Why You Should Spend Time With A Dead Body

Hello. We are here today learning about technology and design and end-of-life innovations. I’m not going to talk about that.

I’m going to talk about my great life’s passion, which is convincing you to hang out with more corpses.

Now, this is probably where I should say, of course, it is much more nuanced and complicated than that. But it’s not, really. It’s just, yeah, get you to hang out with more corpses.

I will say, though, okay, one caveat: I am talking about the dead bodies of your family and your loved ones, not just random dead bodies. So that’s fair. That’s a caveat.

So why am I so passionate about this?

Ten years ago, I entered a job in the funeral industry, and that’s the industry I’ve been in ever since. Almost immediately after I started in this job, I noticed a somewhat sinister pattern emerging.

So let’s talk about someone dying. Let’s say Mom.

A voice from beyond. Perfect.

Okay, let’s say someone died. Let’s say Mom. Mom died at a hospice. She died at home. She died in a nursing home. She died at a hospital.

In the hours following her death, there is an absolutely incredible opportunity that you have for ritual in and around her dead body.

By ritual, all I mean is some physical action, either with your own body or with the body, mixed with a thought or an idea or a belief.

Rituals can run the gamut. If you’re a deeply spiritual or religious person, ritual can mean singing or chanting or praying. If you’re a more secular or nonreligious person, ritual can mean holding her hand, washing her feet, brushing her hair, telling stories.

But what we do know is that something sort of sacred happens during that time.

And listen, I’m a pretty secular person myself, but I have to borrow words from religion to describe the awe that can take place in those few hours, however long you’re comfortable being with the body.

Why is it so powerful? I think there are a few reasons.

The first reason is that you are looking down at a body that is starting to physically change after the moment of death. Their skin is growing stiff. It’s going down to room temperature. Their features are sinking.

With that physical proof, you have to start realizing: This person is dead. They are no longer part of my community. They are no longer part of my life. Any relationship that I continue to have with them will not be the same as it was before.

The second reason is a little more selfish, but I think equally important, which is that looking down at a dead body, you realize: As they are, so you too will be one day.

How are you living your life that reflects that? How aware are you of your own mortality and the fact that you’re going to die? Can you leave the room at the end of this experience with a different way of thinking about the world you’re inhabiting?

And the last thing, I never really could put words to this until I had a conversation with a rabbi, and he said, “It sounds like what you’re saying is an important reason to stay with a dead body is that it gives you time and space to mourn for all the people you never got a chance to mourn for.”

That can be people in your family whose death you didn’t get to be there for, or it could be people you’ve never even met but still feel a connection to.

So we know that being with the dead body, just the simple act of being with the dead body, can have these profound implications.

But here’s the somewhat sinister narrative that I was talking about: That almost never happens.

What does happen is Mom dies. It was an expected death. I’m not talking about traumatic deaths or unexpected deaths. It’s an expected death, which most deaths are.

But it is treated as an emergency.

It is treated as: Pick up the phone. Call the funeral home. Call the funeral director. Get them here right now.

I’m going to be brutally honest with you. In the 21st century, the second you pick up the phone and call a funeral home to take over, all that opportunity for ritual is essentially lost to you.

When the funeral home comes and picks up Mom, one of two things is likely to happen.

The first thing is that she is cremated or buried and you do not see her again. And that’s okay. That’s your choice.

The second thing is that they are going to chemically preserve her, embalm her, put her in makeup, put her in a suit or a dress, put her in a casket and present her to you in a wake.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking about these two different ways of hanging out with the corpse, essentially.

The first option is seeing Mom as she actually is immediately after death, spending time with her, sitting with her, having that kind of space and time around it.

Versus what happens at a modern American funeral home with the embalming, with the makeup, with all that, and the very different user experiences, to borrow a Silicon Valley term, that people have with these two different ways of being with a dead body.

The first way that I was talking about, just sitting with a dead body, honestly, I wouldn’t keep advocating for this if it didn’t have the response rate or approval rating of, like, puppies and chocolate.

People who have done this with their loved ones come and say, “It was life-changing. I would absolutely do this again. I had no idea I could do this.”

It’s an introvert’s dream. You have the space and the time to feel your feelings and start going on your grief journey, whatever it looks like for you.

Whereas the modern American wake, a lot of millennials, a lot of Gen Xers especially, tell me that it makes them pretty uncomfortable.

They show up, and all these people are there, so they’re essentially on display as a close family member. They feel they have to perform.

There’s a time limit because the funeral director only has so much time allotted for you to be with the body.

They walk up to the casket, and they see Mom in there, and they tap her hand, and then just kind of back away and sit down.

There’s not really an opportunity built in there for ritual.

Most of you in this room probably have some sense that it didn’t always used to be this way.

Until the 20th century, there wasn’t a funeral industry, especially not a $20 billion funeral industry.

To maintain a $20 billion funeral industry, the industry can’t really let people know that the first option is available to them.

They cannot really let people know that there is this option with an approval rating of puppies and chocolate.

They cannot really let people know that there is a, frankly, free option available to them to sit and have ritual and be with the dead body.

So a lot of what I do is just reinforcing to people again and again: It is safe and legal to be with your own dead.

It is safe and legal. Safe and legal. Safe and legal.

It’s difficult when a family doesn’t know that, but it’s even more difficult when the medical professionals we work with don’t know that.

I’ve said this again and again: Hospice nurses, trauma nurses, nursing home workers, these are some of our greatest allies in this fight to have this continuum of care for people through dying and death.

But they can also be our greatest enemies if someone higher up has told them bad information or another funeral director has told them bad information.

Let me give you a story of a time that this really did work, this continuum of care.

There was a young girl who died. She was only 13 years old. Her death was expected, but obviously still tragic for her family.

Because the hospital and our funeral home were in communication, what we were able to do for the family was, when she died at the hospital, they allowed her to stay in their morgue under refrigeration for a few days while everything got ready.

We came and picked her up and brought her home to her family.

Over that next night, her family stayed up with her. They dressed her. They washed her. They put her in the casket.

They didn’t want anybody else to do this. This was their little girl. They wanted to be the ones who did it.

The next morning, they put her in a minivan, and off they drove up to Central California, where they had a family plot for her to be buried.

That worked only because the medical establishment and the funeral establishment were on the same page with the family taking that kind of control.

So I’m really excited about the future. I am excited about technology. I am excited about the way we’re moving forward. I’m excited about this continuum of care.

But I think, especially for people in this room, yes, let’s think about dying well, but let’s also think about being dead well.

Which is not as catchy. I see that. It’s maybe not the branding I would choose.

But think about it. You can have this empowered, informed, best-medical-care-has-to-offer death. But if it just drops off from there, there’s this whole family left behind that is not getting the “well” part of dying well and being dead well.

So I’m excited about the technology that presents itself in the dying process, but I want to encourage you to think that the best answer for after the death occurs might be this very ancient idea that humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years, which is just simply being present with the dead body.

Thank you.