S2:E31: a good death

Thursday, April 29, 2021

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Episode description: In this episode we reflect on some of our own experiences of death, and get some fresh perspective from Sarah Chavez, executive at the Order of the Good Death and a leader in the death positivity movement. She pulls back the shroud on the modern funeral industry, points out how social issues can also affect the dead, and suggests better ways for us all to engage with this natural part of life.

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Show notes:

Laura: Here at Shelter in Place, we do our best to keep our episodes family-friendly--even when we’re talking about hard stuff. Today’s episode is about death positivity, and in the course of this conversation we discuss suicide and other traumatic experiences with death. If you have young kids listening, you might want to pause this and listen later. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, we urge you to call the free, confidential National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255

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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Sarah: My family has always been extremely open about everything. My grandmother talks about her funeral like she's planning a party, because to her, that's what it is. What kind of music she wants played, what she's gonna wear, and she's gonna rent a limo for the family. And then we'll end up by, “Oh, it's going to be such a good time. I'm going to miss it.” 

Laura: When my son was three years old, we enrolled him in a preschool called La Plazita--Spanish for “the little place.” It was a short walk from our house and some of our neighborhood friends went there, too, but the best thing about La Plazita was that all of the teachers came from Latin America and the instruction happened exclusively in Spanish.

Even though I’ve pursued language learning with a certain amount of vigor--and Spanish in particular--I’ve never achieved that much sought-after goal of fluency. I can carry on a kindergarten-level conversation and catch snatches of words in songs, but I quickly realized how limited my language was the first time they hosted an event for Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The moment we walked into the fenced in outdoor play area, we were surrounded by lightning-fast Spanish and laughter. I had assumed that we were going to an awkward parent-teacher conference type of thing but this was a full on celebration.

There was a live band, dancing, and a potluck spread of food ranging from homemade tamales to hot wings. The administrator of the school, who I’d previously found a bit stern, was tearing up the dance floor salsa dancing with her partner. Other teachers were wearing traditional baile folklorico dresses with colorful flowing skirts and shoes that snapped when they danced. It was the first of many such celebrations that we would come to love almost as much as the community that invited us into them.

At one point that evening I crept indoors to use the bathroom and passed through the room where my son took naps and learned his alphabet. I’d seen the email go out inviting parents to bring in photos of deceased family members, but only now did I understand why. The room was bathed in the soft light of battery operated candles nestled inside empty milk jugs, which the kids had decorated with jewels and paint and skeleton faces. Next to them were framed black and white photos and faded color photos with corners curling. 

This was years before the Pixar movie Coco would celebrate the Mexican traditions of Dia de Los Muertos, long before we’d see Miguel at the family altar whispering his dreams to his ancestors pictured in those frames. I was charmed by the party, but also a little creeped out by the candlelit altars remembering the dead. 

It’s been a long time since that first La Plazita celebration and a lot has changed. When COVID-19 shut our world down, it also launched our family on a journey into the unknown. Along the way we’ve created over 130 episodes of Shelter in Place, and launched an apprenticeship program to train the next generation of women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs. 

A couple of months ago one of our apprentices pitched an idea for an episode that brought me back to that first Dia de Los Muertos celebration at La Plazita. She wanted to do an episode about death. In a year when we can’t seem to get away from death, it seemed natural to do an episode about it.

But death is hard to talk about. Most of us don’t talk about it well. 

I knew working on this episode would be interesting, but I hadn’t expected it to be fun. It’s been a lot like that first La Plazita celebration; when we showed up with our potluck salad, we’d assumed we were in for a night of awkwardness, of forced conversations we didn’t really want to have. But instead, we were welcomed into relationships and traditions that have made our life richer, ones that have helped us to understand that the sadness around death is only half the equation; the other half is a party. 

I thought it was only fitting that I pass the mic to the person who is responsible for bringing this episode to life. I’ll let her take it from here. 

Eve: My name is Eve Bishop, and I’m an apprentice here at Shelter in Place. 

A year ago, a month into the pandemic, I was spending a lot of time alone, and thinking a lot about death. It seemed everywhere I looked, death was there, creeping in and out of shadows, coloring everything around me. I couldn’t get away from it.

One night I was up late watching TV and there was death again--not just the idea of it, but death personified as a cartoon with a woman’s voice. Cartoon Death said that staring down your death fears was an important part of life, that there was a way to approach death that was actually positive. I felt like she was speaking directly to me

The series I’d stumbled upon was The Midnight Gospel, an animated show that explores life’s big questions with a bit of bizarre humor, created by the comedian Duncan Trussell and the director Pendleton Ward. The woman who played the part of death is a real-life mortician and best-selling author named Caitlan Doughty. She’s also the founder of The Order of the Good Death, a collective that helps people understand that death is natural--but our modern cultural anxieties about it are not. 

I’ve been following Caitlin and The Order of the Good Death every since that night, facing down my own death fears and slowly moving from fear to hope in that process. I’ve learned that Caitlin isn’t alone in the work she’s doing. There are death artists, death scholars, death doulas, death cafes--a whole movement of people who aren’t content to let death be the cloaked figure in the corner of the room that no one wants to talk about. 

One of those people is someone who works closely with Caitlin, who Laura and I spoke with recently. 

Sarah: Hi, I'm Sarah Chavez. I am the executive director of the Order of the Good Death, one of the founders of the death positive movement. I'm also one of the co-founders of the collective for radical death studies and my work centers on death and grief and mourning.

Eve: Sarah is also the co-host of Death in the Afternoon, a delightful podcast that somehow makes death hilarious and unassuming--and yes, I did just call a podcast about death delightful. 

Sarah’s family is from Mexico, so she grew up with the Dia de los Muertos celebrations that Laura encountered at La Plazita. Death was a part of daily life, something to be celebrated, a party her grandmother loved to plan for. Sarah’s parents were in the entertainment industry, so her Mexican culture wasn’t the only influence on her experience of death. 

Sarah: As a child, I didn't stay at home with a caretaker or with friends. I spent the vast majority of my childhood on a movie or television set, and often that involved watching these super choreographed Hollywood deaths being recreated over and over and over again, which was a very weird and surreal experience, but also there was a lot of openness about the idea of death. My family has always been extremely open about everything.  

Eve: But Sarah says that openness began to shut down when something happened on the set one day, and one of her parents witnessed actual deaths. 

Sarah: This completely changed everything. There was a lot of silence and secrecy about what had happened. Grieving wasn't done in front of the family. It became this shroud over the entire experience. And as a child, this was very strange to me, because you do death stuff at work all day long, but what is this real death stuff? Why is it different? Why is everybody behaving differently? Why is no one talking to me about this? That definitely played a huge part in my wanting to understand the experience. What was the real death about? And how did people deal with that?

Eve: That curiosity and desire to understand death better followed Sarah into adulthood, when she was a museum curator and historian at a cultural site. 

Sarah: I worked at a historic hospital that was over a hundred years old, and people would come and talk about their experience of a family member dying at the hospital, or somebody would come in and talk about, “we heard this place is haunted. So here's what I think,” or “here's this experience that I have.” 

People would come because of their interest in death and the afterlife. They would have all of these questions that they felt they couldn't ask other places or share experiences they couldn't talk to other people about. I began working with artists and funeral industry professionals and writers and academics who were all working in some way with death. 

We don't talk about those things in our society. We change the subject really quickly. There's a lot of discomfort around death. Making space for people to safely explore that curiosity and ask those questions was something that I saw people really, really wanted and needed. 


Eve: Around the same time, Sarah experienced a death that would change her forever--the death of her own child. It was a death that nothing in her upbringing or her culture could adequately prepare her for. 

Sarah: From the moment I was told about it from the doctors and the nurses and the staff at the hospitals, I was met with a lot of secrecy and a lot of silence and a lot of shame. No one wanted to answer my questions about what is your protocol at the hospital? What would happen to my child's body?  I just kept coming up against a wall, this bizarre veil between getting support and information and assistance so I could make the decisions that I needed to. 

And then afterwards, the immense, almost life-breaking grief that comes with that child loss, with people ghosting you . . . a lot of shame and silencing. You bring up something like child loss and you make other people extremely uncomfortable. You begin existing in the world wanting to hide that because you make other people so uncomfortable, they don't want to be around you. 

I don't ever want anyone to have to go through that. And because of that experience, it really, really motivated me in supporting other people from having to experience that.

Eve: Sarah was born and raised in the United States, but the American cultural norms of avoiding or trying to move on quickly from death left her feeling isolated and alone. She thought back to those conversations with her grandmother, and began to explore how her Mexican ancestors had faced down their fears about death.

Sarah: I think no matter who you are, death is scary. There are so many unknowns at play. It's natural to fear the unknown. 

But our culture here in the United States did not serve me or support me in any way, shape, or form. In modern Western society, the dead body and death are often viewed as something that's dangerous or scary that we need to distance ourselves from. Continuing this relationship with our dead is something that we're usually pressured to get over or move on quickly from. And if we don't, it's seen as unhealthy and morbid.  

But for many cultures, the dead remained in this integral part of everyday life. And in fact, for many cultures, the care and continued acknowledgement and relationship with the dead through rituals and memorialization was directly tied to the health and happiness and success of both the dead's family and their wider community. 

Mexican and Mexican-American culture are more accepting, more open about deaths. And so it was really a journey of exploration and research of how did my ancestors deal with this? And really being met with some very meaningful answers, where I felt that instead of my grief being shunned, it was held and made space for and acknowledged, that I wasn't alone in that pain or that experience or that grief.

Eve: Sarah says that a lot of our Western discomfort with death comes from the barriers we’ve put between ourselves and the processes and rituals surrounding death. 

Sarah: Today, a lot of people die in hospitals and nursing homes. When someone dies, the funeral home immediately comes and picks up the body and takes it away. We don't see any of that process. What is that process? What happens to them? 

Before the advent of the funeral industry, people by and large took care of their loved ones at home. They did not have the luxury of denying death. People died at home. They had the funeral at home. The body was prepared at home. The community or the family made the casket. It was a family- and community-centered process.

And the funeral industry positioned themselves as the guardians of health and safety of society, where we're going to take the body from you and sanitize it and prepare it through embalming to keep you safe, because the dead body is dangerous and unsanitary. Inducing these myths and this fear is what gave them a lot of leverage in creating the power that they held in these systems.

They positioned themselves as the correct or only dignified way to handle death. Everybody else is weird and creepy and bizarre. But to the rest of the world, the things that we do are often viewed as weird and creepy and bizarre. People in the U.S. don't always realize that our death practices are definitely not the norm for the rest of the world.

More and more people are beginning to express that their experience of modern funeral traditions in the West that we practiced today, they just lack meaning they're unsupportive and the huge expense often leaves families in what we call funeral poverty. I mean, how many people need to have a go-fund me or ask for help to pay for a funeral, which think the national median cost right now is $8,500. And that's not even for  specific grave plots because you're buying land,  the upkeep of that in perpetuity forever. 

It gets really important to ask, “who those traditions serve? Is it the $20 billion funeral industry? Or do the things that you do at a funeral in mourning at death, do these rituals hold deeper, meaning that not only honors your person, but your, and their own values and beliefs?

Eve: These were the exact questions I had after watching Caitlin Doughty play death in that episode of The Midnight Gospel episode, and that eventually led me to Sarah and Caitlin’s work at The Order of the Good Death.

On their website, it says that the Order of the Good Death “is about making death a part of your life. Staring down your death fears—whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety of modern culture is not.”

It was that idea of staring down my death fears that initially drew me to the Order of the Good Death. I wasn’t just thinking about death because we were a month into the pandemic; I was coming up on the anniversary of a death that had haunted me for years.

I grew up in a small town on Long Island, a place where neighbors were friends, where summers meant capture the flag and kickball and climbing trees. There were 54 students in my high school graduating class, and I’d known about half of those students since preschool. George was one of them.

In almost every memory of my childhood, George was there. In my preschool photos, there was George with his perfectly symmetrical bowl-cut. In elementary school, we’d chase each other on the playground. He was the designated class clown, always getting into trouble with teachers because he cared more about entertaining the rest of us than paying attention. We took Driver’s Ed together, and his jokes got me through painfully long lectures about the importance of stop-signs and how to know if you have the right-of-way. One time George made me laugh so hard that we both got asked to leave the lecture. I remember clutching my belly and crying tears of laughter as we sat out in the hallway, not regretting a bit of it.

As teenagers we had different groups of friends and spent less time together, but George was always in my life, more like a cousin than a classmate. He was an important thread in the fabric of life that I assumed would always be there. 

In May of 2016, we got the news that George had taken his life. His death came as a shock. Even his parents hadn’t seen it coming. It left a fracture in our close-knit community that you can still feel today. I’ll never know why he killed himself. Even five years later his death feels like a slap in the face. 

Initially when I heard about the Death Positive movement, I was reluctant to accept it. It made sense that an old person would want to reframe death and plan for it, but there was nothing good about George’s death. 

In our conversation, Sarah helped me to understand that there’s an important distinction between Death Positivity and Death Acceptance. 

Sarah: The Death Positive movement really just acknowledges that death is a part of life, and that engaging with death demonstrates a completely natural curiosity about the human condition and something that we will all experience.

The term “death acceptance” was attached to a movement from the 1970s. It's a phrase that implies that we should somehow intellectually and emotionally accept death. I can't do that. I certainly can't expect that anybody else can do that. I don't think that's even possible, honestly.  

No matter how much you know, you are always caught by an element of surprise when someone dies. There is no way to truly prepare for that. That violent and traumatic, unnecessary deaths happen is not something we should accept, and that we should work toward dismantling and recreating the systems that harm.

I know sometimes that's not possible, but we can at least provide ourselves and others with better support systems. And I think a lot of that has to do with getting comfortable talking about death. It's awkward, supporting someone through pain and grief. If we can learn those skills and really accompany each other through this pain, I really wonder what our society would look like, because I think a lot of the ills of our society are really just a manifestation of unheard unacknowledged, unsupported grief.

Eve: The Death Positive movement doesn’t dismiss death; it acknowledges that death is a part of life, one we all experience, and that we need to talk about a lot more so we can support each other better when it happens. Sarah’s own experience of losing her child showed her just how limited our current support structures are.

Sarah: Afterwards--you know, after they tell you the terrible things that are going to happen--then they have a counselor for you. But all the counselor could do was push this pamphlet into my hands, saying that “the only child loss grief support that we can offer you in this area is a Christian support group,” which is wonderful and helpful for so many people, but not for me. 

Eve: Sarah knew that there were death doulas who supported people and their loved ones through the physical and emotional toil of death and the ensuing grief the same way birthing doulas support mothers through labor and childbirth. She found an end of life guide who could help her process her grief in a way that aligned with her culture and values.  

Sarah: Finding grief support that truly acknowledged just how horrible loss is, acknowledged the pain, did not try to fix it in any way, shape, or form--it was really the only grief advice that made any sense.  

I don't know what I would've done without my end of life guide, who continues to check in and support me years later to this day . . . the grief support from a therapist named Megan Devine. I use what she has taught me really on a daily basis, about how to support others and also myself. Just knowing that those options were out there and where to look instead of having nothing  made all the difference. 

Eve: The week after my friend George died, I was in gym class, still moving through life in a fog, finding it difficult to do all of the usual things that used to feel normal. When my P.E. teacher saw me standing in the corner of the gymnasium when I was supposed to be on the court playing volleyball, she came over and asked me why I looked so miserable. 

“Look,” she said, “I know it’s been a tough week. But we have to get back to normal. Now get on the court.” 

I felt completely bulldozed by her bluntness. I ran out of the gym, hot tears streaming down my face. I didn’t know where to go, so I went to the guidance counselor’s office, where I knew a grief counselor had been hired temporarily to provide support to students in the wake of George’s death. I stormed into her office and she looked up and asked if I’d like to sit down. She said I was welcome to talk if I felt like it. I sat down, and talked. And talked. And talked. And she listened. She didn’t tell me I needed to get over George or get back to normal. She just let me sit and talk and cry. I didn’t know it then, but that was exactly what I needed.

Sarah: Death and grief is incredibly difficult. It's awful. There's no getting around that, but talking about and engaging with deaths can really help mitigate some of that pain. 

We really don't do a good job of supporting grieving people or people in pain--which is all of us.

All of us on a global level have lived through the past year of the pandemic and many of us have experienced other kinds of losses as well. We've had losses of jobs, of relationships, of a way of life. We are all grievers right now. We are all grieving.  

Eve: When I was grieving George, I didn’t know what I needed at the time until I sat in that office bawling. That grief counselor didn’t offer advice or tell me George was in a better place. She just listened, and let me know that I wasn’t alone.

When someone comes to us and they're sad or upset, we think it's our job to cheer them up or distract them from their pain. But usually this ends up invalidating their experience. It can often really make things worse. 

Death and loss is painful. It's really hard. So instead of saying things that we think are often helping, “they're in a better place,” “don't cry,” “they wouldn't want you to be sad or unhappy,” or “don't worry, you're young, you can remarry,” or “you can have another child”--hearing those things as a grieving person, it's jarring, it's hurtful, it's invalidating--even though the person is trying to comfort you, is trying to offer you solace. So instead of saying this, knowledge, your awkwardness acknowledged that I don't know how to do this, but I hear you. I can't make things better, but I am here and you don't have to go through this alone and just be with them.  

Eve: Sarah says that as important as it is to sit with others in their pain after a death has occurred, it’s only half the equation. There was no way I could prepare for George’s death; it’s not always possible to know when death is coming. But having conversations with our loved ones now can help both us and them navigate the challenges of death in the future.

Sarah: Death often leaves really once close-knit families fractured and broken, because there was no conversation, there was no plan. Death is an extremely stressful event. Grief leads to brain fog. We're not equipped to deal with things emotionally or logically or reasonably.

Say for example, your parent or your partner has been hospitalized and they're in an unconscious state and they're not able to make decisions for themselves, which means as their legal, next of kin, decisions about life sustaining medical procedures then are left up to you. What does that look like if you have nothing to go on? If an individual can't breathe or eat or move or communicate on their own, do they want medical assistance? Do they want to be sustained by machines? A lot of people don't. A lot of people do. By having these hard discussions, you can make a decision that's based on what your parent or partner would want for themselves. But if you're kind of left unsure and guessing, this can be an incredibly agonizing position to be left in, and can lead to a lot of guilt and uncertainty for the rest of your life. And it's the same with death care. I've heard so many stories from funeral directors who have had a body in their care for months just because the family couldn't agree about what mom would want.


Having something in place so we are not asked to make these incredibly difficult decisions at the worst possible time can really help avoid some of the pain that we experience. And then we can really focus on supporting our loved ones and our community, and really listening to and caring for our own feelings and what we need to, instead of dealing with some bureaucratic awfulness, or trying to find your partner’s passwords and you can't access anything. That you can't get into your bank account.


We plan and we research for all these big events in our lives, like having a baby or weddings or what university we're going to, or birthday parties. But we don't for death, which is an equally life altering event.  


Eve: On the day of George’s wake, my classmates and I lined up outside the local funeral home and waited for our turn to see the casket. As we inched closer, I could see George’s body--but it didn’t look like him. His skin looked plasticky and white. I knew I should want to say goodbye, but I felt disgusted. And then came the shame. I felt guilty for my disgust. Why did I feel so disconnected from the body laying in front of me? And why couldn’t I cry?


I left the funeral home feeling empty. I tried to get on with my life, to go to school and pretend that everything was normal. But for weeks that unwanted image of George’s body would surface almost hourly, propelling me through that cycle of disgust and shame. 


Even though the experience disturbed me, I figured this was just what happened when someone died. They would be embalmed, put in a casket and buried, or maybe cremated. It was weird, but it was all just part of the process. Only when I talked to Sarah did I realize that things could have gone differently.


Sarah: It’s a struggle for people to envision, “well, if I don't do the two hour rented church and adjoining conference room, what do I do?” 


In many, many States, You don't have to have a funeral director. You don't need to hire a funeral home. There are rights and choices that most people are not aware of.  Home funerals are still an option in every state in the us. Obviously there are limitations; you can't have Viking funerals. That's just not practical, and the science just doesn't support it. The fire just can't get hot enough. But there is an incredible amount of freedom. 


There are more eco-friendly options out there, for example, not embalming. The body is typically drained and their fluids are replaced with a very toxic chemical to preserve the body.  But that's completely unnecessary. You can also just put cooling packs of dry ice under the body if you're doing a home funeral.  


Dead bodies are not dangerous, which is a myth that we really kind of buy into, that we need to be protected from the dead body. But there's nothing to be protected from. We have these very strange ideas and a lot of fear that really surrounds death and the dead body because we've been so separated from it in our culture. Our experience of death nowadays is very much informed by things like horror movies, body's sitting up or moving on their own, people coming back to life--all kinds of wild things that just don't happen.


We have all this fear attached, but there's really this beautiful opportunity to create ritual and have this moment with your loved one that not only helps you begin to comprehend that that person is no longer there and your own grief, but your own idea of trying to understand this immense idea of what death is.


Eve: Sarah says that planning a death is a lot like planning a party--more like what Laura experienced at the Dia de los Muertos celebration than what I experienced at George’s funeral.


Sarah: Think of your person as if you were planning them a birthday party. What are the things that they love? What are the things that brought them joy?  What are the connections that you shared? What were their favorite foods? At weddings they have the signature drink that's made just for the couple, go have somebody make up one of those. Invite an ice cream truck. Watch their favorite movie together. Dress up as their favorite characters from a show. What are the things that really honor and celebrate that person, your relationship to them and their impact on your life and their community. Because you have the freedom to do all of that. People just don't know that. 


Eve: A large part of Sarah’s work is helping people to become aware of their end-of-life options, to reimagine for themselves what a good death looks like. So naturally, we asked Sarah what she wants for her own good death.


Sarah: It changes because I, as a person change. But I'm really interested in protecting environment and resources for future generations, and because the land and its resources have supported me and nurtured me my entire life, I feel obligated to be conscious of and give back in some way. But also because I'm very passionate about decolonizing land. I don't feel comfortable taking up space on colonized land, so a grave plot is just not something that appeals to me. I think that's totally fine for other people. It's just not for me. Having my body decompose at a natural, but accelerated process to where I am just turned into soil after a short period of time where I don't take up space and can just literally be turned back into earth that can immediately be of use to plants and nature and producing oxygen, all of these lovely, wonderful things that for me is my ideal death.


Honestly, something that I thought I would never in my lifetime see, recomposition, or a lot of people might know it as human composting, has been legalized. We haven't had a new choice since the 1800s, cremation. And even cremation was, like, a huge struggle to get legalized and culturally accepted as well. So that's a huge thing. Any change, especially social change and big changes to systems that govern all of our lives--or in this case, deaths--they're really slow in coming. But I'm a little hopeful because there has been some progress. End of life care has vastly improved the last few years. It's more aligned with supporting a person's quality of life as they age, instead of a focus on just extending or sustaining life. And there's a direct correlation between the death positive movement and these results. 


But my little conservative hope for the future of death care is that we really begin to apply the idea of mutual aid and community care to the end of life as much as possible. There are really so many amazing individuals and initiatives who have been doing this work for years. So things like death doulas, who can provide support and guidance, like for me, at end of life experience. To appoint a person in your community that people can go to to help undocumented folks navigate the really complicated process of repatriating a body back home. To coffin makers who create some kind of donation system where for every coffin purchased, one gets donated. Community-run crematories or burial spaces. Volunteer programs where people can go into hospitals and make sure that BIPOC people can get the food and the spiritual support and all of the things that are really culturally meaningful to them. 


Eve: Sarah’s work isn’t just about learning to face our death fears and develop meaningful practices around death. It’s also about making sure that all of us have access to a good death.


Sarah: A main facet of our work in the movement really has to do with making each person's idea of a good death or an end of life experience. But before we can even begin to ask those kinds of questions, we have to understand that death and dying isn't this one size fits all experience. Contrary to what a lot of people say we're not equal in death. Often the same inequalities that communities who have been historically marginalized in life, follow them into death. We've seen this over and over again with members of the black community who are victims of police brutality. Their characters and actions are judged.  They are often blamed for their own unnecessary, violent deaths. They don't have consent over their images, their legacy, or their bodies after death. We really need to address the fact that for many, if not most people, the support and services to even access the things that would make for a good end of life experience or good death  are not even accessible to them.  Especially for someone whose daily living experience ends up being consumed by just trying to stay alive. 


Another example is the fear that many transgender folks face in deaths  that their identities may completely become erased  by family members,  funeral homes. They may be mis-gendered or deadnamed in their death. 


And then finally women femicide has been recognized as a global epidemic. Women and the gender violence that they experience. So, if you take an individual, for example, who is a black trans woman, who is living with these intersecting identities and how each one contributes to their experience of death, there's layers to the death and mourning experience that really have to be accounted for.  


Both the laws that govern death and the quality of end of life care should really be accessible to all. But it should also ensure that each individual's identity and wishes are honored regardless of their sexuality ability, race, gender, or religion.


It's important to remember that power has always belonged to people. It's really time to claim that power in not just life, but death as well.


Laura: It’s been seven years since that first Dia de los Muertos, a day I’ve come to love --not just at La Plazita but at the Spanish immersion public school my two older kids attend. It’s a party there too, with homemade pupusas and kids with painted skeleton faces. Even though we’ve across the country and away from our schools, my kids still look forward to Dia de los Muertos. This year they asked me if we could dig up some pictures of our dead relatives, to honor their memory. That tradition no longer seems strange to me. It’s helped me feel more connected to my own family’s traditions. 


As Sarah said, death isn’t something we can just accept or get over. It’s never easy. But my vision of what a good death can be has expanded. It’s made me feel less afraid, and more hopeful. It’s got me feeling eager to have conversations with my loved ones about death, to find out what they’d like in a good death.


Sarah offered us some wonderful options for what that could look like, and we’ll provide resources for the Order of the Good Death in our show notes. But before we go, I want you to hear from the apprentices who worked on this episode, who have their own ideas of what a good death could be.


Elen: My name is Elen Tekle. I live in L.A. and I was born in Arizona, but my family is from Eritrea.


I realized recently that I’ve attended way more funerals than the average person. I asked my mom why and she just shrugged and said,  “you’ve known a lot of people who’ve died.” 


When someone from Eritrea or Ethiopian dies, the entire community immediately descends on the house of the family who lost a loved one. Even if you don’t know the person, you come to their house, sit with the family, and help them feel less alone in their grieving. 


There are no boundaries in our culture, so you don’t have to ask people to be there for you. They’re already there from day 1. The community takes care of the bills, funeral costs, cooking, and cleaning. The idea is these people are already suffering, and we don’t want them to suffer any more having to think about money or funeral planning. People will even move into your home to take care of you. And at our funerals, there are professional criers to encourage people who are holding in their grief to cry and release their pain. 


40 days after a death, you go to the church for a ceremony, eat, and the family thanks you for supporting them during this difficult time. After that, the family can start their life.


I don’t know yet what my own good death would look like. I’ve definitely thought about it. But I’ve realized in working on this episode that what’s more important to me than where I’m buried or what kind of funeral I have is that my community is a part of that process--because it means that the people I love will be taken care of, and if I’m the one who’s grieving, I won’t have to do it alone. 


Shweta: My name is Shweta Watwe and I’m from northern Virginia., but my parents immigrated from India before I was born. 


My parents are very practical people. They like to have their ducks in a row. They visit our family in India every year like clockwork. We’re big on spreadsheets and lists. We’re planners. And so naturally, we’ve done a lot of planning about death, too.


My parents often talk about how they’d like to be remembered. They’ve told me all about the logistics of the estate planning I’ll have to do after they pass. My dad will often remind me where the passwords are and what to do if the unthinkable occurs. 


But my dad also has a strained relationship with religion. So many Indian cultural practices are intimately tied to Hinduism, but my dad doesn’t want any of those things.(voicing his requests?)

“Don’t do any of the rituals others will try to pressure you into. No priests! None of those long drawn out ceremonies. Just do what you need to do to get closure because I’ll have already been closed.” My dad is a big wine guy, and has imparted all his knowledge to me, so he tells me that instead, I should just get a nice bottle of wine that he’d like and think of our happy memories together. 


I’ve always appreciated these intensely practical conversations. I know there’s no way I can prepare myself for their deaths, but knowing what they’d like done with their bodies and their house, and how to handle the inevitable family tensions that will arise makes me feel a little less anxious about the future.


Whenever this comes up outside my family, my friends find our frank conversations about death bizarre and morbid. Why would we spend so much of our time thinking so much about death?

But the attitude in my family has always been that death is unavoidable and life is unpredictable. If we can take care of the important details now, then we can avoid having to make difficult decisions when we’re drowning in our grief. 


When I discovered death doulas and death positivity after falling through an internet rabbit hole, I realized that my family wasn’t alone in our attitudes about death. In addition to doulas and the movement, I learned about death cafes. According to the death cafe founder Jon Underwood, “people go along, drink tea, eat cake, and discuss death” to help people make the most of their (finite) lives. 


Just because my family talks a lot about death doesn’t mean that it doesn’t scare me. But having those conversations has made me feel seen in those fears. We can talk about death not as something to worry over, but an inevitable part of life that we’re all going to eventually experience. I like knowing that when it comes time to say goodbye to the people I love, there are places I can go to grieve like death cafes, and people who will guide me through the suffering that comes before and after death like death doulas, and even end-of-life guides and grief counselors who can check on me years later to make sure I’m doing okay--and to sit with me if I’m not.


Eve: This Sunday marks 5 years since George’s death. It’s a loss I still feel, one that comes in waves when I’m passing through his parents’ neighborhood or see kids chasing each other on the playground. But talking to Sarah has changed the way I think about that loss. It’s given me permission to grieve George in a way I’m now realizing I never allowed myself to do. I wish I could go back in time and tell him that his life mattered, that he was cherished and loved and important. I wish I could sit with him in his pain.


I can’t do that, but what I can do is to tell the people who are still in my life now that I love them. I can reach out to them when they’re suffering. And maybe most of all, I can talk to them about what it means to have a good death. 

I want you to invite you to join me is asking that question, and in having conversations with your loved ones to ask them about their own wishes. If that conversation brings up pain and fear for them, then use it as an opportunity to tell them how much you love and cherish them. And then sit there and listen. Let them talk.

I still have fears about death, and I know that George’s death is only the first of many that I’m likely to experience in my lifetime. But death doesn’t have to be shrouded in silence and shame. Maybe someday I’ll be able to talk about my own death the way that Sarah’s grandmother did, a great big party that I’m sorry I’ll miss. 

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Support Credits:

If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including our new apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. 

End Credits:

Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Eve Bishop was our associate producer for this episode, Shweta Watwe was our assistant producer, and Elen Tekle was our assistant audio editor. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Alana Herlands, Clara Smith, Quan Zhang, Samantha Skinner, Elen Tekle, Shweta Watwe, and Michele O'Brien.

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.