Finding The Good Death

Finding THe Good Death Good Death

Advanced Directive

An Advanced Directive is a legal document that states what you wish to be done with your body, and who is to excute your wishes with legal right over your corpse after your passing. It’s important for everyone to have, but especially important for marginalized communities like LGBTQ+ people. Otherwise your body generally goes to your next of kin. Make sure you tell everyone in your life about this advanced directive, especially who will be executing it.

Talk about it Demistify death

Death isn’t the most common dinner time conversation, sure. But society has put such a taboo on the subject that we treat it as something to only be talked about exclussively when someone has died that when it comes down to how the departed would have wanted theiir funeral to go that those left have little to no clue what to do. By talking candidly and comfortably about death you and your loved ones make it easier on each other plan your funerals

Not just what happens after you die, but talk with friends and family about how you’d like to die. While we’d all love to go in our sleep, you can’t garuntee that’s how it will happen. Important conversations about what you’d like to happen to you if you lose power to make medical choices. If you’d like to excerise your right to die if life came to that. Talk about if you’d like to be kept on life support and for how long. Have the worst case scenario talks with your loved ones while everyone in happy and healthy. Hopefully it never come to using that knowledge, but if it does you’ll be prepared

Plan your funeral

Know your options

Knowing different options now can help you fgure out if you’d rather have a burial or a cremation, if you’d like to be embalmed or not. The internet is magic, guys. Not including Ask a Mortician there are millions of resources talking about the funeral industry, new options coming up and plenty in between.

Controlling our deaths is an idealistic phrase. When formatting your advanced directive, don’t let anyone tell you that things are nescessary when they 100 are not. If you don’t believe in emblaming, there’s no requirements in the United States that bodies need to be embalmed for a standard wait time, home wakes, or funeral home wakes.

Mourning

Nobody said that death wasn’t still sad. The loss of an important presence in your life can be devstating. There’s no one timeline for how to move on from a big death in your life. Ignore pressure to move on or just get over it, moving at your own pace is the key to life continuing. Hopefully when your time comes you’ve taken ask much control of your death as possible, and your friends and family don’t have to add to their grief by guessing what you’d want, and their closure can come knowing that you’re at peace.