Module 3: News and Opinion.
With all that’s going on in the world, I felt overwhelmed in picking a topic to discuss for this assignment. I thought about the wildfires we’re battling in California, the hurricanes on the east coast, and the continuous COVID-19 cases. A common thread all of these topics boiled down to is what we fear most about them, death. You might think, “Okay Charity, that’s kind of morbid!” I want to talk about why it’s not, and how death is as natural of a topic to talk about as birth is. The topic of death seems to be rather taboo, but I find myself encouraging others to approach me about it. I took a Death and Photography course taught by Ashley Czajkowski, through Arizona State University. The material we went over helped me see death in a new light. At 18 years old, I attended my first funeral, for someone I was close to. Since then, death has been a common consistency. Because of its consistency, I never understood the stigma surrounding it as a topic of discussion. In the Death and Photography course, I learned about the Death Positive movement that Caitlin Doughty created.
It all started with a tweet.
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician that sparked the death positive movement in 2011. In this opinion-based video, they highlight the main objectives that Caitlin is trying to communicate with the movement. I find this video to be credible because they use clips from Caitlin’s YouTube channel to give a summation of her overall objective. Caitlin Doughty’s main goal is to create a place where open conversations can be had about death. I enjoyed the part of the video where they share the open dialogue people had at a death café met up. I often enjoy similar open discussions like the ones they go over at those types of gatherings. Another part of talking about death openly is being able to understand that “It’s become a consumerist thing, it’s become capitalistic.” Caitlin opened my mind to how in America, death has become a huge market.
I found a recent news article that is a credible source for an action that California is taking towards having green burials become legal. I was excited to see this article for two reasons, I live in California, and in Caitlin Doughty’s book, “From Here to Eternity” there’s a chapter that goes over green burials and their impact on the earth. It hasn’t been an option, so to see this processing forward is exciting. Being able to cut back on cremations, would be great for the environment. I found the article credible because they talk about solid facts. They speak about what states have already legalized this process, and which states are looking into legalizing it. They also cite their sources, some of which are scientific articles. The article points out that our current burial processes are harmful to the planet, “cremation relies on fossil fuels, and emits millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, while the burial of embalmed bodies can cause chemicals to seep into the earth.” I don’t think we openly talk about how we envision our burials, mostly because we avoid thinking about it altogether. This often becomes someone else’s task to figure out.
From the news article above, I found this great scientific news article that talks about the science behind eco-conscious burials. With COVID-19 bringing cases of death at such high rates, burial space is becoming limited. I found this news article to be credible as it has a lot of evidence and great references used for information shared. I liked this article because it talks about what embalming does. It prevents the body from decomposing, which means the body won’t decompose overtime on the earth. This also creates chemicals that aren’t environmentally friendly. Our current burial processes were never intended to be environmentally friendly, as they were created to make a profit.
This fun YouTube video Caitlin created is a collection of things based on her opinion. She lists off her top 7 highly effective death-positive habits. I see resources with material directly made by the creator themselves, to be credible, as it’s about their opinion and word. She’s a mortician and because of that, I find her word to be credible because she’s in the field of death. “#1 refuse to be embarrassed” which is exactly what I had to remind myself when I thought about Death as a topic to write about for school.
There is so much to further explore on this topic, but the main point is to keep an open dialogue. By writing this I hope to open up more conversation on the topic. When I began to write up this blog, I was afraid that the topic might be a bit much. But the whole point of being Death Positive is feeling comfortable talking about death.