The one thing everyone shares in life is that some day it will end. Pāhiki Eco-Caskets wants to shape a final resting place that is environmentally friendly for all.
Like most people, Cortney Gusick never considered the prospect of purchasing a casket until she needed to select one for a family member. Eight years ago, her dad died from pancreatic cancer, and she was thrust into the death-care industry as a consumer. The most difficult part of making the funeral arrangements was finding the right casket. Gusick wanted something that reflected who her father was in his very full life: a Hawai‘i boy who cared about the environment and carried those values with him to Oregon, where he raised his three daughters. Ultimately, Gusick settled on a simple pine box from a small-scale, non-commercial business. “His body was going to biodegrade as it was designed to do, and it would provide some kind of nourishment for the earth,” Gusick says. She reasoned that the receptacle in which he was buried should do the same.
Common caskets are not earth-friendly. Nearly every model found in funeral home catalogs is manufactured with metal, paint, silicone, synthetic polyester fabric, and other non-biodegradable materials. That greener options aren’t readily available in the modern burial industry concerns Gusick, especially in a place like Hawaiʻi, where a reverance for one’s natural surroundings is part of daily life. After her dad’s death, she saw the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel, and she came out the other side a casket builder. “This is what I want to offer for people,” she says. “For someone’s eco-legacy to be, ‘I did right by the earth.’”
Last year, Gusick started Pāhiki Eco-Caskets, a low-impact, environmentally sound casket manufacturer, in the backyard of her Mānoa Valley home. The venture was a 180-degree pivot from her ongoing job at the Silicone Valley-based company UserTesting as a test engineer in the amorphous world of software and mobile applications. “I had zero background,” Gusick admits. But the 37-year-old felt equipped for the intensely tactile field she was about to enter. “My dad taught his girls how to do everything, how to change our own tires, acid-strip a deck, lacquer the house’s wainscotings,” she says. She binged on online tutorials to gain a baseline knowledge of woodworking. “Between Dad and YouTube,” she says, “I felt like, ‘I got this.’”
Three months later, she teamed up with Logan Baggett, a friend she met in Oregon who had previously worked in Hawaiʻi’s solar industry, to help finesse Pāhiki’s offerings of 4- to 6-foot-long, 100 percent biodegradable caskets crafted from untreated, Hawaiʻi-grown wood. Soon after, the company attracted five investors and received a business loan from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which they used to buy hardwoods and build out inventory.
In Hawaiian, the word pāhiki means “to pass quietly, go lightly, touch gently,” a definition the duo strives to embody. Their caskets are made with reclaimed local albizia, monkeypod, mango, avocado, and Norfolk pine provided by Waimānalo Wood, a lumber mill that also houses their workshop. Pāhiki caskets range in price from $1,800 to $2,200 (less than the $2,400 median cost of a standard metal casket). In the circumstance that someone needs a keiki casket, Pāhiki provides it for a dollar.
Gusick considers every dimension of her industry. We’re trapped in a “death-denial culture,” especially in the United States, she says, which is obsessed with indefinitely preserving the deceased in ways that only benefit the living. For Gusick, the more grandiose style of caskets, which can cost upwards of $15,000, are more for the living than the dead. Those caskets “resemble pieces of high-end furniture that belong in this world, that belong in a house, and look like they’re meant to last over time,” she says. But the reality is they go into the ground, never to be seen again.
Pāhiki’s unobtrusive design aesthetic is in direct response to that. The final products—caskets that trade metal, paint, synthetic fabric, and lacquer for wood, non-toxic glue, muslin, and coconut-oil finishes—are crafted to allow the wood grain to shine in its most organic state. The caskets are stripped of sensational flourishes, but not of sentiment. Family members can opt to purchase the “collaborative option,” for which Gusick and Baggett affix biodegradable linen loops around the casket’s perimeter to hold flowers from funeral guests.
Pāhiki also has a keen interest in engaging with communities that have large Native Hawaiian populations on Oʻahu and neighbor islands. During community talk stories, Gusick presents information about Native Hawaiian burial rights and practices—which involve cremating a body in an imu, wrapping the bones in kapa cloth, and burying them in lauhala—and how to perform them legally. As a Native Hawaiian, Gusick feels especially called to apply a Hawaiian understanding of ʻāina to her work. “Hawaiians were the original environmental stewards,” she says. “I can rewind back through so many generations of people where this was always their charge, to take care of the land, and now I can do it in a way that’s modern.”
As long as humans are dying, the death-care industry, which sees profits in the billions of dollars, will remain open for business. Pāhiki’s niche market is a fractional percentage of that, but it is poised to grow as an aging population becomes more informed of greener burial methods. While Pāhiki’s prototypes are evolving, the emotional gravity of the caskets will always be the same. “Isn’t it so crazy that we’re responsible for this thing that is so intimate for a person we’ll never meet?” Gusick often thinks. “We’ll never get to look into their eyes, never get to shake and touch their hand. It’s this very special, unique thing that will only be crafted and given to them once.” It’s a heavy order, but Pāhiki hopes to treat it lightly.
Above Ground
People who work in the death-care industry bring the lessons they learn in the field into their daily lives in quiet but profound ways. Here is what Gusick and Baggett have learned from the dead about how to live better every day.
Be introspective “Most people should contemplate death; it shouldn’t be an afterthought,” Baggett says. “We know it’s coming, we know it’s part of life—it’s just a transition, in my eyes.” Thinking about death and removing its negative connotations can lead to a more present and purposeful approach to life.
Be clear about your wishes “Documentation is an act of love,” Gusick says. “Put it in writing and in thoughtful detail.” The way you live isn’t always enough to let loved ones know how you want to be buried.
Be nice “There are 20 million things I don’t know about a stranger, but there is one thing I can guarantee I know about them and that they know about me,” Gusick says. That is the inevitability of death. “In society, you can quickly and easily dehumanize another person in the way you talk about them off-handedly or the way you treat them, not thinking back to that completely timeless experience you know you share with that person. If you reverse-engineer that awareness when you interact with people, you can use it to make a kinder, more insightful connection with someone. Or, you know, just try to not be a jerk.”
While enjoying her seventh decade on the planet, Donna Personna knows her remaining days are numbered. Yet the prospect of her demise doesn’t scare her.
“The end question. ‘The end.’ It’s not a touchy subject for me. I’m irreverent,” said Personna, a transgender woman who grew up in San Jose and now lives in San Francisco. “I have been on the planet for 72 years. I learned long ago this was going to come.”
Personna, a beloved drag performer, playwright, and hairdresser, credits her Mexican heritage with teaching her that death is a part of life. She pointed to the annual Dia de los Muertos holiday — the Day of the Dead in early November — as one example of how, from an early age, she was taught to embrace one’s mortality rather than fear it.
“I am not worried about it. It doesn’t scare me,” said Personna, who graduated with honors from San Jose State University and, for years, owned her own hair salon in Cupertino, which she sold a while back but continues to cut hair at once a month for longtime clients.
Born into a large Baptist family with 16 siblings, Personna remains close with several of her older brothers and their families in the Bay Area. She is confident she can rely on them in the case of emergencies or if her health deteriorates.
“Some of my nieces said, ‘You can live with us,'” said Personna, who has designated one of them the beneficiary of her estate.
Her Plan B, however, is to move into a pueblo outside Guadalupe, Mexico where her Social Security check and personal savings will be worth more.
“I want to spend the rest of my days in Mexico. I don’t want to die in San Francisco,” said Personna. “I am longing to go there.”
Confronting the end of one’s life isn’t easy for the majority of seniors, whether LGBT or straight. Most have not declared an executor for their estate, let alone discussed with their physician what sort of care they want in their dying days.
“It is rooted in the death phobia that North American culture has,” said Brian de Vries, a gay man and professor emeritus of gerontology at San Francisco State University who is a leading expert on end-of-life issues among LGBT seniors.
There are an estimated 2.7 million Americans who are LGBT and 50 years of age or older. Of that age group, 1.1 million are 65 and older. By 2060 LGBT elders in the U.S. are expected to number more than 5 million.
This generation of LGBT seniors differs from its heterosexual counterpart in significant ways, according to aging experts. Most of the LGBT seniors experienced discrimination not only in their day-to-day lives but also in medical settings due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.
LGBT seniors are oftentimes no longer in touch with their birth families, having been ostracized after they came out of the closet. And many don’t have a partner, spouse, or children of their own to rely on as they age.
“The issues around aging alone are particularly meaningful in LGBT seniors,” said Lisa Krinsky, 55, a lesbian who is the director of the LGBT Aging Project at the Fenway Institute in Boston.
And in the case of many older gay men, they lost their families of choice, whether it was their friends, partners, or spouses, to the AIDS epidemic. Thus, they are more likely to be aging alone. And if they are living with HIV, they are largely unprepared for their retirement years having believed they would have died by now.
Dearth of research
For LGBT seniors, living alone “sets them up to more likely need institutional care as one gets older,” said Daniel Stewart, a doctoral student and adjunct professor at Saint Louis University in Missouri.
Stewart and his colleague, Brandy Fox, a Ph.D. student at the university’s Center for Health Care Ethics, presented their research on LGBT older adults’ end-of-life perceptions and preparations at the Gerontological Society of America’s annual conference, held last month in Boston.
“There is not a lot of research on LGBT end of life,” noted Stewart.
Talking about the end of one’s life can be exceedingly difficult for LGBT seniors, according to aging experts, because of their lack of trust in their health care providers or not having close familial or social connections, leaving them without a family member or friend they can turn to and discuss how they want to be cared for as they age.
“We know gay and lesbian seniors delay getting care,” said Kysa M. Christie, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System during a panel at the aging conference focused on palliative and end-of-life care for LGBT older adults.
The reasons can vary, said Christie, from internalized homophobia and heterocentrism to stress-related stigma and poverty. It is estimated that one in five LGBT seniors, she said, “have no one to call in a crisis. Compare that to one in 50 for heterosexual seniors, so that is a stark difference.”
Fox and Stewart interviewed 17 LGBT seniors living in the Midwest about end-of-life issues. The cohort expressed concerns about being a burden as they aged and largely had unfavorable views of health care settings, particularly religious affiliated hospitals.
As one 78-year-old woman told the researchers, “Me and the medical profession do not get along,” recalled Fox.
De Vries and his colleagues in the field of LGBT aging call the lack of discussions about one’s palliative care needs, from who will be one’s power of attorney to what a person’s advance directives are for their medical care, “the missing conversations.” It is a subject that seniors must repeatedly address as their circumstances and choices may change as they age.
“I like that it is plural, as once you have the conversation people think you are done with it,” said de Vries. “It is hard enough to have the conversation. And once you have it, you want to wipe your hands dry and move on. As if that is it; it is one of many conversations people need to have, I think.”
For several years now de Vries has been involved in research in Canada looking at end-of-life issues among LGBT seniors. In one paper de Vries co-wrote, and is under review at the International Journal of Aging and Human Development for inclusion in a special issue on LGBT aging, he and his colleagues note that evading end-of-life discussions “keeps death ‘in the closet’ — along with one’s hopes, fears, and wishes about their end of life.”
The issue struck close to home for de Vries six years ago when his husband, John Blando, Ph.D., who is also a professor emeritus at SF State having worked there as an instructor/adviser in the Department of Counseling, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The men, both 62 and together 33 years, began to seriously discuss end-of-life issues, such as how to care for each other, as they drew up their wills and estates. When they moved four years ago from San Francisco to Palm Springs and had to revise their wills, they also completed their advance health care directives and durable powers of attorney.
“These naturally involve deeper discussions about end of life — at least that was our experience,” said de Vries. “Of course, elements of end-of-life discussions have dotted our other conversations as we talk about our plans and hopes for the future. I will admit to some discomfort in some of these conversations — about raising issues that we both fear, about releasing strong emotions — but they ultimately rest on expressions of love and opportunities to share.”
‘Death cafes’
Aging expert Brian de Vries, right, with his husband, John Blando, Ph.D.
Since the couple retired to Palm Springs, de Vries has continued to work on end-of-life issues and helped launch a group called PALS, short for Planning Ahead for LGBT Seniors. It presents seminars where people can discuss a range of palliative care issues, from entering hospice care to planning one’s funeral.
“We have a funeral home director come in who is gay and talks about his experiences and the issues and the complications he has seen and how they could be mitigated if people only planned ahead,” said de Vries.
He also borrowed a concept from Britain known as a “death cafe,” where people meet socially to talk about death and dying issues. The gatherings are held at least once a month in Palm Springs and attract upward of 20 people or more.
“What is so neat is it is an in-your-face approach to it. It is not a ‘passing away cafe’ or something subtler. It is a death cafe,” said de Vries. “The idea is it just kicks the door open and brings it out of the closet and brings it into a public space and invites people who may not know each other to a safe space to have these conversations.”
For those LGBT people who have thought about how to plan for their end-of-life care, they tend to focus solely on matters related to their death or dying and not the months or years leading up to their final days. As an example, de Vries said when he once asked a focus group of gay men if they had a will or written out their funeral plans, most had. Hardly any of them, however, had determined who in their life would take them to the hospital or pick them up when, and if, they were discharged.
“It kind of provides an entry into this. It is a bit innocuous to ask someone, ‘I need a ride back and someone to sit with me for an hour, would you do that?’ People feel honored to have been asked and that someone cared enough about me to think I could help them with this,” said de Vries.
Asking for help isn’t always easy for LGBT seniors, noted the Fenway Institute’s Krinsky, even when they have family or friends who can assist them. She recalled talking once to a group of 20 older lesbians and asking them if they would be willing to go to the pharmacy for a friend.
“Eighteen said they would go for someone,” said Krinsky.
But when she flipped the question and asked the women if they would request help for themselves in getting their medications from the pharmacy, “only eight hands went up.”
Krinsky refers to such a model of care as “horizontal caregiving,” where a circle of friends, neighbors, and/or co-workers rely on each other to look after one another.
“We see tight families of choice taking care of each other as best as they can,” she said, “as people are concerned about how will I care for myself as I age.”
Such a structure, she said, upends the heteronormative approach of relying on one’s biological family to provide caregiving. It is expected that a married straight couple’s children and grandchildren will look after them in their senior years and that responsibility is passed on with each new generation.
“Right now, we a have a vertical model of multi-generational caregiving,” Krinsky explained.
Challenges
Even though Personna lives in an LGBT-affirming city like San Francisco and has her family’s support, she is cognizant of the fact that there are still challenges that LGBT seniors must confront.
“Because of my orientation it is totally different than a heterosexual family and their end-of-life situations. So many things are already in place for them,’ she said. “By law you get things and your family connection is built in. My community, we have to build that and do the work. People my age usually don’t have what the heterosexual person has, like built in grandkids to come over and take you to lunch.”
Five years ago Personna moved from Cupertino into the city to help care for her friend, Bill Bowers, 71, a member of the famed gender-bending group the Cockettes whose outrageously designed jackets became a must-have for rock stars such as the members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
Bowers, a gay man who is HIV-positive, had been living alone at the Derek Silva Community when he had a stroke that left him unconscious for two days in his studio apartment. After that episode, he moved into a two-bedroom unit so that he would have a roommate who could look after him. After he lost his first roommate to cancer, Bowers asked Personna to move in.
“I can’t live alone,” said Bowers. “I asked Donna because she was traveling back and forth from the city to Cupertino on weekends to move in. She is here to be my caregiver.”
Personna not only ensures Bowers makes it to his various medical appointments and takes his daily regimen of medications but also provides companionship. They also share many of the same friends and can reminisce about their younger days in the city.
Bowers has designated an executor for his estate and thought about how he would prefer to be cared for at the end of his life. For example, he doesn’t want to be put on life support should it come to that.
He expects to live out his days in San Francisco, though Bowers said if he could afford it he would spend the rest of his days in Paris or somewhere tropical, like Tahiti or the jungles of South America.
Unafraid of death, Bowers is concerned about how he will die.
“I don’t want to suffer,” he said. “I watched my former roommate go through weeks of suffering. I don’t want to go through that or have someone have to watch me suffer.”
When somebody dies in the Catholic tradition, people generally know what to do. There’s the saying of the Last Rites at a dying person’s bedside, the vigil for the deceased — also known as a wake — and, often, a formal Mass of Christian Burial.
In the Jewish tradition, there’s the practice of sitting shiva: the week-long mourning process during which the family of the deceased remains at home, and friends and relatives call on them to pay their respects.
In the Islamic tradition, the deceased’s body is ritually bathed and shrouded in white cloth before Muslims of the community gather to perform the Salat al-Janazah, the customary prayer for the dead.
But what happens when you die and you don’t follow any faith tradition?
When Iris Explosion — an entertainer and social worker who prefers to go by her stage name — was widowed unexpectedly at age 28, she and her friends had to create the memorial service for her husband, Jon, from scratch.
Explosion and her husband were not conventionally religious — she describes herself as a “lax Jew,” while her husband, a queer man interested in alchemy and other occult practices, often felt alienated from the born-again Christianity of his parents. The memorial service her friends created a few days after his death, she says, contained a blend of traditions and practices individual to Jon.
A Jewish friend recited the Mourners’ Kaddish. The group told stories — some reverential, some “bawdy” — that reflected all aspects of Jon’s personality. They played an orchestral rendition of the theme song to Legend of Zelda, Jon’s favorite video game. Friends from out of town dialed in on Skype to share their stores. Numerous friends gave Explosion rose quartz, a stone associated in some New Age and occult traditions with heart healing, as a gift.
The memorial service — as well as a second funeral service, which took place a few months later, and was similarly eclectic in style — focused on Jon’s personality and interests rather than being constrained by a specific set of traditions.
Explosion is just one person among the 24 percent of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated. For the religious “nones,” the issue of what happens when you die is an open question in more ways than one. According to a 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, the most recent year for which data is available, 29 percent of Americans do not anticipate having a religious funeral, for whatever reason, and given the steady increase in religious “nones” over the past decade, that number will likely only rise.
But what do secular funerals — or death rituals more broadly — look like? What can they provide that religious death rituals can’t? What are the challenges involved in putting them together?
And as secular funerals become increasingly individualistic, tailored to the preferences and needs of the deceased, rather than a given religious or spiritual tradition, what does that mean for the sense of community engendered by ritual?
Secular funerals are part of a wider “unbundling” of religion
It started with weddings.
Scholar and psychologist Philip Zuckerman, author of Living the Secular Life, suggested in a telephone interview that secular funerals are just the latest iteration of the secularization of major life stages overall.
Its genesis, he said, lies in the proliferation of secular weddings in America. In 2017, just 22 percent of American weddings took place in houses of worship, a nearly 20-point drop from 2009, according to data from the wedding website the Knot.
“The first thing we saw was zillions of people going online and registering with the Universal Life Church,” said Zuckerman, referring to an organization that virtually automatically ordains people over the Internet, “so they can perform their own weddings for friends and family, so they can still make it sacred but not under the auspices of religion.”
Different states have different laws about the extent to which Universal Life ordinations are legally valid for performing weddings. Funerals, however, have no such restrictions.
Zuckerman posits that among the people he’s interviewed for his book research, the desire to have a secular funeral isn’t just about not wanting to affirm the existence of a God or an afterlife that the deceased may or may not believe in. Rather, he says, it’s also about wanting to preserve a sense of the deceased’s individuality.
“They just don’t want fairy tales. They don’t want to be told, ‘So-and-so’s in a better place now,’ or, ‘So-and-so is now suckling the bosom of Jesus’ — they can find that talk annoying,” Zuckerman said. “We want to curate our own Facebook page. Why wouldn’t we want to curate our own funeral?”
More and more, Zuckerman said, he sees people choosing their own music and their own speeches that they want to be read after they die. “I think that is part of our growing individual and less of this care of tradition … more and more people want to feel the idiosyncrasies of the dead person and the specialness of the dead person.”
This attitude, he said, is particularly prevalent in the United States. “We all like to think in the United States that we’re special. Why wouldn’t we want our funerals to be special too?”
Certainly, for Iris Explosion, commemorating Jon’s life in a way that felt true to his personality and character was a priority. From sharing Jon’s favorite Spotify playlists with his friends to curate the music selection for the services to working in references to My Little Pony — a show Jon loved — Explosion and the couple’s friends created a memorial for Jon that fit his character.
By contrast, Explosion said, she declined to attend other memorial services, like one hosted by Jon’s family in his home state, that had a more Christian focus, instead circulating an email to attendees of that service asking them to donate to Planned Parenthood, which she felt better reflected her husband’s values.
Explosion’s experience dovetails with a phenomenon called religious “unbundling.” A term coined by Harvard Divinity School researchers Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thomas, who have covered how phenomena like CrossFit and Soulcycle function similarly to religions for their participants, “unbundling” refers to the way both the religiously unaffiliated and the religious alike are increasingly willing to pick and choose elements of spiritual traditions.
Someone might, for example, be a committed Christian but also practice Buddhist meditation or yoga, or be an atheist but attend Jewish family holidays and read tarot cards. In a pluralist landscape, in which people are used to gathering information and ideas from multiple sources (not least through the internet), a more individualized approach to religion and life rituals is all but inevitable.
As a culture, we still haven’t figured out what secular death rituals should look like
Even for those of traditional faiths, death is a phenomenon that defies easy answers. But for the religiously unaffiliated, processing and dealing with death and its aftermath can be an especially loaded task.
Brad Wolfe is trying to help them do that.
Wolfe is the founder of the week-long Reimagine End of Life festival. The singer-songwriter and author was inspired to work in the end-of-life space after watching a close college friend’s struggle with terminal cancer. The festival, which takes place in New York and San Francisco, partners with community centers and artists to curate a 300-strong series of events — from talks to workshops to performances to museum displays — dealing with the subject of death.
“Death is often the central coalescing element around which many religions are formed,” Wolfe told me in a phone interview. “As we’ve become more secular in some communities … there’s an increasing hunger for that space … to come together and explore this topic.”
The New York festival, which took place around Halloween, featured a range of explorations: a class on how to write your own obituary, doctors talking about dealing with their patients’ deaths, live musical performances exploring themes of loss and bereavement.
Participants speak at the the Nocturnists storytelling event where doctors from Mount Sinai, New York University, Columbia, and other local hospitals share their personal experiences with death.
What connects each event is a sense of intentionally: that people are actively setting aside time and space to deal with a weighty topic.
Both Wolfe and Zuckerman identify similar elements of what that “coming together” looks like. Ideally, both say, it involves elements of ritual, community gathering, and a sense of meaning: How do we conceptualize a person’s death as part of a bigger picture?
Wolfe suggested that we might be better off looking at this “coming together” not as a nonreligious event but as an expansion of the definition of what religion means. At least two Reimagine events are, fundamentally, immersive theater performances. In one, participants are invited into a phone booth to have conversations they wish they’d had with somebody who has died.
In another, participants role-play members of a fictional bereavement support group. Speaking about these events, Wolfe argued that the lines between art, ritual, religion, and performance are deeply blurred.
“The boundaries between art and religion are more porous when it becomes a practice explored with intention,” he said. What matters is the sense of significance shared by participants: “Having a practice, a shared system, allows us to connect in ways that give us a sense of comfort and something we know we can turn to.”
The idea or combining artistic creation and end-of-life ritual is far from new to Janie Rakow, president of the International End of Life Doula Association. As a “death doula,” Rakow works in hospices, helping those facing the end of their lives develop rituals and practices around their death. While she works with patients from a wide variety of religious backgrounds through the hospice, she tailors her work and approach to the individual in question.
One of the most important parts of the end-of-life process, she says, is the act of creation. She helps her patients develop what she calls “legacy projects”: individual artistic works, from a memory box to audio letters.
“Everyone has a legacy,” Rakow says. “So [I ask myself] what kind of legacy project could we possibly create with this person to really leave behind a sense of who they are or were?”
Next, she asks patients to help plan their own death — where they would like to be? What music they would like to be listening to?
“There may be some ritual work done around that,” she says, even if it’s “as simple as surrounding their bed, holding hands, saying a prayer or saying poetry, reading something to them, [or] lighting a candle.”
The point is to help dying people take an active, creative role in the story they leave behind.
Doula Craig Phillips pauses before entering the room of a person who is near death at the Gilchrist Hospice in Baltimore on June 6, 2016.
Often, Rakow says, these rituals are tailored to individual passions. She gives the example of one man she worked with, who was dying from ALS, a degenerative neurological condition that prevented him from being able to move. With his wife, Rakow created a series of guided visualizations for the man, who loved hiking, “so we would bring him with his eyes closed on the most detailed and specific hike that we could from the very beginning to hiking all the way through.”
She’d walk him through ”smelling the forest and feeling himself walking up the hills and hearing the birds chirping and looking over at the crystal clear lake. And the more descriptive we could get, we were able to bring him back into his body that he wasn’t able to use through his mind.”
Secular rituals present their own set of challenges
One of the most difficult parts of creating secular death rituals is compensating for the lack of built-in community, or built-in structure, that often accompanies more established religious traditions.
Zuckerman pointed out that the secular bereaved don’t necessarily have a clear road map, or community support, to help them deal with the pragmatic aftermath of a death.
“One of the biggest problems for secular culture [is that] you have to cobble together and make it yourself. If you want your kid to have a bar mitzvah, it’s all taken care of. You want your kid to go through confirmation class in the Episcopal Church? Boom, they’re enrolled. If you want to do a secular version of that? Good luck. You’re on your own. You have to figure it out, explain it to people, rent the space, find people, figure out how to write up your own program. … It’s a lot of effort.”
The lack of intentional secular communities, Zuckerman said, only intensifies this problem. “With religious communities,” he said, “not only is the structure of the funeral in place, but there are going to be people who are going to immediately sign up to cook dinner for your family for a month and they’re going to deliver food to your doorstep and they’re going to help you get your kids to school and they’re going to do a lot for you. And when you’re secular, you don’t have those kinds of resources.”
Pallbearers escort the casket to the altar during the funeral for Watertown firefighter Joseph Toscano at St. Patricks Catholic Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, on March 22, 2017.
For some secular Americans, the idea of having a “chosen family” — a close-knit network of friends — helps fill in the gap. Just as Friendsgiving has become a phenomenon among urban millennials, friendship networks more broadly have become an increasingly vital part of social cohesion, replacing both extended family structures and traditional organized religious communities.
That was certainly the case for Explosion. She cites her friends’ involvement in making the service possible at a time when she didn’t feel capable of planning herself. “I needed camaraderie and community,” she said, and I feel like I had it.”
At the same time, she says, she had less of a blueprint for how to cope with the next stages of grief after about six months.
“People go back to their own lives,” she said. “And it was hard to feel that sense of community. Without a church or synagogue to bind us together, it maybe felt like it dissipated. People missed their friend and their co-worker. But for me, it’s like, I miss my husband who lived with me, and it was hard to feel that sense of community after time had passed.”
The next step forward might be intentional secular communities
Explosion’s story points to a wider tension in the world of secular funerals and the creation of secular culture more broadly. On the one hand, the benefits of the “unbundled” religious landscape, for many secular Americans, lie in the opportunity to create truly new, individualistic rituals and experiences. We have the opportunity to curate our identities and public personae event after death, creating experiences that feel unique to us.
On the other hand, what risks getting lost in the process is precisely that feeling of collective identity that demands subsuming our individuality in a wider whole. Religious rituals and language, from Catholic ceremonial liturgy to the Salat al-Janazah, may not feel fully and uniquely “us,” but they nevertheless define and orient a wider community and give us a sense of shared values.
The 19th-century sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion primarily as a shared construction of identity; in his seminal 1912 work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he wrote, “The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.”
As more and more Americans leave organized religion, the next question is whether, and how, many of them will gather together, and how an increasingly individualistic conception of identity can be reconciled with the real, human need for group belonging. As secular funerals and death rituals become the new standard, we may see some of these rituals become more group-centric.
For Explosion, for example, the process of grieving led her to an unexpected new ritual. During her husband’s life, she said, she often played a video game called Destiny with him, looking up the location of objects hidden in-game and giving him hints to find them. While she never particularly got into the game, she said, she enjoyed playing it with him. After his death, she started watching YouTube videos of people playing the game, or its sequel, to remember the time they’d shared. Then she decided to buy the game’s sequel to play it herself.
“I’ve been playing this game I wouldn’t have played if he hadn’t died. And it’s been meditative for me. Finding the little things, like doing these things we used to do, felt like a pilgrimage in a way,” she said.
Sometimes, Explosion communicates with other players in the game online. While she’s only told a few of them about her personal history with the game, she’s nevertheless found a community that can accompany her in a time of grief.
“When we do a big quest or a raid together, there’s always a moment for me of, you know, okay, he would have done this. He did this in the old game. Now it’s me kind of picking up this mantle.”
The secular funeral liturgies we see in the future may transition from being individualistic to being based on other nonreligious elements that bring a community together. They may involve the music of My Little Pony or the playing of video games.
Ultimately, they’ll represent two fundamental human needs. First, to make sense of a beloved’s death. And second — and just as importantly — to not do it alone.
When someone dies, it is common to mark their death with funeral rituals, but the idea of using a ritual to mark someone as they near the end of their life is less common. Yet rituals could provide succour to all involved at this difficult time.
Rituals help people to mark and make sense of the big life changes that we all go through, such as births, marriages and deaths. Rituals work when the people involved understand what is going on. For example, for a non-religious parent, it may make sense to have a secular baby-naming ceremony, rather than a religious christening or baptism to welcome their baby to the community.
Ritual is often thought of as actions that express shared meanings, such as lighting candles during a funeral ceremony. They could also be words or music, such as reading a poem or playing a favourite song. Rituals can help us deal with change, partly because of the shared understandings we have of the actions involved, but also because those ritual actions tend to be familiar to us. Using familiar words and actions in an unfamiliar situation can help us find our way through it.
We are used to thinking of funerals as being for the living. The funeral can be an opportunity for bereaved people to mourn, to share stories about the person who died and to come together with others who are grieving. Funeral ritual can help people to feel more in control when faced with a terrible loss.
The period of time when someone is dying, however, is viewed differently. The focus is on the dying person and on making sure that they receive the care they need. But ensuring that the person who is coming to the end of their life receives the best care does not mean that those who love them need to ignore their own welfare.
Gathering family and friends around the bed of a dying person is called keeping vigil. It is a common practice in many parts of the world. Traditional Xhosa healers in South Africa, for example, describe death as a collective matter. It is important for the family to be at the bedside to ensure a good death. Family presence allows the dying person to be at peace and to let their relatives know what they want for the family’s future. This doesn’t just benefit the dying person, but also helps family members, offering a chance to mend relationships.
Being with the dying person, whether sitting quietly or chatting, gives people the chance to say goodbye. It is also an opportunity to share the experience with other family members or friends, in much the same way that mourning is shared at a funeral. For some dying people and their families, music is used as a shared experience in the final hours.
Memory box
Memory boxes are another form of ritual that is becoming more common. Women in Uganda recently began the practice of creating a memory book or a memory box in order to share their life story and create a sense of belonging for their children after they had died.
A memory box can also be assembled by the family or friends of the dying person and doesn’t have to be intended for children. Such a box can hold mementos, photos, written notes, a CD, copied poems; anything, in fact, that can act as a reminder of the person.
Mementos of life’s journey.
Thinking about and discussing how to manage the end of life may be useful for both the dying person and their family and friends. The unknown is difficult to deal with so understanding that they are taking part in a ritual of accompaniment and leave-taking can help a family make sense of and mark the change that they are going through.
Death is about the biggest change any person will encounter, whether it is their own death or that of someone close to them. Using rituals that express shared meanings to help them feel more in control at a time of loss can only be a good thing.
On a brisk November night, Tagine, a Moroccan restaurant tucked away on a quiet side street near Times Square, is alive with conversation. Nearly 20 people pack in around two tables cluttered with heaping, communal plates of steaming couscous, chickpeas, and yellow lentils. People exchange stories, laughs, and soft wedges of bread dipped in bright green chermoula. Multi-colored disco lights dance across the walls, and the swell of conversation rises and falls against a soft pulse of music and noise from the bar. A young, blonde woman walks through the door and surveys the crowd.
“Is this the singles’ event?” she asks, pointing to the tables. I shake my head.
“Nope,” I tell her. “This is the Death Cafe.” She thanks me, brow furrowed, and heads to the back of the restaurant.
While it may seem strange for conversations about death to be conflated with courting, our group could easily be mistaken for speed daters. Relatively young, open, and inquisitive, my dining companions exude a curious energy, solid appetite, and hunger for good conversation. But, unlike the majority of small talk with strangers, dialogue here is all about death—from philosophical musings about post-death life to the physiological components of dying.
“When the body is dying there are lots of … secretions,” says Tanya, a nurse who works in the intensive care unit at a local hospital. “We sometimes give patients medicine to try to dry them out and stop them from gurgling.”
“Is that what they call the death rattle?” someone asks from across the table.
Those noises, we learn, arise once the dying person can no longer swallow or clear fluid from the throat, and often indicates that they’re within a day of passing. But as disturbing as it may sound, the death rattle typically doesn’t cause the individual pain or discomfort. We talk about the sounds of death, and how to attempt to interpret them, sipping mint tea from delicate, warm glasses. “Having to take care of somebody who’s dying, and their family … it can be a lot. I want to talk about it with my husband, but I don’t want to fatigue him with it,” says Tanya. “But I think about it all the time.” It can be months, even years, she says, before she stops thinking about a patient who has passed away under her watch.
But not all Death Cafe diners come from professions that deal with death. According to Nancy Gershman, the facilitator of our cafe, attendees come from all walks of life, from college students with a philosophical curiosity about death to those who have witnessed something supernatural. Some people want to understand death better in order to prepare for their own. “I had this one 80-year-old who kept asking these roundabout questions,” recounts Gershman. “It turned out she wanted to know what dying was like.”
Hot tea helps the conversation flow.
Gershman, who has been facilitating this Death Cafe for the past three years, says there’s no agenda. Meetings often meander thematically, driven by the questions and stories people bring to the table. But she’s quick to remind me that, while the Death Cafe is a safe space to talk about loss, it’s not a support group. “When you lose someone, there’s a particular period right after it happens where you keep repeating, like a groove on a record,” she says. “We’re not here to stay stuck in that groove.”
Instead, Gershman says, it’s a place to speak openly and inquisitively about the end of life. Formally established in 2011, the original Death Cafe arose as the brainchild of the late founder, Jon Underwood, in his East London home. Inspired by Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz’s café mortel, he set out to create an intentional space dedicated to talking death in order help people “make the most of their (finite) lives.”
Strangers began gathering in Underwood’s London basement to sip tea, munch on cake, and casually discuss death and dying. Before dying unexpectedly from undiagnosed leukemia in 2017, Underwood and his mother created accessible guidelines and protocols so anyone could create Death Cafes within their own communities. Since then, more than 7,300 cafes have cropped up in over 60 countries—an indication that they address a deep-seated desire to understand death, one that’s been ignored, if not avoided.
After remaining relatively tight-lipped on the topic for centuries, those in the U.S. are more willingly peeking into the abyss—a cultural moment that’s been dubbed the “positive death movement.” From the growing demand for end of life doulas to the creation of apps that send daily reminders that you’re going to die, it’s apparent that more people are interested in confronting death.
“There’s a growing recognition that the way we’ve outsourced death to the medical profession and to funeral directors hasn’t done us any favors,” Underwood told the New York Times in 2013. By avoiding the topic until it happens, we’re left with all sorts of strange feelings about this universal life event. And yet, many of us prefer to keep it at a distance.
Part of this aversion, Gershman suggests, is that talking about it reminds us that it’s real. It shakes the comfortable illusions many of us cling to—that our bodies and brains are ours to control and keep. Sitting around the table, talking about how to financially plan for our funerals (to keep our partners and families from going into debt) can feel alien, even morbid, at first. But, through sips of mint tea, mouthfuls of warm lentils, and a few laughs, I’m reminded that it’s as necessary as making a financial plan before any big life event, such as going to college or getting married.
The strangeness of talking about death, Gershman says, goes beyond the mere fact that it’s been a longtime taboo topic in some cultures. There’s a lot of subject matter that’s taboo, she says, but death is different—largely because it’s inevitable. She compares it to the sex-positive movement in the U.S., where much of the silence surrounding sexuality has been stripped away to increase transparency and dismantle stigma. “People still have a choice when they’re talking about sex. You can either have sex zero times … or many times. But with death, you don’t have a choice. It’s going to happen, and it’s not going to be in your control.”
Nancy Gershman and a cafe attendee.
While making death less taboo will help us understand it and plan for it, it can’t help us prevent it. So planning for it is both frightening and necessary. But by ensuring tea and food are present, hosts of the cafes are able to make discussions of dying a little less scary. “There’s a superstition that if you talk about death, you invite it closer,” said Mr. Underwood. “But the consumption of food is a life-sustaining process. Cake normalizes things.”
My tablemates seem to agree that eating makes engaging with death easier. Tanya mentions that the pediatric unit has a giant bowl filled with candy, and it’s intended for the staff, not the patients. Digesting and processing death might be easier when accompanied by something sweet, something that nourishes us, something we understand to be routine. Like death, eating is something all living bodies simply have to do.
As the night progresses, one attendee whose husband passed away a few years ago tells me that, when she lost him, she lost her appetite, too. But in the past few years, her love for food, particularly dark chocolate, has returned forcefully. “Now, I eat it and I can’t stop,” she chuckles. She reaches into her purse, shuffling around a bit before pulling out three wrapped Hershey’s Dark Chocolate with Almonds nuggets, and hands one to each of us, smiling.
Laughter is common at the Death Cafe.
Even after years of facilitating Death Cafes, Gershman finds herself surprised by the feverish interest the cafes continue to garner. Month after month, newbies and returners come to talk death with strangers. A big part of the appeal, she ventures, is that death is great fodder for in-person conversation. “This is a subject that people can stay on, as opposed to babysitters and real estate,” says Gershman. “Death is such a rich topic that you could approach it in a million different ways and never be bored.”
Back at Tagine, conversation shifts from the life and death lessons learned from watching Golden Girls to the weirdness of grieving on social media. In a group of complete strangers, no one looks awkward or distracted, and no one is fiddling with a phone. “I really think that people are starved for interesting conversation at dinner,” laughs Gershman.
As I gulp down my piece of chocolate, another swell of laughter erupts from the table to my left. In comparison, the singles’ event in the back seems relatively lifeless. Gershman tells me that what I’ve seen and felt tonight is no anomaly.
“One of the waiters told me, ‘Whenever your group comes in, there’s always such great energy.’” she says. When she told him that this was a Death Cafe, a group focused on death and dying, he thought he had misheard her. “I think it’s because there’s a tremendous sense of relief. When you have relief, there’s more laughter.”
Podcasts: Cariad Lloyd interviews celebs about losing a loved one. It’s far from a downer
Griefcast features interviews with such celebrities as Aisling Bea, Adam Buxton and Ana Matronic
By Sarah Griffin
A few weeks ago, I covered a podcast called Death in the Afternoon, hosted by funeral directors and experts in the business and cultural history of dying and bereavement. Griefcast, hosted by comic Cariad Lloyd, is a far more intimate examination of grief and loss. Lloyd interviews a person – usually a fellow comedian – about a person close to them who has died. She lost her father when she was 15, which is the central thesis of this podcast: it’s a project about normalising conversations around death. This year, it won in three major categories at the British Podcast Awards and it’s very clear why.
I had been tiptoeing around this podcast for a while, aware of Lloyd as a comedian and gifted improviser, but had been unsettled at the idea of listening to two people dig into a conversation about death in such a personal capacity. Podcasts are already a very intimate medium, and this kind of intimate conversation seemed a long way from the peripheral. However, I am so glad I took the leap – Griefcast has made its way swiftly into my top podcasts of the year. I haven’t been able to stop listening.
Philosophical
This doesn’t come from a voyeurism, necessarily, which may seem hard to believe given the fact that each episode is an hour-ish long interview about loss. Rather, there is something hugely philosophical about each conversation, some wisdom imparted about the horror – and mundanity – of death. Every subject handles it differently, and Lloyd conducts the interviews with huge grace. She is the other person in the conversation, for sure, and acts as a very powerful conduit for conversations that cannot be absolutely easy for the subject, no matter how much levity they conduct themselves with.
Cariad Lloyd: conducts the interviews with huge grace.
The episodes I started with were interviews with Aisling Bea, Adam Buxton and Ana Matronic, all of whom had lost their fathers. Buxton is serene and gentle in his discussions of losing his father – this interview was given only months after his passing. Ana Matronic is a powerful storyteller; her father died of Aids when she was 15, and her episode is a portrait of the late 1980s in America, but also about how stigma operates.
My recommendation as a starting point is Aisling Bea’s episode, which is raw and angry and extremely real. I was floored by the integrity and honesty Bea brought to the interview regarding her father’s death – and her admittance that some days she just didn’t want to talk about it, but she was going to talk about it anyway.
Fascinating
Not only are the stories that the interview subjects dispense important, but the manner in which they dispense them is fascinating too. I cannot stress, either, how none of the episodes I have listened to so far have been downers, or left me feeling distressed. Certainly they are emotional listens at times, but there is an ease to the atmosphere Lloyd creates and facilitates here – which in many regards is a deeply courageous thing to do, as a person who has suffered a loss. She offers hers simply and honestly at the beginning of every episode – her dad died when she was 15 – and sets the tone that this next hour is a place for big, big chats.
I wholly recommend this as a listen, whether or not you have experienced the death of someone close to you. It is one of those rare pieces that, without ego or self-congratulation, examines a vital component of the human condition.
For more than a century, every deceased resident of Long Son Island has been buried in the same coffin.
The residents of Long Son Commune near the Vung Tau port city in southern Vietnam follow the Tran religious teachings set out by the island’s founder, Le Van Muu, early in the 20th century.
Muu was a resistance fighter against French colonialists in the 1800s, but the war forced him to flee his hometown in the Mekong Delta.
He and a small group of people migrated to an unpopulated Ba Trao Hamlet (now Long Son Commune). Muu settled there, built permanent homes, and formed a religious practice on the basis of maintaining human virtues.
His teachings focus on living harmoniously with nature and loving people. Besides that, there are not any rules and books that adherents have to strictly follow. They can get married and have children, but maintain a simple life close to nature.
Adherents wear the ao ba ba, a baggy shirt that is popular among peasants in southern Vietnam, tie their hair in buns, walk bare feet, and keep their head bare, too.
Muu’s followers inside the “Big House.”
Togetherness is a cornerstone of Muu’s philosophy. People in the community work and eat together. There is a lot of bonding, and in an unusual departure from mainstream traditions, this is carried on at death as well.
Muu believed that everyone was the same when they died, so he introduced the practice of sharing the same “Ba Quan” coffin when a person dies.
“Ba Quan” is a standard coffin that is placed in the Nha Lon (Big House) on the island.
Thanh Thi Thanh, a 75-year-old local resident, said that when a family member dies, relatives go to the Big House to ask to use the Ba Quan coffin.
The deceased’s body is washed clean, dressed in new clothes, shrouded in cloth and mats, and placed in the coffin.
At the cemetery, the body is taken out of the coffin and buried directly in the ground. “Ba Quan” is taken back to the Big House to be used by relatives of the next person to depart the world.
“The burial practice does not include the coffin so the corpse can quickly decay and attain liberation,” Thanh said. “This practice also helps family members save costs.”
She added that only those who are 12 years or older will be placed in the Ba Quan coffin when they die.
The dead are buried within 24 hours, instead of waiting for a set day or time. Family members will complete the mourning ceremony at the graveyard and do not invite guests over or perform any other ritual.
Those who visit the deceased will burn incense for the soul of the dead, and relatives will not receive any condolence money.
This tradition has been kept alive by locals for long.
Tran Ba Viet, head of the Culture and Information Department of Vung Tau City, said that the ceremony that Long Son residents have maintained for decades has many advantages since it is very short and expenses are minimized.
But since the coffin is not sealed for reuse, if the deceased had any serious, contagious illness, it could be contagious and affect the environment, Viet said.
He added that he will work with locals and authorities in the health sector to identify better funeral practices to protect the environment while respecting long-standing customs.
Pāhiki’s unobtrusive design aesthetic is in direct response to that. The final products—caskets that trade metal, paint, synthetic fabric, and lacquer for wood, non-toxic glue, muslin, and coconut-oil finishes—are crafted to allow the wood grain to shine in its most organic state. The caskets are stripped of sensational flourishes, but not of sentiment. Family members can opt to purchase the “collaborative option,” for which Gusick and Baggett affix biodegradable linen loops around the casket’s perimeter to hold flowers from funeral guests.
