Why do we find it so difficult to talk about dying?

Opinion

May 16, 2026 — 5:30am

Spoiler alert: one day you’ll die. Same for those you love, your mechanic and that power-walker you see most mornings. As for your old teachers, they’re probably dead already, or fast on their way. Death is how mortals do things, yet how often do you broach the topic?

In the Bhutan proverb, “To be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily”. That’s overkill, in my books, but I envy the gist. Pondering your end stands to enrich your meantime, highlight the gift of each wakeful hour. But in practice we flinch. Deny. Evade. Bury the truth of death.

Thanatophobia is the clinical term. Not that fear is the only driver. There’s admin, too: the finicky details of who gets what, where your body goes, plus the humdrum of getting there – the dying bit. Even English struggles to embrace the mess of death, though Dr Hannah Gould illuminates many inside terms that apply.

A cultural anthropologist who calls death her living, Gould works with the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne, teaching about dying and deathcare. Gould is also the author of one of the year’s best non-fiction titles, How to Die in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson), a breakneck rip through the RIP world.

Morbid euphemisms, we learn, fall into four categories, where the idiom in Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch is just one ploy: “He’s off the twig, kicked the bucket …” Other tactics are negation (“he won’t survive”); coded event (cardiac arrest); and pronoun (“if it should happen”).

Such aversion, said British scholar Geoffrey Gorer, whets our hunger for death porn, as masses fixate on zombies and vampires, true-crime podcasts and Call of Duty. This despite the peak-death window opening before us, the silver tsunami as it’s called, or boomergeddon, our population’s median age encroaching the endgame.

Nowadays ‘we are living longer and dying slower’, life’s grand adventure reduced to ‘prolonged dwindling’, as it’s known in the literature.

“Dying, I think, is harder than death,” says Gould. In Western culture the process is typically outsourced, medicalised, marginalised. Nowadays “we are living longer and dying slower”, life’s grand adventure reduced to “prolonged dwindling”, as it’s known in the literature.

Not that deathcare is all doom and gloom. For every “terminal lucidity” in Gould’s glossary, labelling that cognitive sharpness prior to a patient’s last breath, there’s the beauty of the Kerala model, where palliative care falls largely to the community, or the revelations of San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project, where we learn how AIDS patients found solace in the kitchen, despite not being able to eat or drink. Commensality, or living in close association, fosters the pleasure of being human in the face of finitude.

Gould also deciphers today’s dispatch options, from aquamation (alkaline hydrolysis) to terramation (human composting). Or the German pragmatism of Ruhefrist (“rest deadline”), being a grave’s lease before the family’s right to renew the rent, or witness nana’s bones being traded for the next tenant’s interment.

Grim stuff but necessary. For a book on death, Gould’s book is vital, and timely. Even the concept of dead, and how to gauge death, warrants its own chapter. Plus a Barbie cameo, where the ageless doll asks her everlasting friends, “You guys ever think about dying?” [Ten-second silence.] “I don’t know why I said that. I’m just dying … to dance!” [Party resumes.]

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