Death Positivity: From Ars Moriendi to yaydeath

Nov 8

Language is often where culture hides its fears.

I once reviewed a hospital chart that read simply: “Patient expired.” I pointed it out to the social worker and she nodded, “It sounds like food that went bad.”

In medical notes, jargon is efficient. Out loud, it wounds. Families don’t need efficiency. They need clarity that honors who their loved one was. Research confirms this instinct: euphemisms such as expired obscure meaning and complicate bereavement, leaving families uncertain about what has truly happened (Barlet et al., 2022; O’Gorman, 1998).

Death positivity is not new. What’s new is the packaging. Today it trends on YouTube, shapes burial laws, and floods TikTok feeds. But the core idea—that death belongs in public conversation—is as old as humanity. Historians trace it back through the Ars Moriendi traditions of the 15th century and the Victorian “Good Death,” when dying was public, ritualized, and communal (Ariès, 1974/1981; Boyd, 1977; Dickerson et al., 2023).

Hospice Synopsis joins that lineage by reclaiming language itself. We call it yaydeath.

Ars Moriendi – The First Death-Positive Manuals

This lineage stretches far back. Long before the Stoics, cultures prepared guides for the dying. Egyptians inscribed the Book of the Dead. Hindu and Buddhist traditions taught death awareness as practice. Even the Epic of Gilgamesh wrestled with mortality as the defining human limit.

The Stoics treated death as a teacher, insisting that life’s boundaries gave it shape. Centuries later, in the shadow of plague, European monks wrote the Ars Moriendi, “The Art of Dying.” These handbooks blended prayer, family instruction, and community ritual, offering practical courage at the bedside (Dickerson et al., 2023).

Ars Moriendi was less innovation than flowering. It gathered what humanity had long practiced: that death could be taught, spoken, and shared. Historian Philippe Ariès described this as the era of “tamed death,” when dying remained communal, visible, and integrated into daily life, not hidden behind hospital doors (Boyd, 1977; Heller & Wegleitner, 2017).

The lesson endures: long before hashtags or hospital charts, communities believed death was not only inevitable but teachable.

The Victorian “Good Death”

By the 19th century, death was visible in daily life. The “Good Death” meant being prepared, witnessed, and meaningful. Parlors doubled as viewing rooms. Mourning clothes marked grief in public.

At a funeral I was once asked, “Why don’t people wear black anymore? I feel like I’m grieving in secret.” She was right. In the Victorian era, mourning clothes made loss visible. Families carried grief together, not alone. Euphemisms like rest in peace only worked because death was unmistakable in ritual, fabric, and family memory (Curl, 2000; Brandes, 1997).

But in the United States, that visibility did not last. By the early 1900s, hospitals, professionalized funerals, and a cultural turn toward privacy moved death out of the home. Mourning clothes disappeared. Parlors became living rooms. The rituals that once made death speakable began to fade. Death shifted from public to private, from shared to silent (Ariès, 1981; Heller & Wegleitner, 2017).

Not every culture followed that arc. Mexico’s Día de los Muertos honors ancestors with food and altars. Madagascar’s famadihana celebrates the dead with music and dance. Japan’s Obon festival welcomes spirits home with lanterns and movement. These traditions remind us that silence was not inevitable (Brandes, 1997; Croucher et al., 2020).

The lesson is clear: the Victorian “Good Death” made mortality visible, but American culture surrendered that literacy to medical systems and private grief. Once death left the parlor, it quickly left the conversation.

Medicine Speaks – Osler and Kübler-Ross

The early 20th century brought hospitals, and with them both silence and honesty. William Osler studied the final moments of about 500 patients and concluded that most deaths were quiet, not catastrophic (Mueller, 2007; Erard, 2023).

Decades later, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying (1969). Her “five stages” are debated, but her greater gift was making death speakable again in classrooms, clinics, and living rooms (Kübler-Ross, 1969).

These pioneers cracked the door open. After a century of retreat, they showed that medicine itself could help restore presence and prepare families to face dying together.

Hospice – Death Positivity in Practice

The voices of Osler and Kübler-Ross cracked the door open. Dame Cicely Saunders built the house.

In the 1960s, she founded the modern hospice movement and reframed dying around total pain—physical, emotional, spiritual, and social (Saunders, 2001). She showed that suffering could be eased, and that presence mattered as much as medicine. As Hospice Synopsis reflects, the heart of her reminder is this: the dying are the most important people you will ever meet. Her own words still echo: “You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life” (Saunders, 2001; Clark, 2014).

Hospice did more than treat symptoms. It restored meaning, ritual, and conversation at the bedside. After decades of silence, it made death visible again—not in parlors this time, but in homes, hospitals, and communities.

You could argue hospice was the most powerful death-positive movement of the 20th century. A clinical system that insisted dying was not failure, but a human moment worth honoring. (Testoni et al., 2020)

Grassroots Revival – Cafés, Burials, Literacy

By the 1980s and 90s, communities began reclaiming rituals. Families revived home funerals. Natural burial preserves opened.

In 2004, the first Death Café convened in Switzerland, spreading globally by the 2010s. Strangers gathered over tea to talk mortality—ordinary people doing what the Ars Moriendi once did (Crettaz, 2010; Miles & Corr, 2017).

Sociologist Allan Kellehear called this death literacy: a public health skill, teachable and essential for resilience (Kellehear, 2013; Leonard et al., 2020). Hospice had already shown that dying was not medical failure but human presence. Death Cafés and literacy carried that same spirit into community life.

From Mortician to Physician – A Renewed Stage

In 2011, mortician Caitlin Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death and gave the movement a new phrase: Death Positivity. Through books, videos, and advocacy, she mainstreamed natural burial and grief transparency for younger generations (Doughty, 2015).

A few years later, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (2014) carried the same message from inside medicine. His book reframed death not as medical failure, but as part of medicine’s responsibility—a truth long known in hospice but rarely named in mainstream practice (Gawande, 2014).

Together, a mortician and a physician shared the same stage. They did not create a new movement. They amplified ancient practices and hospice wisdom for a modern world.

Death Positivity in Society Today

Traces of death positivity are visible across culture. Minnesota legalized aquamation in 2003 (NPR, 2020). Washington authorized human composting in 2019, followed by Colorado and Oregon in 2021, with California and New York soon after.

On TikTok, “grief talk” creators draw millions of views, offering raw testimony that bypasses clinical jargon (Davoudi & Douglas, 2025). Bookstores sell memoirs on dying, comedians host podcasts on grief, and families create memorial tattoos, livestream funerals, and build digital remembrance pages.

But these are islands of openness in a sea of avoidance. In most workplaces, death is unmentionable. In schools and families, it is still whispered or ignored until crisis forces it forward.

Death positivity is no longer fringe, but it is not yet fluent. The work remains: to make conversations about dying ordinary again.

Where Hospice Synopsis Fits – yaydeath

We do not run cafés or sell composting pods. We teach clarity in dying.

Hospice Synopsis enters this lineage with a specific goal: restore ordinary, fearless language about death. Clarity itself is care. Families need more than morphine pumps or funeral plans. They need words that steady them and make sense of the moment.

That is why we gather euphemisms as cultural artifacts, name tools like The Silence Lag, and build clarity-first frameworks such as Forecast Scripts and Expectation Alignment. These tools give clinicians the confidence to say what most avoid.

Death positivity is a tradition humanity keeps forgetting and relearning: from the Stoics and Ars Moriendi, to the Victorians, Osler, Kübler-Ross, Saunders, Doughty, and Gawande—and now, us.

Hospice carries death positivity daily at the bedside by opening conversations with presence and acceptance. Hospice Synopsis extends that work into public space with humor, history, and clarity.

This is our goal: words that make death talkable, teachable, and transferable. That is what yaydeath means—not cheering death, but cheering the courage to name it, teach it, and face it together. Because the only thing worse than dying is death unspoken and alone. That is why we say yaydeath.

3 Key Insights

Death positivity is not new. From the Stoics and Ars Moriendi to Victorian mourning rituals, cultures have long treated dying as visible, teachable, and communal.
Modern medicine both silenced and reopened the conversation. Osler, Kübler-Ross, and Saunders each showed that death could be ordinary, speakable, and worthy of honor.
Hospice Synopsis continues this lineage through language. By naming silences and reclaiming euphemisms, HS offers clarity as care—pushing death positivity into public space as yaydeath.

2 Clinical Applications

Practice clarity at the bedside. Avoid euphemisms like expired or passed. Use “died” when needed, giving families certainty and steadiness.
Equip your team with shared frameworks. Forecast Scripts and Expectation Alignment make language teachable, repeatable, and transferable across hospice visits.

1 Reflective Question

When the next silence around dying appears—in charting, in team meetings, or at the bedside—will your words dodge death, or name it with courage?

Glossary

Ars Moriendi – “The Art of Dying,” a set of 15th-century European handbooks written after the Black Death. They provided prayers, family guidance, and rituals to help the dying prepare spiritually and communally. Considered an early model of structured death education.
Death Literacy – A community skillset for engaging with dying, death, and bereavement with confidence and clarity. Coined by sociologist Allan Kellehear and validated through the Death Literacy Index, it positions death talk as a public health competency rather than a private burden.
Death Positivity (Hospice Synopsis context) – A cultural and clinical movement that insists death should be visible, speakable, and part of public conversation. Rooted in earlier traditions such as Ars Moriendi and the Victorian “Good Death,” amplified in the 20th century by Kübler-Ross and Saunders, and modernized by voices like Caitlin Doughty and Atul Gawande. Hospice Synopsis aligns with this lineage by adding clarity-first language tools.
The Victorian Good Death – A 19th-century Western cultural model in which dying was marked by public ritual, family presence, and visible mourning. Examples include parlors as viewing rooms and mourning clothes as outward markers of grief. Contrasts with the 20th-century U.S. trend of medicalization and privatization of dying.
Total Pain – A concept introduced by Dame Cicely Saunders describing the multidimensional nature of suffering at the end of life. It includes physical, emotional, social, and spiritual distress, and remains a cornerstone of hospice philosophy and practice.
yaydeath – A Hospice Synopsis term for reclaiming fearless, ordinary language about death. yaydeath does not mean cheering death itself, but cheering the courage to name it, teach it, and face it together. It functions as a lexicon, archive, and cultural nudge to make death talkable.

Bibliography

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Amy Leann