How Death-positivity Helped Me Deal with My Necrophobia
By: Elise Bona
Tags: Culture, Death, Psychology, Storytelling, Personal Growth

Necrophobia is an awful thing to have when you need to attend a funeral. Many people have it. It feels very similar to being dragged on the edge of a 15 story building and forced to look down when you have an obvious fear of heights. But instead of staring into what seems like a bottomless pit ready to suck you in, you are looking into the opaque, humorless eyes of Death.

Insane respect for anyone working in the mortuary business and can deal with coffins, embalming, and applying makeup on the deceased on a daily basis! Fun fact: did you know that a funeral director (the person responsible for organizing all aspects of a funeral) is also called … an undertaker? I bet you didn’t.

When I was six years old, my parents took me on a trip to the countryside and told me it was time to say goodbye to my grandfather. They didn’t really explain why, but the urgency in their tone made me believe it was a final goodbye. ‘Your cousin will be there. You can spend the entire day with her.’ Sold! If my then five-year-old cousin was going to stomach this, I thought I could too.

But I was wrong.

When you participate in a funeral in the countryside of Romania, things get heated pretty fast. Romanians are incredibly superstitious, even more so in regards to death, and they will do plenty of rather .. ahem, unorthodox things to make sure the deceased has an uncompromised journey to the afterlife. For example, it’s quite common to cover every mirror in the house with black fabric or shoo any malevolent cat or dog that might cross under the table on which the coffin resides.

As I grew up, my parents realized I developed an uncontrollable fear of things associated with death (unlike my cousin who decided to follow a career in Medicine and had anatomy classes in the morgue. That daredevil!). Since then, my parents and I have this non-spoken agreement between us: I don’t do funerals. I just can’t handle the spook!

Because at some point I’ll have to buckle up and accept the arcane parts of adulthood, I decided to look into the death-positive movement, in a half-hearted attempt to desensitize my very precarious relationship with the macabre. I came across The Order of the Good Death, who does a great job at giving people a more optimistic perspective about anything death related.

Here is their mission, according to their website:

The Order of the Good Death is a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality.

I put my rose-colored glasses on and let Caitlin Doughty, the founder of the order, walk me through the basics. The first thing I learned reading her articles was that facing a deceased can be the first step in acknowledging their passing. Sounds fairly easy, but if you are a necrophobic, just the thought of being in the same room with a cadaver can be extremely distressing, regardless of what that person meant to you when they were alive.

To alleviate the distress, Caitlin suggests to really take the time and process the events, viewing the earthly remains simply as a shell, a vague remembrance of a person that is no longer there. Other people are comforted by the fact that their loved one looks asleep, and at peace, so there’s no real one-size-fits-all solution here.

Caitlin argues that for decades we hid our dead behind closed doors, an act that brewed fear and uncertainty in our collective minds and made us dread the otherwise natural act of dying. Hail to that! I would also add that treating a funeral with less mystical reverie and removing spooky paganism would enable people like me to say goodbye to a loved one during their final moments on earth.

Will I ever be able to beat my intense fear of the macabre? Honestly, I don’t think so, but I will say my prayers and think logical thoughts any time the panic starts cawing in my ears.