Why is death so taboo in the Western world?
I feel very grateful to have an Indigenous Dai/Lao father who gave me perspectives and experiences that may be foreign to Western ways of thinking, being and doing. Some examples include how open, normal and natural it is to discuss death, to discuss my own experiences with the spirit world, and how it’s okay to experience both pain and joy while grieving.
This means throughout my life whether I experienced the loss of a loved one through natural causes, by suicide or murder — I wasn’t discouraged or shut down when I talked about these losses or if I questioned what it means to be alive and what it means to die. I understood growing up that death is always with us… it’s how we’re living while we’re alive that matters most.
Before the pandemic, death was one of the most taboo topics to discuss and acknowledge, resulting in a society that feared death more than ever in recorded history. There’s many reasons for how this all happened when we reflect on our history, but the main reason was that death increasingly happened outside the home. Over time, this resulted in death becoming both increasingly invisible to us and feared.
The pandemic has truly brought these shadow-y topics to the forefront of our lives and has forced us to witness, reckon with and acknowledge death, loss and grief as equal parts of our lived human experience in very challenging, intense and even traumatizing ways.
Perhaps the pandemic made you more scared of death and your mortality. Perhaps the pandemic brought out a new curiosity or wonder about what death means to you, or perhaps it’s a mix of both. If you have any curiosity to better understand death, I’d like to encourage you to experience YU where we go more in depth about our how death became so taboo in the Western world.
YU is designed to reflect, investigate, and expand on our experiences and understanding of both life and death. By doing so, it makes death less taboo, it creates an opening to see your lives in the rawest, realest way — it gets to the core of our existence. When we have less fear of death we can do more to prepare for the inevitable, show up for our loved ones, and perhaps live a life in accordance with what matters most to us.
This isn’t morbid or taboo work, this is actually very common across many different cultures and all throughout history. What’s most taboo about death is not understanding what it means to us, or fearing death to such great extents and not having spaces and places to discuss and understand what we all have in common. This work isn’t about fueling your fears or sadness, in fact it’s the opposite — it’s about alleviating your fears and anxieties while creating greater understanding, appreciation and joy in your life.
How have you learned about death? How did your ancestors honor their dying and dead? Feel free to share your responses, thoughts, questions or comments with me as I’d love to hear back from you.
With ease — Mangda
