The Death Curious Blog
Death is scary and hard to talk about. The Death Curious Blog is here to change that. Our mission is to eliminate death avoidance & bring people together with death-curious education.
The Top Death Curious Moments of 2023
As 2023 draws to a close, it’s nice to look back and reflect on the growth and accomplishments achieved in death care this year. I’ve always been a fan of a “tabula rasa” or a blank slate fresh start, and a new year is a great time to reflect, learn, and carry ourselves forward. 2023 was the first year for Death Curious. While our education platform has accomplished a lot in our goal to create healthy and honest conversations around death, there have also been a few major “death curious” moments in our wider society in the past year that are worth celebrating. This is my list of the top 4 Death Curious moments of 2023.
Grieving During the Holidays
For some of us, as the holiday season approaches each year things can often seem a bit heavier than usual despite the sentiments of “merry and bright” and “it’s the most wonderful time of the year”. Many people struggle with the holidays for a multitude of reasons: estrangement from family, financial struggles, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and grief. Believe it or not, many studies show that more deaths happen between late November and early January than any other time of year. This means more people than usual might be experiencing grief from a recent loss or marking a death anniversary as the holidays approach.
However, there are some helpful things you can do to help move through grief during the holiday season. Grief rituals are a wonderful and accessible way to acknowlege and integrate grieving, especially during this time of year. As we find ourselves in the thick of the Holiday Season of 2023, let’s take a moment to learn about winter death rates, and how to better understand and support those of us who are grieving during the holidays.
The Real Environmental Impact of Funeral Options, Part 5: Natural Organic Reduction
One of the newest options for body disposition to become legal in the US with an incredibly low environmental impact is Natural Organic Reduction, or NOR (also known as “body composting”). NOR was first developed for humans by Katrina Spade of Recompose, and began as a way for people living in urban areas to have access to more natural and eco-friendly disposition options. It allows city dwellers a greener option than traditional burial or flame cremation, without having to transport a body miles outside of a city to a conservation or green burial cemetery.
First legalized in the US in Washington State in 2019, NOR is now available in Oregon, Vermont, and Colorado, and legislation is currently in the works to make it a legal disposition method in other states as well. Though this disposition method is still an outlier in the disposition arena, it is quickly gaining traction and popularity. The incredibly low environmental impact of Natural Organic Reduction is directly meeting the needs of death planners today and tomorrow, as we see more people are consistently searching for eco-friendly alternatives in death planning.
Getting Death Curious About Halloween
Across subcultures and generations, “spooky season” is a highly anticipated time of year. The entire month of October allows many people to publicly display a fascination with the morbid through enjoying horror movies, decorations, costumes and more. However, it is curious to me that, for a society that has a hard time having healthy conversations about death and grief, we seem to have no problem getting excited about Halloween.
Perhaps the paradigm of our cultural obsession with Halloween can be linked to our wider societal death avoidance, and thus our growing need for connection to human mortality. Halloween might be so appealing to us–especially younger generations– because it offers an approachable way to process fear around death and dying. This means that getting death curious about Halloween could have positive repercussions for our society’s tenuous relationship with death.
Colorado and the Complicated History of Funeral Regulations
By now everyone who watches the news or looks at social media is aware that Colorado is a state with more lenient funeral industry regulations and certification requirements than any other in the country. This knowledge comes in the context of a horrific funeral home scandal in Penrose Colorado, in which the smell of over 180 decaying bodies at Return to Nature Funeral Home prompted neighbors of the business to call local police to investigate. However, before this scandal, Colorado had a reputation of being on the cutting edge of death care, as one of the first states to adopt both natural organic reduction and alkaline hydrolysis, and the only state to have a city that allows open-air cremation. Now, the question is one of correlation, Do more funeral home scandals happen in Colorado, where there are fewer funeral director regulations, and are these scandals directly caused by the lack of required licensure? Or does the benefit of allowing more people access to the funeral profession lead to better death care services and happier families? Are these questions mutually exclusive or is this a “both/and” scenario? Let’s look a bit closer at the history of funeral regulations and licenses to better understand how tragedies like the one at Return to Nature Funeral Home occur.
The Real Environmental Impact of Funeral Options Part 4: Green Burial
A previously cited study by IBM Institute breaks down what is driving consumer choices today and reveals that 40% of consumers across all sectors and industries are purpose driven- i.e. making purchases based on ethics, beliefs, and personal values like eco-consciousness. Nowhere is this fact more apparent in death care than in the rapidly rising interest and enthusiasm for green burial in recent years. Let’s dive into the real environmental impact of green burial and how it compares to other disposition methods.
Since green burial typically means no body bag, no embalming, the most ecologically friendly biodegradable body covering possible, as well as no use of an elevator, graves dug by hand, only natural monuments and markers, only biologically degradable clothing, no jewels, no maintenance of burial grounds, and more people buried per graveyard, it has a significantly lower environmental impact than traditional burial, and even cremation. According to data from NFDA, 60% of funeral planners are interested in green burial as of 2022, up from 55.7% in 2021. However, there are other studies that cite even higher interest in green funeral services. A 2021 study by Kates Boylston Publications found that a whopping 84% of those surveyed said that they would consider green burial if those services were offered at a funeral home.
