Hannah Gould
“Do you guys ever think about dying?” In Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie, this seemingly innocuous question has the power to instantly kill the party. Quite literally, Barbie’s entourage of bedazzled friends, with their choreographed dance routine and signature song, freeze at the mere mention of mortality, causing the protagonist to spiral into an existential crisis. Indeed, intrusive thoughts about death are what set Barbie on her quest for meaning as she travels into the human realm.
One would hope that today we’d be better equipped to respond to this question. And yet most people are not good at talking about death. The voyeuristic allure of true-crime podcasts, “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism and multiple TV murder-mysteries aside, contemplating personal mortality and the mortality of friends and family tends to stir up feelings of discomfort, if not dread. It is not just that many of us fear death, we don’t know how to even begin the conversation. We fear killing the party.
Fair enough. For Barbie at least, the party seems pretty perfect. After all, she exists in a land of childhood make-believe. And yet, after travelling to our world and experiencing the highs and lows of a mortal life, Barbie ultimately chooses to become human. She chooses ageing, cellulite, empathy, joy, gynaecologist appointments and even death. For all its agonies and frailties, life simply feels more (more meaningful, consequential, substantial) when lived in the mortal realm.
What an insult to Barbie – and disservice to ourselves – then, that we often deny or suppress knowledge of our mortality. Death contemplation is a feature of religious and philosophical traditions around the world and throughout time. It is also a route to improving one’s quality of life, not just quality of dying (although it can help with that too).
The truth is that we do not need to fear killing the party. In fact, there are whole parties devoted to talking about death, and plenty more opportunities to bring some gentle death awareness into our daily lives. But first, we need to understand what we are up against: death denialism.
In the simplest terms, the “death denial thesis” states that because thinking about our mortality is terrifying, or at least uncomfortable, we do everything we can to avoid it, from psychological tricks to elaborate systems to obfuscate ageing and dying bodies.
Perhaps the most famous proponent of this idea is anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, described fear of dying as an “innate and all-encompassing” part of the human condition. For Becker, the consequences of this fear are revealed in everything from religion to art to politics as people create elaborate defence mechanisms to shield themselves from having to think about impending mortality. Hence the centrality of a heavenly afterlife in many religious traditions. Or, in a secular frame, the immortalisation of national martyrs who “live on forever” in the minds of citizens.
These defence mechanisms change through time and place. As well as religion and heroic myths, we fall back on drugs and alcohol and, more recently, consumer culture. Put simply, if you just keep scrolling on Instagram and buying yourself little treats, maybe you won’t have to think about your impending demise, or that of everyone you love, including pets. It is no surprise, therefore, that “mortality salience”, or awareness of death, seems to be inversely related to consumer desire and activity. That is, we are all “shopping against death”. Which, to be fair, feels very relatable.
Death denial can lead people to delay or avoid conversations with family and care teams about their end-of-life wishes. Talking about death will not guarantee a better quality of dying, but avoiding the conversation until it’s too late can lead to poorer end-of-life outcomes for the dying person, their family and their community, as well as for the team of healthcare and death-care professionals looking after them.
One of the wondrous things about life in the 21st century is the sophistication of medical interventions for end-of-life care, if we are privileged enough to access them. But if we don’t discuss our end-of-life plans and wishes, we may not be able to say yes or no to these interventions, have input into our funeral, divide up our assets or make important decisions about the manner of our death, including withdrawing life support and accessing euthanasia.
Put simply, it is not enough to reflect privately on death: you have to tell somebody. But such conversations are rare. In Australia, according to the 2022 National Palliative Care Community Survey, 88 per cent of us believe it is important to think about and discuss end-of-life wishes and preferences, but less half of us have done so. The dead do not bury themselves. Other people will make decisions about your care for you. What a gift it would be for your loved ones to feel confident they were doing what you wished.
One problem with the death denial thesis is that death is everywhere in the news media and popular culture (Barbie included). We recently lived through a period of waking up each morning to fresh news of the numbers dead from COVID-19. We hear daily reports of people killed by famine or war.
Death might be taboo, but if there is one thing I am certain of, it’s that people love indulging in taboos. It is for this reason that anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer once compared death to pornography. Put simply, the taboo of sex in Western society produces pornography – a space for the private consumption of dramatised visions of sexual activity. Correspondingly, the taboo of death produces vampire fan fiction, zombie movies and Call of Duty – the most lurid presentations of sensational, violent and unusual death, to be consumed with abandon. True-crime podcasts, horror films and video games are the backbone of our popular media.
The problem is that most death is not sensational. It is quiet, banal. And it is this everyday death and dying that popular media remains largely silent about. When was the last time you saw somebody dying from natural causes depicted accurately on screen? When was the last time you saw it at all? No wonder death literacy is so low.
Gorer was writing in the 1950s. Since then, our shared taboos have loosened and shifted. Sex is less restricted to the realm of pornography and more a topic of open conversation. Through the “sex positivity” movement, universal sex education in schools, and shifts in biomedical discourse, sex has been reframed as a normal, if not explicitly positive, part of human existence. There is good reason to believe that death is now headed in the same direction. Across the world, in disparate communities and for different reasons, people are embracing death positivity.
Whenever I am asked if I am “death positive”, or am labelled as such, I hesitate. Frankly, death is f—ed. I’m not positive about it. But I fully accept that it is inevitable, even valuable, and that it has inspired great art and our extraordinary endeavour to create meaning.
I agree with Barbie that life is more when it is lived in the light of our mortality – and I think about death more than most people want to or should. But I am not overjoyed by the reality of my impending mortality and even less so that of friends and family, which is why I’m committed to making sure they die as well as possible.
There is, I think, something singularly horrific – not romantic – about the idea of grief as “love with nowhere left to go”. It is also important to remember that not all deaths will be “good”, or even OK. Many deaths are unjust, premature, painful or violent. They come at the hands of the state, or as a result of persistent inequality or just banal evil. Positivity in the face of such suffering seems inhumane.
To die, and die well, in the 21st century, you don’t have to like death. You don’t have to think about it five times a day, and you certainly don’t have to always be positive when facing it. Positivity, with its relentless optimism no matter how dire the circumstances, can be toxic. This toxic positivity does harm where it limits the free expression of negative emotions, like sadness or distress. And if there is anything that deserves my sadness and distress, it is the knowledge that my dog will one day die.
Many other social movements have latched onto the language of positivity, only to later abandon it. Most notably, “body positivity” fought back against unrealistic aesthetic standards, particularly those imposed upon women. With its origins in 1960s radical fat activism, body positivity aimed to make the world safe and welcoming for people with marginalised bodies. But in its contemporary, social media-heavy expression, this movement can focus on the body’s appearance to a fault, reaffirming visual aesthetics as a determinant of value, even if those aesthetics have expanded.
In contrast, “body neutrality” seeks to remove appearance from the realm of moral judgments. Let us adopt this tactic. Let us be death neutral. Living and dying bodies still need to be cared for, and we need to reclaim the more radical aims of fighting for equality in this manner. Death is neither good nor bad; it is simply part of our existence. And it deserves our contemplation and reflection, even if that process is sometimes scary.
Edited extract from How to Die in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson) by Hannah Gould, out now.
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