9 Death Positive Books for Newbies to the Movement

It couldn’t be a list of death positive books if I didn’t include at least one book by Caitlin Doughty. She could make up most of a list by herself, honestly. She’s one of the founding members of The Order of the Good Death, one of the current driving forces in the death positive movement. She’s also the individual behind the Ask a Mortician videos. In From Here to Eternity, Doughty travels the globe, researching different death traditions from Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos to the Tana Torajas’s death involved lives. She poses the question of just what is a good death, and is the way Americans approach death really the best? Can’t we do better? If you’re brand new to the movement, this is the book you want to start your journey.

Did you know that we are currently outliving our bodies and are butting up against the natural lifespan of humans? We have made so many advances in medicine that our bodies cannot keep up and we are medically prolonging our lives. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in some cases, this does mean that suffering may be prolonged as well, and that is exactly what Atul Gawande discusses here. He argues that we should be able to choose how we die, and be able to die on our own terms. He also holds nothing back, letting you know exactly what will happen to your body as you age and after you die. It can be kinda gross. You’ll learn what hospice and assisted living is like too, with first hand accounts from both the elderly and the staff. This is a must read for everyone.

So you’ve died, got through this thing called life, and had your affairs in order so your family knew what you wanted in death and got the ball rolling, so to speak. You’re officially a cadaver. What’s next? Mary Roach has the answer for you. And not just answers from modern day autopsies and medical discussions: you’ll learn about cadavers that have changed the course of history, different death rituals across time and cultures, what donating your body to science really means, and other various stories about humans after death. It can get a little gross, but there are too many jokes to laugh at to get too skeeved out.

Death is a difficult topic to broach with children, whether it’s in preparation for a funeral of a loved one, or explaining why their beloved fish is swimming upside down. This book is a good place to start. It focuses on four siblings who live with their grandmother, who is slowly declining. The four of them come up with a plan to stall Death when he comes for her, and he does, inevitably, as he does for us all. But he takes the time to tell a story, a story that helps them understand the connection between life and death, joy and grief. Death is a complicated subject to teach, but this picture book handles it magnificently, teaching how to say goodbye in a way that is heartfelt and only a little bit tear-jerking.

While this, admittedly, leans more towards a more academic-type of text, it’s still deeply important to read, especially with a conversation centered on death. This book is the first look into the social, cultural, and political history of death within a country, extending all the way back to the sixteenth century. Death is an important part of Mexican identity, and Lomnitz demonstrates that expertly, laying out clearly the death practices of the pre-Columbian age, how colonization and imperialism affected the culture (especially in regards to Catholic diaspora) and even touches upon the new religious movement around Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, more colloquially known as Santa Muerte.

Learning about how a culture thinks often requires looking at the stories it tells itself. Seeing how a culture views death is no different, nor is reading cultural ghost stories. This book catalogs some of the more recognizable ghost legends from Japan. It also looks at their place within Japanese culture as a whole, and the varied views of death within the country, especially those rooted in pre-Buddhist beliefs. This is another scholarly level of work, but is still accessible to those willing to pick it up, and it’s a short book as well, only about 162 pages.

One cannot talk about death, both the study of and the laws that essentially regulate the management of it, without acknowledging the repatriation efforts focused on Indigenous remains. This book lays out the constant struggle of Native Americans to reclaim remains of family members that were appropriated and sold to collectors or museums by colonists. It traces the histories of laws surrounding the subject, as well as the cultural reasons for both sides of the fight, before finally culminating in the fight that brought about NAGPRA: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.