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.
4) Natural Organic Reduction Becomes Legal in Nevada
In July 2023 Nevada became the seventh state to legalize natural organic reduction, also known as human composting. The environmentally friendly disposition method was first introduced by Katrina Spade of Recompose and was legalized in Washington State in 2019. Other NOR facilities like Return Home helped NOR become more available in Washington, while other states like Oregon, Colorado, New York, and California legalized the process in subsequent years.
Legalizing NOR in an additional state in 2023 is an important step in making this meaningful, eco-friendly option available to more people in different areas of the US. Every state that legalizes new death care options like NOR helps normalize more eco-friendly, nontraditional options that meet the needs of more people, which allows the general population to have more meaningful connections to death care and death planning. That’s a very death curious moment!
3) AI Enters the Death Care Space
From whimsical TikTok filters to Chat GPT, 2023 was a year of AI tech evolution. For better or worse, it seems like this branch of technology is here to stay. Nearly every area and profession has been impacted by so-called AI in the past year, and death care is no exception. The bright side of AI moving into workplaces includes easily generated marketing copy and automation of mundane administrative tasks. Anything that makes the more tedious aspects of a funeral director’s job quick and easy is a great thing for a profession that requires long hours, limited time off, and lots of emotional labor.
However, AI in the death care space also has a darker, more questionable side. A handful of companies that allow people to exist as AI avatars after death have appeared on the scene. Some companies even claim so much as allowing unique relationships to continue after someone dies. While some companies’ premises are less concerning than others, these technologies raise questions about the ethics of AI representing a real person’s thoughts and feelings after they’ve died and thus can’t correct the algorithm or defend themselves in the case of an error.
I had an excellent conversation with Chase Downs of Gather Software on the Death Curious podcast at the beginning of the year, in which we talked about the possible benefits and repercussions of AI in the death care profession. Ultimately, we landed on the great benefit that AI might offer in helping with menial administrative tasks but agreed that obituary writing, funeral planning, and anything needed to be personalized or beyond in funeral care should be left to real humans. You can listen to the episode here.
I do believe that, for ethical reasons, the role of AI should be limited (or at the very minimum highly scrutinized and evaluated before being presented to the public) when it comes to the death care space. High-quality death care services require empathy and personalization that AI cannot replicate. I also think that any technology that helps people think about death in new, exciting, more approachable, healthy ways is ultimately a good thing. While the ethics of recreating a deceased loved one as an AI avatar, or seeking companionship from an AI avatar are murky at best, thinking about human responses to grief, and evaluating what is healthy in that space can help us address death in more contemporary, relevant ways. This is an important part of dismantling death avoidance, which is what Death Curious is all about. That’s why AI’s emerging presence in death care was a top Death Curious 2023 moment.
2) Not One, but TWO Death Care Companies Appeared on Shark Tank
In our predominantly death-avoidant world, death care rarely receives national news or a major spotlight in pop culture. However, in 2023 this happened not once, but twice, on the hit show Shark Tank.
In March of 2023, death care tech start-up, Parting Stone (Death Curious’ parent company) made waves when the company’s founder and CEO appeared on Shark Tank to present solidified remains. In 2019, Parting Stone introduced a new form of remains for families choosing cremation. Their service solidifies 100% of the remains into a clean form that resembles 40-60 smooth, elegant stones that can be touched and held by families.
Similarly, Return Home, one of the first large-scale companies to offer Natural Organic Reduction or human composting, went on Shark Tank in ___ in 2023. The company’s founder, Micah Truman, alongside Services Manager Katy Houston, pitched this increasingly popular eco-friendly death technology to the sharks.
While Parting Stone left the show with a deal, Return Home did not. However, the deals in this instance aren’t the most “death curious” takeaway for death care at large. When innovative death care options like Return Home and Parting Stone get huge national coverage, it goes a long way toward normalizing death planning and conversations around death in our society. More people knowing about new and better options in death care is a huge step in the death curious mission to dismantle death avoidance and foster honest conversations about death. Shark Tank contributed to a death curious 2023. Here’s hoping we see more coverage of amazing deathcare options like these in 2024.
1) Barbie’s Death Curious Message Swept the Nation
The mission of the Death Curious education platform is to dismantle death avoidance and help us have healthier conversations about death because ultimately death is something that none of us can avoid. It’s inextricably braided into what it means to be human on planet Earth. It comes for all of us, and we need to talk about it, process it, and have a healthier relationship with it.
Thus, I was overjoyed when I realized that this was the ultimate point of the Barbie film, which swept the nation with one of the most effective marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen for the better part of 2023, and dominated this year’s summer season from the fashion industry to mundane TikTok content. (Death Curious even had a TikTok about Barbie go viral!)
*Spoilers Ahead*
To me, the more widely talked about feminist message of Barbie– which is obvious, basic, “feminism 101” for most of us– is overshadowed at the very end of the film, when the real message becomes clear. In the last 10 minutes of the movie, subtle threads that have been set up throughout the film are brought together by the core message, “Death is what makes us human.” A wonderful line from the end of the film is “Humans only have one ending.” That ending is death.
This primary theme is set up throughout the movie as Barbie’s perfection slowly unravels and she descends into an existential crisis. She becomes self-aware, begins to show signs of age, and thinks about the concept of death for the first time. During her adventure in the real world with the initial goal of returning to her former state of ignorance-is-bliss, she learns more about humanity and begins to understand larger concepts that give human existence meaning. There is a very moving scene in which Barbie sits next to a very old woman on a bus bench and begins crying while looking at her aged face. Barbie sees the visible journey of the woman’s life written on her face in wrinkles and age spots as beautiful. When Barbie returns to Barbie-Land after learning about real humanity, her existential crisis continues and she doesn’t understand her purpose. By the end of the film, all of the other gender-based, feminist storylines have wrapped up, but Barbie still feels incomplete. In a conversation with the spirit of her creator, Ruth, Barbie finally learns that she can choose humanity simply by understanding what that choice means: ephemerality, mortality, and eventual death. It’s also made clear in a beautiful montage of intimate home movie footage that the fact that our lives end is what gives them meaning. Death is what makes our human lives important.
Underneath all of the beginner feminism, the deeper point of the film is to highlight that death is what is in store for every human. The film’s primary thesis is that our lives end, and that fact is essential to what being human means. This thesis is essentially Death Curious, aligning perfectly with the mission of the Death Curious education platform and all of the work we do here. Thus, the Barbie film was the #1 death curious 2023 moment.
Here’s to a Death Curious 2024
As we head into the new year, I’m confident that contemporary death care options and death-positive stories will continue to become more present in pop culture and the media. Each death curious milestone in our society hacks away at cultural death avoidance and helps us think about and talk about death in healthier ways. So, we can all look forward to what comes next in death care technology, and death-positive representation in 2024.
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