What Does it Mean to be Death Positive?
On the movement to destigmatize death work (and death talk)
In Sister Death, the book I published last year, one of the phrases I use to describe my approach is “death positive.” It’s also a term that, I’ve been learning as people respond to the book, seems to generate antipathy. I’ve found myself not infrequently defending the term, sometimes in ways that challenge me.
I understand why the idea itself—being death positive—might sound unappealing, or even offensive, to people. Especially right now. Not only does it seem as if climate-related mass death and disasters are constantly in the news, but we are only just barely on the other side of a pandemic. We are watching horrific deaths pile up in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan (I could go on) and holding our breath just hoping that maybe someone will make it all stop. We are constantly confronted with the fact of more death than any of us, than any public culture, can grieve or metabolize. I can understand why it would sound offensive to place the term “positive” next to the word “death” in a necropolitical world like the one we’re living in.
And yet, it’s not as if claims to be on the side of life sound morally superior in any uniform way these days, either. Most of us can see the hypocrisy at play, for instance, when people claim to be pro-life but would prevent a person whose actual life is threatened by childbirth from having an abortion. It’s a performance of virtue that rings hollow. I find it to be an evasion of the fact of death and this evasion is, in its own way, offensive.
Death is many things, but one part of death is the decay that plays a key role in a crucial cycle (one that contributes to birth, growth, and regeneration). It’s a phenomenon that’s at the heart of nature: a way of things that people have frequently imagined themselves to transcend, often to their own detriment. The world has changed, since I sat down to write the book. And maybe it’s changed enough that I will eventually change my own mind. But for the time being, death positivity—for me—offers a way to acknowledge the natural fact of death, to destigmatize death talk and death work, and nevertheless allow us to feel ambivalent, or even angry, about death as well.
The Death Positive Movement
The phrase “death positive” is one that I’ve borrowed from people who work with the Order of the Good Death. The highest profile member of this group is the charming mortician Caitlyn Doughty who’s published numerous books and has a popular channel on YouTube with explainers demystifying death and burial. People like Doughty, and the Order of the Good Death itself, have developed and popularized the term “death positive.” They’ve turned it into a movement.
The death positive movement takes cues from earlier movements like the hospice movement (which pushed for better care for the terminally ill and their families). What many people encounter, today, as hospice care is an institutionalized form that doesn’t always feel (or look) like care. This is probably one of the consequences of rationalizing and institutionalizing care. The death positive movement also notes a host of other inspirations from the Natural Death movement that pushed to create advanced directives as a legal tool, to the “die-ins” of the AIDS movement, to the shift towards green burials.
Death positivity is also a play on sex positivity—a movement aimed to destigmatize sex work, and to recognize that sex is natural, healthy, and pleasurable. That’s not to say that death positivity has anything to do with pleasure. But it is a way of pointing to the fact that death, like sex, has long been an unavoidable dimension of our biological life that’s nevertheless often treated as it if doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist.
The Order of the Good Death describes people who are death positive as, simply, people who “see honest conversations about death and dying as the cornerstone of a healthy society.” There are a number of tenets that the Order describes as central to the death positive movement. But the one that resonates the most with me is probably: “I believe that the dead body is not dangerous, and that everyone should be empowered (should they wish to be) to be involved in the care for their own dead.”
I think the most tender thing we can do for another person is protect them against death. But, if and when this isn’t possible, I think that being with them in the time before death and caring for them in the moments after is a close second. This includes being with our animal companions, who may look for us in their final moments. This act of being-with is a sacred form of care work. Yet it’s not something most of us, today, are taught to do. I’ve discovered, in conversation with students who’ve taken my course on death and the afterlife, that even just thinking about the care work of burial can often spark a profoundly moving meditation on their connections with others, and their sense of the sacredness of life itself that’s often held in the crucible of our relationships.
It’s this feeling—that sudden, clearer, sense of the sacredness of life—that feels like the heart of the death positive movement, to me. This is one of the reasons why I think that being death positive is bound up with understanding ourselves as natural beings, as earthlings.
Sister Death as a Death Positive Figure
One of the other social movements that changed the way that Americans were thinking and talking about death, in the late 20th century, was what’s often referred to as the death acceptance movement. It’s often tied to figures like Ernest Becker, who wrote The Denial of Death—a critique of the way that culture denies our mortality. Some—like Lyn Lofland—have argued that this could be called a “happy death” movement. As if it were trying to convince us to be happy about the fact of death.
The Order of the Good Death pushes back against the idea of “death acceptance”, and this is something that I also push back against, in my book. Death positivity doesn’t ask “that we simply ‘accept death’,” they note. But instead “that we push back and engage with the systems and conditions that lead to ‘unacceptable’ death resulting from violence, lack of access to care, etc...”.
Denying the fact of death (which is a phrase I pulled from the work of James Baldwin and use pretty consistently in the book) is a problem, as I see it. The idea that death is not real, or an illusion, carries a particular sort of violence within it: it’s a denial of how life on Earth unfolds, and has always unfolded. But it’s always seemed to me that it ’s possible to both accept that death is a fact, and yet still be angry or unsettled about it. And it’s always seemed possible to imagine the many ways in which life is ongoing in the wake of death, while still accepting death as a fact.
The figure of Sister Death, who is the namesake of my book, is meant to mark that ambivalence. I’ve always seen her as a figure who can help to make the twin movements of both recognition and refusal, perhaps. She offers a way acknowledge the fact of death, and yet also the need to be angry, to be devastated if need be. She offers a way to name the possibility of feeling both the connections between life and death and yet also the dramatic disconnections—the way that sisters are sometimes so deeply conflicted and ambivalent in their relationships with one another.
Maybe death positivity, as I use the term, is simply ambivalent. In that sense it’s not positive in any clear way. I know we all want to feel good. We don’t want to feel ambivalent. We seek comfort and pleasure, not the feeling of being unsettled. But I think there’s something honest, and quite frankly true, about that ambivalence. And I think recognizing that we can’t make it go away is the beginning of a much more profound sense of belonging, in our bodies and in the world. It’s a way of feeling a connection to the Earth that can drive both pleasure and pain. That kind of truth and honesty, which I find among people who are death positive feels unequivocally like a good thing, to me.
Western culture altogether is based on the gross body only. It is founded on utopian idealism, an impulse to "out there" life things, towards bringing order to the material appearance in this life so that it is made fulfilling, made complete, made happy, made deathless even.
Westerners systematically eliminate death and suffering from their view. Western philosophy and "theology" is the always-wanting-to-forestall-the-day philosophy that does not embrace death and does not take it into account. In the background of our chronic anxiety we acknowledge that death exists but want to avoid it, even talking about it.
The impulse toward the religious life is about positive life-affirmation, and wanting life things, gross things, to work (out), but all the while rejecting death and suffering and, therefore, rejecting surrender to the Radiant Life-Principle. By contrast the real religious life is not based on the rejection of death. It is based on taking death fully into account and on making the fact of death the framework and the fundamental basis of ones understanding of life and its purpose.
A philosophy based on the rejection of death becomes materialism, utopianism, worldliness. Philosophy and religion based on the acceptance of death, the understanding of this life - associated as it is with death, with ending, with suffering, with limitation - is an entirely different affair It is the basis for the profundity of religion, the profundity of self-surrender and self-transcendence. It is the basis for renunciation but not ascetical self denial or flagellation