This might not be a pretty thought for this time of the day, or any time really, but we are all going to die. But wait, hold off on the horror film background music just yet, for death need not be that scary.
Even before our own demise, most of all will be touched by death one way or another throughout our lives. Some of those instances can be out of our control, as in the case of unexpected deaths in the family, national tragedies, or public health scares, causing high levels of anxiety and unresolved grief. In other instances, having a healthy relationship with the realities of death, knowing what to expect when it arrives, and being prepared for what comes after can make death not only peaceful but also worth living for.
By outlining the history of our modern avoidance of death and some of the issues it has created, the following piece might just make you rush to your local funeral home to make some preplanned arrangements, if only for the sake of it.
But wait, what does this have to do with me?
But why? Aren’t we young and carefree and a bit lazy now? Is it even a “girly” thing to do, ruminate about dying? Yes, it is. And more women in the last couple of decades have taken an interest in and a stand within the death care industry than have yet to find widespread recognition.
Already in the 60s, Jessica Milford led the way exposing how the funeral industry in America deprived the dead person and their bereaved of agency, ultimately aggravating not only the pain of their departure, but also the financial situations of those left behind to navigate it.
‘But dead people are dead!’ you might say, wanting nothing to do with this grim subject, ‘why would they care about agency this, agency that?’
Well, people now, especially younger generations, care about the environmental impact of their everyday actions more than ever before. 73% of Gen Zs surveyed globally reported feeling “extremely worried about current and future harm to the environment caused by human activity and climate change.”
Most, however, are unaware of how our modern-day practices surrounding death impact the soil, air, and water we depend on. You name it, by dying, we humans are now negatively impacting our every resource (see table below) and reversing the cycle of natural regeneration that our earthly remains were, until very recently, an essential part of.
A short history of our fear of death
For centuries—nay, millennia really—death was a familiar thing and a family matter. It was something that occurred in the house, in the state, in the manor, in the hut, and even in the tents and caves our nomadic forefathers used to take up temporary residence in. But the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of more and more cities brought rapidly spreading diseases, and consequently deaths, which rendered death care and body disposal into something to be scared of in fear of contamination.
The Victorians, for instance, developed a fear of corpses and cemeteries lest people should become sick from inhaling the vapours, or “miasma” as they called it, exuded by the dead. As a consequence, inner-city burial grounds were increasingly replaced by large, privatised cemeteries outside of the city lines, effectively disenfranchising death from the daily lives of people, commodifying death practices, and setting the stage for our prevailing discomfort towards the realities of death and avoidance of it.
The existence of the aforementioned miasma has, however, been greatly disproven by science as dead bodies do not represent a risk to the public, except in very specific circumstances. On the other hand, death-positive adherents (more on this later) maintain that taking care of a dead loved one by cleaning, cooling, and dressing their body can be beneficial for the bereaved. This can provide the latter control over the process, a sense of closure, and an opportunity to respect and honour the deceased.
However, we have yet to explore yet another nail in the coffin of modern society’s attitudes towards death, as more brutal and deadly wars than mankind had ever known accompanied the new world order of automatic death machinery. In it, deaths occurred further away from home, and the wounds that had caused them were graver, requiring new methods for body reconstruction. How to bring back the departed to their families for a dignified final hero’s goodbye? Easy, stick their bodies full of—harmful, mind you—preservatives and send them on their way unaffected by the scorching sun. This, in short, is but a brief recount of the invention of modern embalming by Dr. Thomas Holmes during the American Civil War.
From then on, death would get increasingly farther and farther away from the house, the responsibility of dealing with it taken from the family and passed on to an industry designed for profit. And profit it would.
I have already briefly introduced Milford’s The American Way of Death, which revealed the dark underbelly of the funeral industry. American-ly localised though it might be, this “way” has been spreading to other parts of the world, if only for its simplicity of it all. In all probability, you may now be more familiar with the sanitised and uniform look of funeral parlours designed for quiet and respectable send-offs than with the apparent messiness and painful familiarity of home funerals, too close to home and to the memories of what once was. But is the latter so bad after all?
Cue the Death Positive movement
So, what is the death positive movement? It is, in essence, a death revolution—though still little heard of––that seeks to reclaim for us mortals an autonomy we didn’t know we had.
An autonomy, mind you, that not only assures our deaths won’t affect the Earth and those in it, but will also grant peace of mind, both emotionally and financially, for us and our loved ones when the time to depart arrives.
The movement, as it stands today, was founded by Los Angeles-based mortician Caitlin Doughty. In 2011, she founded The Order of the Good Death with the aim of normalising questions surrounding, well, death: How can we make death peaceful rather than a prolonged battle? How do we honour the wishes of those we never had those conversations with? How do we begin to have those conversations? How do we plan ahead and not make our grieving loved ones incur debt paying for the ever-more-expensive funeral arrangements that are seemingly littered with hidden fees? And more novel questions, too, such as what happens to our digital footprint once we die, and should we even care?
A gendered affair
Historically, women have been more likely to care for their sick and dying loved ones. While commendable and a testament to women’s character almost everywhere across all time periods, this has not always been a matter of choice or simple coincidence. Death in the family is, above all, a family matter (duh!), and family matters, like other duties in the domestic space, have fallen disproportionately on women’s shoulders.
Having open, conscientious conversations about death can help us plan for a more equitable and less burdensome (though no one likes to hear or say it) departure. We can start by setting a clear division of roles within our own families now by asking questions such as:
Who will take care of Gran and Pop’s final needs? What about their funerals, obituaries, and flower arrangements?
Does it have to be Mom, as it always is? Why can’t Uncle?
Do they want to be buried or would they prefer to be cremated?
Are funeral guest lists even a thing? Are the nosy, annoying neighbours invited? The stranded relatives too?
And as to the most awkward-looking elephant in the room:
Who’s footing the funeral bill?
As young women in an increasingly challenging and globally unstable economy, this is a question that should be asked more often, never mind the side-eyes. This is true whether in relation to our perhaps more medically-compromised elders, as in the example above, or in the event of our own unexpected deaths (touch wood). It is hardly a question nowadays, but rather a matter of female empowerment to decide what happens with not only our bodies but our assets too before and after death.
A 2025 survey reports that a staggering 93% of women in the UK feel like their concerns are not taken seriously in the health sector. Yet another significant percentage of them have experienced wrong and/or late diagnosis, which has led to worsened health outcomes and a growing distrust in the healthcare system. When approaching serious conditions, knowing what resources are available to us—such as advance directives, palliative and hospice care, and available assisted death services, among others—can help us reclaim some of the autonomy we women lack within the health industry.
As if this were not enough, for far too long, women’s bodies have been commodified and made to be pleasing to the beholders’ eyes. Should the resources we leave behind be used to keep this on even after we lose the power to consent? Should invasive methods be used to make the realities of our deaths more palatable? How can our values follow us in the afterlife? How do we wish to be remembered, both in real life and in the carefully curated digital lives we have created for ourselves?
There are no right or wrong answers. There is, however, one simple truth:
Despite what we have been made to believe by the media, superstition (the fear that talking about death might bring her nearer to us), and our particular cultural responses to the end-of-life, we can have the death we choose for ourselves. It can be a peaceful thing, and it can even be great fun.
Final words (though hopefully not my last for now 🤞)
Where should you start, you might ask? Speak up, ask your friends and family what death looks like for them, and tell them what you want for yourself. Do you want a nostalgic My-Chemical-Romance-Welcome-to-the-Black-Parade send off? You got it. Do you want people to donate to the causes that matter most to you instead of sending gaudy floral arrangements? (no offence intended, flower lovers out there.) You got that too, everything you want in death exactly as you set it up to be*.
While this article has presented far too many questions, I have hopefully set the spark that will ignite the admittedly hard conversations that Milford, Doughty, and many other revolutionary women (and yes, men, they’re there too) in the death industry want you to have. In a totally not creepy way, I promise.
Written & illustrated by Paulina Odeth.
Paulina Odeth Flores Bañuelos (1995) majored in English Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2019. In 2020, she was granted a full-ride scholarship to undertake the joint master’s degree Crossways in Cultural Narratives at the University of Tubingen (Germany), the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland), and the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). In 2025, she became a children’s book author with her first book Bruno (siempre) dice NO, illustrated by Óscar Zermeño.
