Walking With Death - A Journey Through Grief and Remembrance

Death is the great unifier of all living beings. The way it is perceived across the diverse lenses of cultures around the world varies widely. Some cultures embrace rituals to preserve the memory of the deceased, serving to keep their spiritual energy alive. These cultures typically do not fear death, nor do they overanalyze and pathologize everything through logic. Western culture, due to its qualities of analysis and logical thinking, fears death. Death is pathologized if it lasts too long, which rushes the grieving process and results in an unhealthy dynamic between the world of the living and the world of the deceased. The way a society treats its dead reflects its values, and in many ways, the Western world has failed to create a space where grief is honored and where death is met with dignity rather than avoidance. In my experiences with grief, through the tragic loss of my awe-inspiring mom, Ana Paula Southwick, I have come to realize two important lessons. Western society’s fear of death and tendency to pathologize grief create an unhealthy relationship with loss. Embracing death positivity and learning from cultures that honor the dead—such as Día de los Muertos and Torajan rituals—we can cultivate a more compassionate, dignified, and meaningful approach to both death and grieving. 

Death is life’s shadow, an ever-present counterweight that cannot be bargained with or denied. In Mexico, it dances through the streets, a guest of honor draped in marigolds, returning year after year as families gather to welcome the dead with altars, offerings (ofrendas), and stories that refuse to let memory fade. Grief is neither hushed nor hurried, but held, turned over, examined, and honored. A ritual. A reckoning. A promise that love, in its purest form, is never severed by death. Because what is grief, if not love eternally persevering? In Western culture, grief is a medicalized inconvenience, something to be treated, subdued, or forgotten entirely. The silent pressure to “move on” swallows the bereaved whole, stripping people of the right to mourn unapologetically. And worse, this right, even in its most stifled form, is not evenly granted. The ability to grieve openly, to receive dignity in death, is shaped by social hierarchies, by wealth, by access to care. Death positivity does not whisper; it demands. It demands a world where grief is not rushed, where the dead are not exiled, and where mourning is not a privilege but a given.

The Torajan people of Indonesia do not sever ties with their dead as the West does; they refuse to let loss be reduced to a date on a headstone, a whisper in past tense. “In Toraja, during the period of time between death and the funeral, the body is kept in the home. That might not sound particularly shocking, until I tell you that period can last from several months to several years” (Doughty 2017). Time here bends, lingers, defies categorization. Grief is not exiled to private, sanitized ceremonies. It is lived. It is spoken to. It is dressed, nourished, and kept warm. It remains present in the home, not as a specter of absence, but as a quiet, unwavering presence. This is not death as the West defines it. Something to be buried, forgotten, processed in hushed tones until deemed “resolved.” This is death as a continuum, a relationship that does not end but transforms.

A body does not become nothing overnight. The presence of a soul does not dissolve into absence with the closing of an urn. The Torajans understand this, resisting the impulse to forget, to rush, to silence. While my experience was much briefer, I found myself in this understanding. Seeing my mother’s body was not the severance of a bond, but a reckoning with its evolution. Death was not an abrupt moment, a singular event; it was unfolding, shifting, demanding engagement rather than avoidance. But in Western culture, that engagement is stolen from us. The dead are whisked away, their names spoken less and less, until silence takes over entirely. We are told to move on, as if grief is an obstacle rather than proof of love’s persistence. But love, real love, does not vanish upon death. It stays. It aches. It demands to be felt. It refuses to fade quietly into the background, no matter how much society urges it to do so.

Grief is forever. It does not shrink into the past like a distant storm. It remains as a scar in the soul. It changes with time, but never truly releases. That’s why it never feels the same after losing a loved one. Because part of oneself dies with them. Losing my mother was not an event, not a singular moment of impact, but a forced confrontation with the impermanence I had always tried to ignore during her last couple years alive. I always thought she would beat the odds, as some do. I never allowed myself to be pessimistic. I wish I had spent more time with her. Life vanishes in fragments, as the years grow shorter and the days grow longer, in the breath between words never spoken. We smother death beneath distractions, suffocate its presence with routines, desperate to pretend that time is something we are above rather than the constant that erodes us. And then, in the relative blink of an eye, loss arrives. Not as a visitor, but as an unshakable presence. Forever rearranging the architecture of your world.

Western culture flinches at this truth, recoils from it, shoves grief into corners where it can be medicated, whispered about, measured in “appropriate” durations. Mourn, but not for too long. Remember, but not too much. Love, but know when to let go. When to forget and move on. But death is not a threshold to be crossed and forgotten. It is an absolute. A tide that does not recede but changes the landscape it touches. I learned this long before my mother’s passing—when I stood over the still, empty body of my childhood dog. It was the first time I understood that absence could be a presence, that something could be so completely gone yet so unbearably there. As if the lights were off and no one was home. When my mother died, I knew I needed to see her, to look at her face one last time, to bear witness to the weight of what had happened. The alternative—turning away, pretending, letting her fade into a faceless memory—was unthinkable. 

Her body, cold and motionless, anchored me in truth. There was no space for denial, no lingering “what ifs.” No space for my misguided optimism. Just the truth of her loss. A screaming silence. A stillness that demanded attention. Western culture instructed me to avert my gaze, to tidy grief into quiet, acceptable mourning, but other traditions do not. Keeping the dead close, speaking their names, placing their favorite food on an altar, inviting their souls back to the world of the living are not desperate attempts to hold on. They are testaments to the truth that love does not vanish, and that mourning is not something to “move on” from but something to carry. And at that moment, looking at my mother, I knew death was not just an ending. It was an initiation, a threshold crossed, a grief that would walk beside me for the rest of my days. And so it is that my life will forever never be the same. 

But grief is not the only thing that lingers. The way people die, the way people are allowed to die, leaves its mark on the living. On those left behind to wrestle with questions that should have had answers long before the final breath. This is why death positivity is important to talking about what it means to have a good death is crucial because it allows for a space of dignity. If conversations about death were more normalized, perhaps my mother’s final moments could have been different—less burdened with anxiety, more openly discussed, and met with preparation rather than avoidance. There must be options for people, not just animals, who are terminally suffering to have options. “People who are death positive believe that it is not morbid or taboo to speak openly about death. They see honest conversations about death & dying as the cornerstone of a healthy society” (Death Positive Movement, n.d.). When my dog passed away, he was euthanized at home. We were by his side, and he felt nothing but comfort in his final moments. My mom’s death was stark in contrast. She passed away in a care facility. She was suffering as cancer had spread through most of her body. When I saw her last, her breathing sounded hoarse and wet since there was a fluid buildup inside her lungs. She didn’t know when she would die, and this always gave her tremendous anxiety. 

My only hope is that the care team was truthful in assuring us that she passed painlessly in her sleep, rather than drowning in the fluid buildup in her lungs. A good death means there is peace, no suffering, is dignified, never alone, and surrounded by love. A good death is not just about the absence of suffering, but also about agency. The ability to make choices about one's final moments. Death positivity advocates for open discussions about end-of-life care, including assisted dying options for those facing terminal illness. Without these conversations, many are left feeling powerless, forced to endure needless suffering rather than having the opportunity to pass on their own terms. Death positivity is crucial to talking about what it means to have a good death because it allows for a space of dignity. There must be options for people, not just animals, who are terminally suffering to have options. The option of a peaceful, dignified death, because my mom could have had a more humane death. Everyone deserves the option to have a good death. While death positivity encourages open conversations about dying, hospice care represents one of the few spaces in Western medicine where these discussions can occur. However, even within hospice care, the limitations of Western attitudes toward death remain clear.

Hospice care is what my mom entered during the remainder of her time with us when the cancer became too aggressive to fully treat and is arguably what my dog entered during his last month alive. She was prescribed painkilling medication to increase her quality of life, but not much else could be done. Often the medication was not enough to fully rid her of pain. The goal of hospice care is no longer to treat the disease, but to attempt to increase quality of life for terminally ill patients using medication and full-time care. “The ethical principles recognized universal are autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice” (Akdeniz et al., 2021). The principle of autonomy is crucial in this discussion. “However, this autonomy has some limitations. The decisions made by a patient should not harm him or her. It is important for healthcare providers to respect the autonomy of their patient and fulfill their duties to benefit their patients without harming them” (Akdeniz et al., 2021). Animals like my dog have no autonomy, unlike people. It is no surprise that people and animals are subject to different ethical standards, so all I am left with is confusion at this double standard. In cases of death there is not enough death positivity surrounding human death as compared to animal death.

Sarah scoured the internet for stories from other mothers who had suffered the death of a child. What she found were hollow echoes of grief—well-meaning, saccharine assurances wrapped in religious platitudes. “My angel has taken his place in the Lord’s arms.” “God needed another flower for his garden.” Empty words, incapable of holding the weight of loss. “To Sarah, these feel-good pick-me-ups were nothing but empty clichés. The accounts could not capture the wrenching agony and longing that she felt” (Doughty, 2017). And that is precisely the failure of Western culture: a suffocating fear of the rawness of human grief. A desperation to soften, sanitize, repackage death into something that can be digested without discomfort. But grief is not palatable. It is not meant to be. It is meant to be felt. The West recoils from this, unable to sit with pain without offering solutions, prescriptions, tidy resolutions. Even in my mother’s passing, the language of her funeral was not one of mourning but of euphemism. A celebration of life. A delicate phrase that sidesteps the abyss of absence, as if calling it anything but what it was could change the reality of her loss.

But loss is not something to be managed. Grief is not something to be treated. Yet, Western psychology attempts exactly that—medicalizing mourning, reducing it to a disorder when it does not fit into its predetermined timeline. In our 2/11 class session, we studied the clinical Western view of grief, a framework that measures suffering in months, categorizes emotions as symptoms, and decides when sorrow has overstayed its welcome. There is no space for cultural variance, no understanding that grief is not an affliction but a condition of love. As Caitlin Doughty explains, “Attempts were made over the ensuing centuries to eradicate the practices, which were ‘above all, horrifying to the illustrious elite, who sought to expel death from social life.’” The elite fear death because they fear powerlessness. The institutions they built attempt to control it, legislate it, classify it—but grief is not a bureaucracy. It does not adhere to Western ideology. It does not follow clinical timelines. It does not expire when it becomes inconvenient.

Día de los Muertos rejects this erasure. It stands in defiance of the Western impulse to finish grief. In Mexico, the dead do not fade into quiet obscurity, their names whispered less and less until silence swallows them whole. They return. They are remembered, honored, fed, celebrated. Their presence does not recede with time; it transforms. It is this transformation, this embrace rather than avoidance of death, that creates a culture where loss does not hollow but strengthens. Where love is not severed by time but carried forward. I wonder—if Western culture were not so allergic to death, if it did not flinch at grief’s permanence, if it did not treat mourning as an illness to be cured—would my mother’s final moments have been different? Would her last breaths have been met not with fear, but with preparation? Would I have been given the chance to ensure that her passing was not something to be endured, but something to be honored?

Because death positivity is not about glorifying death—it is about dismantling the silence that surrounds it. It is about removing the barriers that prevent people from accessing compassionate, transparent, dignified end-of-life care. It is about ensuring that when our time comes, we are not abandoned to suffering but met with choice, honesty, and love. In Mexico and Indonesia, the dead are not erased. They remain forever entwined in the fabric of society and culture. Western culture has the power to learn from these traditions, to unlearn its fear of loss, to stop seeing grief as something to be "treated" and instead as something to be embraced. But until that shift occurs, too many will continue to die afraid. Too many will grieve in isolation. Too many will suffer not only the pain of death but the loneliness of a culture that refuses to face it.

References

Akdeniz, M., Yardımcı, B., & Kavukcu, E. (2021, March 12). Ethical considerations at the end-

of-life care. SAGE open medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7958189/#:~:text=There%20is%20much%20common%20ground,and%20an%20honorable%20death%20process.  

Death positive movement: The order of the good death. Death Positive Movement | The Order of 

the Good Death. (n.d.). https://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/death-positive-movement/

Doughty, Caitlin. 2017. INDONESIA. From here to eternity: Traveling the world to find 

the good death. W.W. Norton & Co.
Doughty, Caitlin. 2017. MEXICO. From here to eternity: Traveling the world to find the 

good death. W.W. Norton & Co.