You’ve heard of body positivity and sex positivity. But what about death positivity?
It’s a rising movement that started in the US and has been gaining traction, particularly in western countries, over the past decade.
Behind the seemingly oxymoronic name, the movement seeks to dismantle the taboos around talking about death and allow people to explore different ways of thinking about the end of their lives. What it means to have a “good death” is deeply personal. Followers of death positivity believe that society must enable those different visions.
It started in 2011 when an American undertaker and YouTuber called Caitlin Doughty posed a question on Twitter: “Why are there a zillion websites and references to being sex positive and nothing for being death positive?”
She later explained that just as sex-positive advocates aim to destigmatise the natural human fascination with sex and sexuality, death positivity is doing a similar thing.
“[It] is saying, ‘I am fascinated by death, the history of death, how cultures around the world handle death, my own relationship to mortality, and I refuse to be ashamed of that interest,’” she wrote.
You might be thinking that this all sounds a bit morbid. But Doughty’s perspective is that it’s normal and natural to be curious about death, and that the reluctance to talk about it in many western cultures does more harm than good.
Her YouTube channel, @AskAMortician―where she posts explainers about death and the wide array of funeral and burial options available―has more than two million followers. She also founded a US-based non-profit, the Order of the Good Death, which has become the primary advocacy organisation for death-positive ideas―from breaking down the social taboos around discussing death to reforming the funeral industry and pushing for legislative change to allow new eco-friendly burial options.
Anna Wilde, a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham whose work explores the death-positive movement, says its roots stretch back to the 1970s and the “happy death movement”―a phrase coined by the late sociologist Lyn Lofland to describe a variety of end-of-life campaigns and ideas emerging at that time. These included everything from the creation of new hospice spaces to “death awareness” initiatives encouraging people to talk about death, and the growth of the right-to-die movement. Many of these issues are still on the agenda today.
The Order of the Good Death itself cites cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker as inspiration. In his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, he argues that most human behaviour can be explained by our efforts to avoid the inevitability of death. Traditionally, religion and belief in the afterlife offered us a way to deny our own mortality. But as that framework has broken down in the west, our reluctance to accept mortality manifests in different ways. We try to build legacies for ourselves, through work or children. We distract ourselves with frivolity, or resort to drugs and alcohol to numb our existential dread.
Instead of spending our lives trying to bury our heads in the sand, the death-positive movement suggests that we’d do better by facing up to our mortality.
Both Lofland and Wilde question the extent to which there really is a taboo around talking about death in western cultures—Wilde gestures to the stack of books about death on the shelf behind her as evidence to the contrary. Still, on an individual level, she acknowledges that some people do find it difficult to talk or think about. For example, most people know of someone who’s died without a will or without their affairs in order, which “is probably part of considering yourself to be immortal”, she says.
If there is a gap, a growing number of initiatives, including in the UK, are filling it. Death cafés, where people―often strangers―get together to “eat cake, drink tea and discuss death”, began in Switzerland in 2004, but have now spread all over the world, particularly in North America and Europe. The UK-based Death Cafe network, which was founded in 2011, says nearly 20,000 death cafés have since been held in 93 countries. Meanwhile, Death Over Dinner―a similar concept, though it’s slightly more structured and primarily encourages conversations about death with friends and family―says more than 100,000 “death dinners” have been held worldwide since it started in 2013. The UK even has a Death Positive Libraries project, which explores how libraries can serve as a public resource for those seeking to understand death, including through book collections, author events and bereavement groups. It started at Redbridge Central Library in Ilford, east London, but has now expanded to several others. Not all of these initiatives use the term “death positive”, but their goals align with the movement.
The increasing interest in alternative and eco-friendly burial options is also part of it. That includes natural burials or even new procedures such as human composting and “water cremation”―the method chosen by Archbishop Desmond Tutu when he died in 2021―where the body is broken down in a water and alkali solution.
In the US, the Order of the Good Death has also been campaigning against what it sees as an unethical funeral industry. Doughty believes that funeral homes often profiteer from grieving families and aren’t transparent about the options available. She also thinks that the “professionalisation” of the funeral industry in the west has broken our natural connection with death.
Much of this work is valuable, Wilde says, but she stresses that conversations about death should never be forced upon people. And fundamentally, she adds, it’s important to remember that “we can’t control how we die”. She compares it to the growing popularity of birth plans, which often get torn up in the reality of the moment. Natural processes cannot be controlled, she reminds us, and it’s important to have realistic expectations.
But some things can be planned for, and it seems that a growing number of people are finding value in thinking and talking more about the end of life.
