I became part of the death positivity movement in my early 20s, after attending many funerals and wondering about the history of rituals and seemingly irrelevant requirements and, conversely, deeply emotional and unique elements. Our family funeral home in Weiser, Idaho, became a more familiar locale as my grandparents began dying in my teens and it made me think a lot about the American way of death. As always, I turned to books to read and after devouring many of them they solidified this idea that perhaps I wanted to become a mortician. So I interviewed a bunch, including my own family’s favorite, and they all recommended I get a job to try out the industry before committing to yet another required bachelors degree (I already had two at this point).
Me giving a historic walking tour of Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise in 2013 for Preservation Idaho.
I did, and spent some time picking up dead bodies at night for a small Oregon funeral home. I assisted with the dead at their homes, hospitals, accident scenes, nursing homes and back at the funeral home with autopsies and organ donations and embalming. It was hard and heartbreaking work. I didn’t end up becoming a mortician after all and still sometimes wonder if that was, in fact, my life’s calling. It’s become a very important part of my work in body positivity and was, in many ways, my introduction to the concepts of the movement. I also ended up becoming a death historian and studying it even more in grad school, writing my masters thesis on the architecture of the American funeral home. Since then, I’ve given a lot of historic art and architectural walking tours of cemeteries and taught workshops on how to write your own obituary and am a facilitator for my local Death Cafe.
I call this Historian in Repose, selfie taken alone in the Gibson Funeral Home after spending months alone researching and cleaning and organizing and preparing this defunct historic space for 700 guests just prior to its demolition.
In my early 20s when I wanted to revamp the way we grieved, bust open the conversation about dead bodies and talk a lot more about death, I learned that an important part of that was talking about what we might want done with our own bodies in the case of death with those closest to us. It’s often called “end of life planning” or “advanced care planning” and there are many parts of it, including signing a medical power of attorney and filling out an advance directive. Like all healthy young people, I didn’t think much about dying or death, and didn’t feel like I had a need to work on a will or anything related to my own death, really. It was getting pregnant with my first daughter, Lucy, at the age of 28 that really set into motion the importance of this ideas as I was now beholden to another human. So Dr. Brown and I filled out a template for a will online, mostly to make sure we had selected someone to raise her in case we both died at the same time. We didn’t have any assets and didn’t own a home and made sure our one car was in both of our names but our student loans weren’t so they could both be properly disposed of in case one of us died.
As part of the mitigation process by the developers before the historic Gibson Funeral Home (b. 1940) was demolished in 2016 I was able to give a lecture in the old sanctuary on the history of funeral home architecture in Boise and a tour. There was a line down the block to get into this beloved landmark and 700 folks came through that day.
Fast forward two kids and two decades later and life and living got so busy that we never did update that will to include Alice or Arlo. I witnessed friends get cancer and die and put their elderly parents in hospice and controversies over physician assisted deaths or ending one’s own life. I made this little list of 40 things to do before I turned 40 and most of them were really fun (and one was a small thing that indeed accidentally became a really big and life-changing thing) but creating The Death File, as we call it, was also on that list. Well, mostly due to having a baby and becoming internationally famous, The Death File didn’t happen for me at 40. And, to be honest, it wasn’t really fun or something I necessarily wanted to do, but knew it was so so important. But still, I put it off. For years.
Me at one of the garden mausoleums at Cloverdale Cemetery, Boise.
Until this last summer, just before I turned 44, when too many young parents I knew were dying, leaving a spouse and little kids with no direction, no details, no important documents organized, that I knew it was time. Thus, The Death File was born.
It’s a cheap plastic envelope that I’m sure came home from Eric’s office at one point filled with yellow file folders. It now has lists of digital account passwords, everyone’s social security cards and birth certificates, statements from every bank account, mortgage and student loan we have. It contains titles of all our vehicles and our home and copies of our drivers licenses and our marriage certificate. Eric and I signed medical power of attorney forms to name each other as well as advance directives in case of pain management, long illnesses, life extending procedures and organ donations. I made a daily list of my children’s activities and medications and appointments and doctors, teachers, therapists, friends and coaches. And it contains an updated will which includes all three of our kids.
The Death File also contains details on what kind of funeral we’d like, what we’d like done with our bodies, and important things we own and what we’d like done with them. Eric would like to be cremated in the suit he wore to our wedding and for his interview to become a professor at Boise State University; I want to be cremated naked. My directives also include the fact that I want donuts served at my funeral and Kacey Musgraves playing (and probably Taylor Swift, the Dixie Chicks and Dolly Parton because let’s be real country pop powerhouses are my love language). And to make sure that my kids print and have my book manuscript from the computer, as it may never be published but it is still a story worth having - it’s their story as much as it is mine. That if no one wants my entire Paint-by-Number collection please find a museum or an owner who will cherish it and keep in intact. That all my historic preservation and architecture books and files and research should get to my friend Dan of Preservation Idaho.
It was an emotional six weeks we spent working on The Death File, for both Eric and I. It ignited hard conversations about what we wanted to other to make sure the kids knew about us if we died tomorrow, our dreams for how they would continue to be raised, our concerns about how devastating it would be for them to lose a parent at a young age. We talked about hypothetical future lovers and our extended families and each of our children’s unique needs and personalities. I wrote love notes to my kids and, to be honest, it got a little overwhelming and seemed like a project that could go on forever.
I’m often asked to come to the Boise Public Library to teach classes and workshops, this one for death month in 2016, for their kids Dinner And A Book program. I read my favorite kids books on death from their collection and we ate pizza and salad and cried together with other families.
It’s a topic I talk to strangers about a lot at our Death Cafes. It’s a topic that is getting more and more recognition in mainstream media and that folks are writing books and blogs and creating workshops and events on, which is so important. It is something that is especially hard when you’re a young parent, though, with little kids. Deciding so much about their future and thinking about the possibility of leaving their upbringing to fate and someone else is depressing and difficult. I cried so much during the six weeks I worked on The Death File - from fear and sadness, yes, but also from beauty and love. What I realized most is that I wanted to leave a lot of the actually celebrating of my life and my funeral after I’m gone to them. I want them to be able to spend as much time with my dead body as they need if possible. I want them to assist with my cremation and decide what they want to do with my remains, even if it’s weird and impractical - my directive to Eric was to do whatever it takes to make it happen. And the same for him. That’s the beauty of the death positive movement becoming more mainstream and the death industry morphing into a creative beautiful thing that I hoped it could be when I was a 24-year-old girl. There are so many options now and the societal rules have loosened. The reality is, funerals are more about the living than the dead. Sure, my desires will be helpful to guiding them towards an ease of decision making and towards greater peace, but I trust them to know what they need to move forward while honoring me.
I special ordered this piece of mourning jewelry in the form of a worry locket to help process and commemorate what would have been the birth month of my first baby lost in a miscarriage in 2014. I write and speak often about my miscarriages as important parts of my death positivity, body positivity, motherhood and the culture of grief.
I’ve talked to them a lot about death and, like all kids, they have lots of questions about what happens after you die. I’ve always told them in life that our hearts are connected, with an invisible string, no matter where we are in the world. To look up at the moon at night because no matter how far apart we are, we are both looking up at the very same moon. And when I die, I will just move right into their heart and live there instead, that it will grow a little bigger to fit all of me inside. Because in death, as in my life, the people in my little family are the most important things.
Me with Joel and Lacy of the NPR podcast You Know The Place at our summer Death Cafe in Boise’s Dry Creek Cemetery, 2019.
Death is such an abstract and personal thing and it’s so personal and different and until you’re in it it’s so difficult to understand or know how or what you might need. But like all things in life, a little education and planning ahead may make the life transition a little easier.
Some of my favorite easy resources on death and starting your own death file:
Join us at Death Cafe Boise to talk in a fun and casual environment about all these things! Our next one is in December (you can also listen to this NPR podcast I was featured in talking about both the Cafe and my death file)
Mortician Caitlin Doughty’s books, YouTube series and Order of the Good Death
The checklists on Get Your Shit Together are extraordinarily helpful, as is her new book
This recent article in Time magazine has a checklist and a link to a new book and says that by “gathering a whole death file together will make you a highly advanced American and a family hero.”
Writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s story on helping her wife die is beautiful and brilliant
This great list of books on grief
Here’s a list of a few of my favorite kids’ books on death at the Boise Public Library if you’re local:
