Death is inevitable, yet unknowable. So how should the living prepare for it?

Death is terrifying. Seemingly unknowable, yet inevitable. As young people, we know that death happens, but there are a lot of fears and unknowns surrounding it.

Especially after this past year, we have been thinking more about death and the death industry, and we have so many questions.

Like, do the services the death industry provide us now actually succeed in helping us find closure and healing? How can we be prepared? How can one live knowing that one day they will die?

We set out to learn more about death and death work for this episode of the RadioActive podcast.

[RadioActive Youth Media is KUOW's radio journalism and audio storytelling program for young people. This episode was entirely youth-produced, from the interviewing to the writing to the audio editing.]

Podcast highlights, at a glance

Saying goodbye to our pets

Many people's first experience with death is when a pet dies. Joslin Roth is the owner of Resting Waters in Seattle. They cremate pets using a process called aquamation, which is a form of cremation done with water. Roth says it speeds up the natural process of decomposing and believes it is a more gentle way to say goodbye to your pet.

An important part of death for Roth is the grieving process. Today, when we grieve, we often rush through the process and don’t take time to really embrace what just happened and who we lost. That’s why Roth encourages people to stay with their pets after they’ve died.

“We encourage families to keep their loved ones for a period of time,” Roth says. “We encourage them to see rigor mortis happen. It helps our brains process the reality of death.”

Dying at home

University of Washington School of Social Work professor Taryn Lindhorst works in oncology and palliative care. She’s also taken care of her mother and mother-in-law in the last several weeks and months of their lives.

“The vast majority of people in the United States would like to die in their own homes,” professor Lindhorst says. “Almost an equal percentage of us will not die in our own homes, [they] will die in an institution.

“The opportunities that were presented to me as [a] daughter and daughter-in-law because we were at home were not things that would’ve ever happened if my mother and mother-in-law had been in a nursing home or hospital setting.”

Death work as social justice work

Every culture has different ways of gathering around their dead. The Collective for Radical Death Studies is a community that provides resources for others to better understand death practices of groups that have been marginalized.

Dr. Kami Fletcher is one of the co-founders and the president of the collective. She’s a historian who studies the Black experience in America, and she says that her Black Southern roots inform her understanding of death the most. In the South, she says, you do not play with death. You respect it.

“I grew up hearing stories about my grandfather’s brother coming back to him,” Dr. Fletcher says. “You know, grew up with ancestor stories. You didn’t question it. We would say ‘voodoo’ now, but my mom had another word for it: somebody 'putting roots' on you. That stuff was normal. It wasn’t this thing you specialize in. I didn’t want to be a mortician or funeral director or anything like that.”

Dr. Fletcher is now an associate professor of history at Albright College in Pennsylvania. In 2018, she was invited to speak at a death salon, an event where historians, funeral professionals, and death-positive people can meet up and discuss death. When she arrived to do her talk, she did a double take.

“This is just so white,” Dr. Fletcher says. “I don’t understand how death is white. I don’t understand how it’s just divorced from culture. Death, like religion, like language, are directly tied to people’s culture.”

That was a big moment for her. “There was this call, let’s decolonize, let’s radicalize, and I thought, 'oh, let’s get this energy.'”

At the death salon was Jenn Tran, who became one of the co-founders of the collective. Growing up Chinese-Vietnamese in Texas, Tran says she was not taught to be afraid of death but to honor it. When her father passed away unexpectedly, Tran and her family had to watch as the funeral home handled his body and traditional Buddhist service, which really stunted her grieving process.

“In my experience with the funeral home, they had not handled a Vietnamese body before,” Tran says. “My dad [had a] darker complexion than, I guess, what they expected an Asian person to be. Just the basics of getting his skin tone right. It was not the same level of care.”

That’s why the collective is so important to Tran. She never wants another person to feel the way she did -- that someone was just going through the motions and doing their job, but not really caring about her mourning family.

“I feel very healed,” Tran says. “I will always grieve Papa. I think he would be incredibly proud. Everything I do is very much colored by his death. I wouldn’t say it’s deflecting grief, but it’s giving that emotion a purpose.”

Joslin Roth on grief

“Just know that whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re thinking, and however that looks, it’s not strange when you’re in grief to feel those ways. Even if it feels foreign to you, very likely it is normal, and it’s something someone else has thought or felt or experienced, and you should never feel odd for feeling those ways.”

This podcast was produced in an advanced producers program for high school and college students. Production assistance from Kyle Norris. Edited by Kelsey Kupferer.

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Support for KUOW's RadioActive comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center.