Cremains of the Day

I wish I could claim this clever post title as my own but it is actually from an article in the Daily Beast about a memoir by former crematorium worker, Caitlin Doughty called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Doughty has been on YouTube for a while with an often funny, very practical series called Ask a Mortician.https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath

As the article offers: "Doughty is the founder of The Order of the Good Death, a group of death-industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality." http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/

Good for Doughty, and others who are coming up with creative ways to acquaint people with the reality of death. As I've said before, I feel that death is highly overrated, and I'm generally against it, even though I'm a resurrection guy. Still, we all die, whether we want to contemplate it or not. This used to be the role of the church. More and more it has become the ballywick of the funeral industry, which can sometimes, although certainly not always, sanitize death. You may have read my previous rants about how funeral and memorial services have often become death-denying events where participants act as though no one has died.

I still think congregations are places where death can be addressed honestly, even as we affirm a life to come. But why not benefit from the experience of others or gatherings such as death cafes-- no, really. http://www.ourhouse-grief.org/education/the-death-cafe/

Be honest, are you in death-denial? Do you find that it's hard to have a discussion about death with loved ones? Are you glad that Doughty and others are addressing death head-on? Should Christians be more open to talking death than others?