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You advocate the idea of “death positivity”. What does that mean?

For so long in the US and the Western world, we’ve taken the attitude that having an interest in death is morbid. But in fact, it’s morbid to try to cover it up, sterilise it and not think about death. Death positivity doesn’t mean that when your mother dies, you are just supposed to accept it and buck up. It means that it’s OK to be interested.

Why do we need to be positive about death?

When I joined the funeral industry, I saw how broken it was and how distant the families were. If a grandparent or even a parent dies, children are kept from the funeral, because it would be “too much” for them. Our children watch TV shows about zombies and cartoon anvils and crimes, but never see a single real dead body or funeral. I had this moment of awakening when I realised I was born into a system, a culture, that sets me up to feel this incredible fear about death. There’s no way to have a logical, healthy relationship with death if everyone around you treats it like a myth. Changing that became my passion project.

What’s the typical interaction with death in the US?

The biggest thing is that death is treated as an emergency, that the body is taken away immediately into the hands of the professionals. Then there is a real lack of education about what options there are. Because there is such a taboo around death, people always assume the funeral professional is the expert and that the options they give you are all that exist. But it’s a business. If you walk into a luxury car dealership, they’re not going to show you their cheaper cars first, they’re going to show you the Mercedes.

“Having my dead body consumed by vultures is something I really want”

There are very real economic consequences to this: if you go into a funeral home and walk out with a $12,000 bill, that can bankrupt families. A lot of people aren’t aware that [in many countries, including the US and UK] you can keep the body at home for a simple wake, and that’s free. You can still have everybody over, have a big potluck meal and a respectful service. The consequence of the silence over your options isn’t only estrangement from death, it’s also the risk of spending thousands and thousands that you may not have.

Why do many people in the West maintain such a distance from death?

It’s a perfect storm of reasons. At the beginning of the 20th century, you had funerals put into the hands of funeral professionals, dying and death in the hands of medical professionals, and slaughterhouses placed at the edge of town so people were no longer killing their own animals. Death was part of the fabric, and then suddenly it wasn’t.

But we had gone through several wars with serious loss of life, so people thought OK, let’s hand over death to a professional. And now we are discovering it’s not that easy: you can’t outsource the actual grief or mourning.

Wasn’t death taken out of our hands for good reason – to prevent the spread of disease?

There’s this myth that corpses pose a health risk, but it just isn’t true. The World Health Organization states this clearly. At the end of the 19th century, people believed in miasma – the concept of disease floating up off everything that stank or rotted, including trash and dead bodies. Early funeral directors used this to convince people that embalming was necessary to sanitise the body. They still say that today, even though by law they are not allowed to claim it does. It is virtually never true, except when the person dies of something like Ebola.

You recently travelled the world to learn about death rituals in other cultures. How do they compare with those in the US?

There is a sense in the Western world that the distance we maintain is somehow more respectful. Many people assume other cultures are showing less respect if they mummify the bodies of their dead, as they do in Tana Toraja, Indonesia, or have animals eat the bodies, as they do with vultures in places such as Tibet. But there is no culture that doesn’t conduct a death ritual with respect, love and the desire to be dignified.

If you want to talk about who is disrespectful of their dead, it’s our culture that comes closest to just ditching the body, putting it out of sight and out of mind. I think we really need to examine that urge to push death away.

You seem to suggest that many other cultures have a more intimate relationship with death. Why is it important to have that?

This is someone you loved; or even if you hated the person, they took up a lot of your mental space and emotional energy when they were alive. You had an intimate relationship with them – not to acknowledge that with intimacy in their death is like cutting off a limb and hoping it will just heal itself. Plunging in and being involved is really the way to come out the other side and feel like you’ve done something. That interaction is what we are missing.

“This modern approach of removing the dead body to the hands of professionals is unprecedented”

Japan is a great example. It is a developed, technologically advanced country. Its people are exactly like us in the West in many ways, and they have a culture in which they can show up and be with the body. For instance, they have a custom called kotsuage where, after cremation, family members use chopsticks to pick up the remains of their loved ones’ bones and place them in the urn.

So you think people in the West need to be more hands-on in death rituals?

Humans have been engaging in ritual for tens of thousands of years. Ritual consists of action plus belief. The US funeral industry is designed to promote inaction: don’t touch the body, don’t dig the grave, don’t clip the hair, don’t sing, don’t even cry if you can help it. We are missing the small physical actions that are the work of grief. Showing up, being present, changes how you feel about the death. People don’t know they can be involved and do things like take a lock of hair or witness the cremation – and basically just interact with the process.

What about the people who don’t want to interact with their dead loved ones?

I’m absolutely saying these interactions are for everyone. But do I think everyone will choose to participate? No, there’s a lot of built-up bias and fear. But the more that people embrace this and have positive, meaningful experiences, the more others will feel confident in trying it.

The basic interaction of human-plus-dead-body had been the equation for thousands of years. This modern approach of removing the dead body to the hands of professionals is unprecedented. What do you want to happen to your body when you die?

Having my body consumed by vultures is something I really want. It’s not accepted, or legal, in our culture, though. Maybe by the time I die it will be. If so, sign me up.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Time to look on the bright side of death”