Why Do We Struggle to Talk About Death?

If you think about it, there are very few subjects that are simultaneously as certain and as difficult to discuss as death. We all know it will happen. We know that everyone we love will eventually die. We also know that none of us can avoid our own mortality, no matter how much we look after ourselves. Yet ask someone what they would like their funeral to be like, whether they have written down their wishes, or even what they think happens when they die, and the conversation can suddenly become uncomfortable.

Someone might laugh nervously. Someone else might change the subject. We might say something like “Let's not talk about that yet”. The thing is, as a professional eulogy writer, I encounter this kind of discomfort almost every day to some degree. People are often perfectly capable of talking about the person who has died, but find it much harder to talk about death itself.

I find myself asking this same question on an almost daily basis. Why? Why is talking about death such a struggle?

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

A recent survey I saw found that around a third of Brits (where I'm based) have had no discussions about their final wishes with their family. In addition, 43% said they avoid the topic because it's simply too upsetting, 32% said it felt too morbid, and 28% didn't know how to start a conversation. I think I'll cover the latter in a future blog.

Those statistics are interesting, but ultimately I think the answer is more complicated than simply saying that death is frightening, so I thought I'd explore this more in this blog (number 101 if you're keeping score!). After all, our attitudes towards death have been shaped by any number of things regardless of where we live, like culture, religion, medicine, language, family experience and history. And while the discomfort we feel today can seem completely natural, my research has shown me that it hasn't always taken the same form.

Why Do We Struggle to Talk About Death?

(aka Is Death the Ultimate Unknown?)

I found an academic framework that perhaps best explains this concept called "Terror Management Theory" (I feel another blog coming on). It's a grand name for a simple, unsettling idea, which is that much of human behaviour is driven by our deep, often unconscious fear of death.

We build up our self-esteem, cling to our cultural worldviews, and seek meaning in our relationships to manage the terror of our own mortality. We don't think about death because it threatens to unravel the carefully constructed meaning of our lives.

In practice, this manifests as a wall of silence. We tell ourselves it's "too morbid" (just as in the study I referenced earlier) or "too upsetting" because it's easier than confronting the void, but this silence is not protection; it is a form of isolation. As one funeral director I work with regularly once told me:

"Silence doesn't protect us; it isolates us".

The legacy of this silence is staggering; research suggests that £80 billion (with a B) of wealth in the UK remains unclaimed simply because families are left in chaos, unable to find wills or insurance policies. The practical consequences are severe, but the emotional ones are worse. We all know grief is hard enough without the additional burden of confusion and regret.

Perhaps the most obvious reason we struggle to talk about death is that it represents something we cannot fully understand or control.

Sure, we can discuss illness. We can discuss ageing. We can discuss funerals and what happens to a body after someone dies, but the fundamental question remains: what does it actually mean to no longer exist?

Religions have offered answers for thousands of years. Different cultures have developed any number of beliefs about heaven, reincarnation, ancestors, spirits, judgement and the afterlife. Philosophers have wrestled with the question. Scientists can describe the biological processes involved in dying, but they cannot provide an answer to every existential question surrounding death. Fundamentally, I think it's that uncertainty that can make conversations about death uncomfortable.

Talking about death also means confronting our own mortality. It is one thing to acknowledge intellectually that everybody dies. It is quite another to say aloud:

"One day, I will die". That sentence also makes something abstract suddenly seem very, very personal.

We Don't Just Fear Death. We Fear Dying

Another reason death can be difficult to vocalise is that people often aren't actually afraid of death itself. They may be afraid of dying.

Will it be painful? Will I lose control? Will I become dependent on other people? Will I have dementia? Will I be alone? Will my family cope? Will I become a burden?

Modern medicine has transformed our ability to treat disease and extend life, which is unquestionably a good thing. But it has also contributed to a culture in which death can feel like the ultimate failure of medicine rather than an inevitable part of life.

Historically, dying was much more likely to happen at home, surrounded by family. Over the course of the 20th century, particularly in Western societies, death became increasingly associated with hospitals and medical professionals. Scholars have described this as the medicalisation and institutionalisation of death.

In other words, we haven't simply become uncomfortable talking about death. In many circumstances, we have become less accustomed to seeing it, and that matters. It is difficult to develop a comfortable vocabulary for something that has largely disappeared from everyday experience.

We've Lost Some of Our Language

As a writer, I think one of the most fascinating things about death is the number of ways we avoid actually saying the 'D' word.

Instead, we say that someone has "passed away". They are "no longer with us". They've "gone to a better place". They've "lost their battle". We "lost" Mum last year.

There's no doubt that euphemisms can be compassionate and appropriate. They can soften something unbearably painful, but they can also demonstrate just how uncomfortable we are with the direct language of death.

Research into attitudes towards death has suggested that modern societies have developed increasingly complex euphemisms that can mask or deny the finality of death. Even the word dead can feel surprisingly blunt.

This is particularly noticeable when talking to children.

Adults often instinctively say that someone has "gone to sleep", because the directness of “Granddad is dead” feels too harsh. Yet maybe there is a danger in making death so mysterious that these children never develop the vocabulary to understand it as they grow.

Was Death Always a Taboo?

Interestingly, in the research I've done before writing this blog, the answer is no, at least not in the way we understand the concept of a death taboo today.

Death has probably always been frightening, painful and mysterious, and may always be. It would be wrong to imagine that people in centuries past were somehow comfortable with mortality, but it seems that Western attitudes towards death have changed dramatically.

In Victorian Britain, for example, death was much more visible. People often died at home, families might care for dying relatives themselves, and viewing the body was commonplace. Mourning rituals were highly visible, with black clothing, mourning jewellery, elaborate funerals and public expressions of grief. Death was part of the landscape of everyday life.

This doesn't mean our Victorian cousins were comfortable with death. They just had more established ways of talking about, experiencing and ritualising it.

In fact, historian Philippe Ariès famously charted changing Western attitudes towards mortality, describing a movement from more familiar and collective approaches to death towards what he called "forbidden death" in modern industrial societies.

Other scholars have questioned whether death was ever truly a taboo, suggesting instead that it has become hidden, medicalised or linguistically difficult to discuss.

For me, that distinction is important. Perhaps modern society hasn't invented discomfort with death. Maybe we have simply changed the way we experience it.

Different Cultures, Different Conversations

One of the biggest mistakes we can make is assuming that everybody approaches death in the same way. Death is universal, but our responses to it aren't.

Different cultures have developed very different rituals, beliefs and attitudes around dying and remembrance. Among the Akan people of Ghana, for example, funeral and mourning practices have considerable cultural and spiritual significance and form an important part of communal life.

Mexico is another fascinating example, although it is important to remember I'm not trying to reduce an entire country to a single attitude towards death. The popular image of Mexico as a culture that simply laughs at death through traditions associated with Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is considerably more complicated than the stereotype suggests. Anthropological research has challenged the idea that Mexicans are somehow unusually comfortable with death.

Likewise, Māori concepts surrounding death and tapu cannot necessarily be translated neatly into Western ideas of a "death taboo". Researchers have warned that Western interpretations can oversimplify culturally specific understandings of death and the dead. Religion also makes an enormous difference.

For someone whose worldview includes a strong belief in an afterlife, death may be understood as a transition rather than an ending. For someone who is secular, it may represent the end of consciousness. Neither perspective truly eliminates grief, but they can profoundly influence the language people use and the rituals they create.

Basically, I'm trying to say that there is no single universal way of "dealing with death".

Incidentally, if you're interested in learning about how death (or more specifically eulogies) are handled in different parts of the world, I've previously written a blog about it linked here and at the bottom of this page.

Modern Life Has Changed the Conversation

Perhaps the biggest change is that many of us now live further away from death than previous generations did. Simply put, we just live longer.

Infant mortality has fallen dramatically. Diseases that once killed large numbers of people can often be treated with an injection or pills. People are (thankfully) less likely to encounter dead bodies as part of ordinary life.

That is, without question, progress, but there may be an unintended consequence.

When death becomes less visible, it can become more difficult to integrate into our understanding of life. We become very good at talking about living longer, but less comfortable discussing what happens when living eventually comes to an end.

Social media has also created another curious contradiction. Death is everywhere online, whether that's the incessant 24-hour news reports, tributes, memorial pages and announcements. Yet our personal conversations can remain remarkably evasive. We can encounter death constantly on our feeds without necessarily becoming better at talking about it.

Photo by Amr Taha™ on Unsplash

Perhaps We Need to Talk About Death BEFORE We're Forced To

As a professional eulogy writer, I often see the consequences of our reluctance to have these conversations. A family member dies, and when they need to send me the information I need to write a eulogy, suddenly everyone has questions.

• What did Mum believe about death?

• What did Dad want for his funeral?

• What music would they have chosen?

• Would they have wanted a religious service?

• What stories should be included in the eulogy?

• What did they want people to remember?

Sometimes the answers are obvious. Sometimes they aren't, and sometimes families are left trying to reconstruct a person's wishes while simultaneously dealing with their grief.

Let's face facts: talking about death doesn't make it happen any sooner. Nor does discussing funeral wishes somehow invite tragedy into your home.

What it can do is remove some of the fear surrounding the subject, so it allows us to say, “This is what I would want”. It permits families to ask questions, and perhaps most importantly, it gives us an opportunity to talk about what matters to us while we are still here.

The PostScript: Talking About Death is Really Talking About Life

There is an irony at the heart of all this. We think talking about death is morbid because it focuses on the end of life, but conversations about death can actually tell us an enormous amount about how we want to live:

• What do we value?

• Who matters to us?

• What do we want people to remember?

• What unfinished conversations do we need to have?

• What kind of legacy would we like to leave?

Those are not particularly morbid questions. They are profoundly human ones.

Perhaps we don't need to become completely comfortable with death. Perhaps that isn't realistic anyway, and perhaps a little discomfort is entirely understandable, but we can become more willing to talk about it, and when we do, we may discover that death doesn't have to be a subject that silences us. It can become a way of understanding the people we love, the lives we've lived and the memories we hope will remain.

As someone who writes eulogies for a living and works with people who have just lost someone every day, I have learned that the hardest part is often not finding the right words after someone has died. It is finding the courage to have the important conversations before they do. Because eventually, every life becomes a story, and perhaps we shouldn't wait until the final chapter to start talking about what that story means.

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Thanks so much for taking the time to read my blog. These are just my thoughts, so I'd love to know yours. What is your attitude to death? Have you had that conversation with those closest to you? Have you planned for your passing, or is it something to do "next week"? How does your own culture shape how you feel about death? Let me know in the comments below. I read and reply to ALL of them.

Finally, if you did enjoy this post, please give it a '❤️' and feel free to share it on your socials. Maybe someone in your own network might need to read it. There are other relevant blogs you might like, linked below, and many more on the site. Thanks again, and take care.