Talking about death — at any age — is a fantastic idea and a great way to break down fear and loathing.
Don’t fear the reaper
Tag: death
We could learn a lot from jazz funerals
Jazz funerals offer an intriguing look into another way of commemorating death and acknowledging community grief.
On death doulas and confronting death on our own terms
Our approach to death and dying is fundamentally, frustratingly broken. That’s why death doulas, with their capacity to change the way we relate to death, are so important to me.
Compost me!
Burial and cremation are old news: Find a more ecologically-friendly way to dispose of your carcass, and consider doing something nice for the planet while you’re at it.
Pop culture and the modern funeral
The funeral is an everpresent force in pop culture, particularly on television, where in long-running serial storytelling, people at some point have to die—from a cynical perspective, to drive the plot forward, but also from a purely practical one, to accommodate actors who want to leave programmes before the end. This means that we tend to […]
The funeral industry may start running scared of alternative death
When funeral homes began to rise in the early 20th century, they forever changed the nature of death in the United States. Now, the alternative death community is eager to force that change back, to empower people to make their own decisions about living and dying in a country where most deaths take place in […]
The Sanitizing of Death
I recently finished reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which is an excellent read for those of you who are interested in a glimpse into the modern funeral industry, and into alternative approaches to death and dying. It’s not a polemic, nor is it a pat panacea, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that death and […]
Commercialising the alternative death movement
The alternative death movement is a growing and amazing thing. It may have started with a heightened awareness of the commerce of death and an interest in less costly approaches to burial, and progressed to green cemeteries and environmentally conscious death, but it’s also taking on a wider scope. It’s encouraging consumers to empower themselves, to […]
Putting the ‘fun’ back in ‘funeral’
Life, in many ways, is ridiculously hilarious, and that doesn’t stop in death. Yes, that’s right — I am among the group of people who proudly put the ‘fun’ back in ‘funeral,’ acknowledging one of the most important and inevitable life events we will face with a more lighthearted spirit. There is nothing funny, of course, about […]
Honesty in eulogy
In death, it seems that people become saintly, with reputations for perfection that quickly calcify around them. In the hours and days following their last breaths, they’re turned into airbrushed, hyperreal yet also fictional versions of themselves in the workrooms of funeral homes, but also in the imagination. Instead of acknowledging people as they are, […]