

M: This was a really cool term that Caitlin Doughty of Ask a Mortician coined. Her inspiration was, we talk about sex positivity, why not death positivity? I feel that as an organization, the term represents us, and it’s something that I identify with personally. It is a good term to represent a few key concepts, which would be acceptance, understanding, talking about the fact that we’re going to die, reducing stigma and taboo around talking about death and dying, and reducing the discomfort that we have when talking to someone who’s grieving. Rituals are so important and a big thing that death positive folks try to advocate for is finding new rituals that can help us work through grief and process grief, because in the secularization of our society, that means that we’re reducing the amount of rituals we’re doing, especially death rituals. And that just makes loss so much harder.

A key to death positivity is how to how to accept things. It’s hard to say that you accept death, right? There’s always going to be that innate fear. I always think of how hard it is to lose someone and the pain around that, and the natural thought is why would we want something that’s so painful to exist? So that’s where I think that the phrase “death positivity” can make it seem as if the message is that you should just be happy, because death is natural. Since a lot of the work we do is on grief, often when someone hears that term, it could definitely be confusing – how can you be positive when someone died and they were such an important part of your life? And that’s why I say “accepting death” in quotation marks, because it’s accepting that you’re going to die yourself or accepting that a loved one is going to die, but it doesn’t mean you’re happy about it, and it’s so much more than that.

J: I have a bit of a complicated relationship to the term death positivity. I have two students in my death and dying class this semester for example, who both had to escape from ISIS in Iraq. Their families had to pack up and leave and cross the Syrian border, and it seems crazy to be talking to them about death positivity and how you just need to accept the inevitable. That’s where I think that the term can feel problematic. But I am of the opinion that so long as death remains our reality and what it is that we have to deal with at the moment, we should have open and honest conversations about it, and we should be able to speak about it openly and comfortably and deal with that reality, as long as it is our reality. Death acceptance or death positivity, whatever you want to call it, can also be looked at from a pragmatic lens. It has a lot more to do with pragmatism than denial – it is about coming to terms. Whatever that means for the individual, but coming to terms with the reality that we are going to have to face the loss of the people that we love, and that we are going to one day also die. I think that’s a much more pragmatic way of approaching our lives than it is nihilistic.

M: Once you accept it, then you’re able to then deal with it in a much healthier way and find something that’s meaningful for you or for your loved one, new rituals and new things we can do. But if you just deny it, and then it happens and you have nothing prepared, it’s going to be so much harder of a process to go through.

So long as death remains our reality and what it is that we have to deal with at the moment, we should have open and honest conversations about it, and we should be able to speak about it openly and comfortably.

How would our society benefit from talking about death more openly?

M: If we started talking about death more openly, hopefully, we would also start talking about how people are disproportionately dying. Yeah, right. And so that would be part of the goal. People don’t realize how certain individuals, particularly BIPOC are dying much younger, and at a much faster rate. So if we can open up the conversation, the goal is hopefully that we can also address some other things that bring that conversation more to the forefront. And I think that, overall, it can help society cope with the bad things that happen. I think that COVID is a huge, very pertinent example of it: we seem to be accepting COVID by accepting the fact that “only old people are dying from it.” Well, first of all, those old people still have lives and still had family. But on top of that young people are dying of COVID and are in hospitals, so there is a denial there.

J: Yeah, it’s layered. Death acceptance, whatever that looks like, is not going to solve all these issues. And it’s not going to necessarily result in this grand awareness or ascension but it’s going to at least make those kinds of conversations easier. People do not want to talk about death because of the stress that it makes them feel. Some people literally cover their ears and walk away. So death acceptance could go some ways towards at least opening up these kinds of conversations.

M: I think an interesting exercise, which is probably very in line with some of Ernest Becker’s thoughts, is to ask: would you still be doing X if you knew you’re going to die tomorrow? How would you be living your life? Just that question in itself is an interesting way of talking about death and dying with people who don’t really understand it. It’s a good way to think about how short our lives can be. The idea that it’s all going to be over can help drive that conversation. And that’s what I think death positivity and talking about death really means.