By Antonia Ramsay
Two skeletal hands wrapped around a coffee mug…
That was the image on the poster for Conversations on Death, an event whose title and premise had already been established by the time I joined the team, but whose voice I was given the freedom to help shape. It is an unusual image: warm but morbid, inviting you to find comfort in hands no longer equipped to provide it. The tagline, “a space for the conversations we rarely have,” intended to reflect our reluctance to face mortality as although death is inevitable, it remains a subject we often soften with euphemisms. The title deliberately resisted that instinct. It was simply Conversations on Death.
The interesting thing is that I did not grow up finding death difficult to discuss. In my family, death was talked about plainly, never hidden behind silence. Coming from a Jamaican Christian background, death was never seen as a taboo or tragedy, it was understood as a natural part of life’s journey. Even the way death is marked reflects this difference as within the culture, mourning exists alongside celebration, anchoring grief in the “Nine Nights” of storytelling, food, music and community that precede the funeral.
Working on this project made me realise that death literacy and death education are not niche areas of knowledge. Rather, they are vital in preparing people to navigate the universal experience with confidence, awareness and the language required to express themselves. What fascinated me about Conversations on Death was the idea of creating a deliberately neutral space where people of different beliefs, experiences and philosophies could sit together and discuss mortality without any one perspective dominating the room.
I came across a concept that helped me make sense of why spaces like this matter, death literacy. Researchers Noonan, Horsfall, Leonard and Rosenberg (2016) define death literacy as “the knowledge and skills that enable people to understand and act on end-of-life and death care options.” They position it alongside death education, arguing that both develop awareness of the wider death system, the social, cultural and practical ways societies understand and respond to death. Importantly, they suggest that death education is most effective when it takes place within communities where people learn through dialogue, shared experiences and relationships.
Reading this made me realise that Conversations on Death was not about providing information rather it seeks to create a community space in which death education and literacy can take place. Literacy is ultimately about access, and access begins before anyone even enters the discussion space. It begins with noticing a poster or reading a tagline. Perhaps death literacy is not only about understanding what happens when someone dies but about creating the social conditions that allow people to talk honestly about mortality in the first place.
This understanding became even more meaningful after I attended a Death Studies discussion on disenfranchised grief. Sociologist Kenneth Doka (1999) used the term to describe grief that cannot be openly acknowledged, socially validated or publicly mourned. What struck me most was the question of who decides which losses are allowed to count and how do we quantifiably measure grief? Is grief something that can be ranked according to the nature of the relationship, the circumstances of the loss, or the expectations of those we surround ourselves by? The more I reflected on this concept, the less convincing those distinctions seemed. Loss is deeply personal and the significance of a relationship is rarely visible from the outside.
This is where my interest into death literacy grew. It stopped feeling solely like a practical framework and more like an ethical one. If death literacy involves understanding death, end-of-life care and bereavement, maybe it also extends to recognising experiences that might otherwise remain unseen and creating spaces where people do not have to justify their thoughts and feelings. In this way, death literacy encourages us to question our assumptions about whose grief is recognised and reminds us that loss is still loss, even when society does not immediately acknowledge it.
An event like Conversations on Death is not equipped to provide grief therapy, nor does it pretend to. It cannot solve loss, remove pain or answer every existential question. Its value lies in creating a welcoming space where different cultures can sit alongside one another and discuss experiences, thoughts and opinions without being categorised, ranked or judged. In a society that often treats death as something to be hidden away, there is something quietly powerful about making room for these discussions to take place.
References
Noonan, K., Horsfall, D., Leonard, R., & Rosenberg, J. (2016). Developing death literacy. Progress in Palliative Care, 24(1), 31–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09699260.2015.1103498
Doka, K. J. (1999). Disenfranchised grief. Bereavement Care, 18(3), 37–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/02682629908657467