Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 10 | Megan Rosenbloom on the Death Positive Movement

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

We're all going to die. But while we are alive, it's up to us how we understand and deal with that fact. In the United States especially, there is a tendency to not face up to the reality of death, and to assume that our goal should be to struggle at all costs to squeeze every last minute out of life. The Death Positive movement aims to change that, helping people to both face up to death on a personal and cultural level, and to give themselves more control over the manner of their own deaths. One of the leaders in this movement is today's guest, Megan Rosenbloom, who works as a medical librarian by day. We talk about attitudes toward death around the world, the differences between dying at home and in a hospital, the importance of autonomy in old age, and how individuals and societies can cope with the ultimate inevitability that comes with being alive. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/megan-rosenbloom.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Megan Rosenbloom received a Masters from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008, and is currently Associate Director for Instruction Services at the Norris Medical Library of the University of Southern California. In 2016 she won a Mover & Shaker award from Library Journal. She is active in the Death Positive movement, serving as the co-founder and director of the Death Salon. She is currently working on a book about the history of books bound with human skin. Home page Norris Medical Library page Order of the Good Death Death Salon Anthropodermic Book Project Talk sponsored by USC's Office of Religious Life Twitter Download Episode

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Visit your nearby Lowe's on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of my favorite things to do in Paris is to visit the catacombs underneath the city itself. These are an extraordinary collection of tunnels that are about 20 meters underground, the height of a five-story building. And there are stories, of course, of people sneaking into sealed off areas to throw massive parties and so forth. But some of the catacombs are explicitly open to the public. You walk down a rickety spiral staircase, and you find yourself surrounded by bones.

This part of the catacombs are used as a storage place where the skeletal remains of literally millions of Parisians from the 1700s. Back then, the art of the cemetery was not quite as advanced as it is today, and bones were just piling up. There are stories of a heavy rainfall, washing bodily remains down the streets of Paris itself. So at some point, they gathered up literally millions of remains and put them underground in these catacombs. It's a site that if you visit it will leave a real impression, an impression of your mortality, but also an impression of the different ways in which different cultures think about mortality. To me, as an American, going to the catacombs makes me realize that it's not necessary to have sort of the ponderous, somber attitude toward death that we have here in the U.S.

Deep in the catacombs, there are little snippets of poetry on the walls. There are sometimes the skulls are arranged in little heart shapes and so forth. It's a slightly more accepting, almost whimsical version of how we think about death. And we know the different cultures think about death very differently. In Mexico, there's the Day of the Dead, Dia de Mertos, which celebrates and honors the ends of our lives. In the United States, we don't do this. We don't celebrate, we don't honor death. We're certainly not whimsical about it.

We treat it with utmost seriousness. And if anything, we try to ignore the impending death that we're all going to face as much as we can. This attitude can have a deleterious impact on one of the most singular moments of a human life, the moment that it ends. When we want to think about death, we should be asking ourselves, where is it that we want to die? How do we want it to happen if we can possibly have any control? over that. How can we plan for it? So recently a movement has emerged known as death positivity. It's a movement that works to create a more healthy, realistic attitude toward the inevitability of death and to celebrate death as a capstone to a

life well lived, to have the cultural and artistic aspects of death taken a little bit more seriously. So today's guest is Megan Rosenblum, a medical librarian who is a leader in this death positive movement. Megan is an associate director for instruction services at the USC Norris Medical Library, and she's also the author of a forthcoming book, Dark Archives.

You'll hear what that book is actually about later in the podcast. She's also the co-founder and director of the Death Salon, the official event of the Order of the Good Death, an organization devoted to exploring ways to prepare a death-phobic culture

for our inevitable mortality. It's going to happen to all of us eventually, so let's go. This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA fan festival of the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on Giant Scream. Feel every goal with thousands of fans and celebrate with music, culture, and flavors from around the world. Join us June 11th through 14th opening weekend as the tournament kicks off in Los Angeles. Tickets are just $10 and kids under 12 were free.

Get yours now at Los Angeles FWC26.com. Okay, Megan Rosenblum, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thanks. So you're a librarian, but a medical librarian. What kind of weird career trajectory ends up with one being a medical librarian in particular? Well, some people just set out to be a medical librarian. You can take medical library classes in library school. So, you know, baseline, in order to be an actual library.

librarian and not just work at a library, you need a master's in library science. A lot of people just think that you sit and read books all day or check out books all day, I wish. But it is one of those rare degrees, like one of those rare positions that you actually need a master's, not a PhD, is specifically a master's. So some people, when they're getting their master's, they take specific courses or tracks in medical librarianship. I didn't do that. I kind of ended up in a medical library in a sort of backward fashion. Some people, you know, are physicians and then decide they want to be librarians and then they go to library school and then use their medical expertise.

I, my first job in libraries, which is still at the same place I am, but this is my third physician there now, was, you know, head of metadata and content. So it was more about the publishing stuff. all the, like describing the resources and making them work and making people be able to get them. So it wasn't super, it didn't matter if I had much medical background. Although while I was getting my degree, I was working in medical publishing. So I did have some very baseline, you know, understanding of medicine, but it's not like I'm a medical professional. But I am now a medical information professional.

So I know all about the information. but you wouldn't want me to perform any surgery on you or anything like that. And did your special interest in the subject of death come before you became a medical librarian, or did that grow out of that? Yeah, I think I always had gothic tendencies, you know, but didn't really kind of recognize it. But then in terms of professional interest and, you know, learning about different cultures and history and that kind of thing

and getting involved in this whole death positive community, I actually came to it from history of medicine, and it came to history of medicine from rare books. So my first love in libraries was rare books. And while I was in Philadelphia, I was working in a publishing company, but while I was getting my degree, I volunteered a couple places, and one of them was the AIDS Library,

which I was doing, I was cataloging some of their archive material around the very early days of the AIDS epidemic. which was completely heart-wrenching, but kind of showed me the importance of that kind of material, you know? And then I was a docent at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. A lot of people don't know about that place, but it is basically a rare book museum. Dr. Rosenbach was the rare book seller to the stars.

He built all the main rare book collections in the country. So the Huntington, he was one of his main sellers. Henry Huntington's main seller was Dr. Rosenbach, you know, that kind of guy. And so he has some of the craziest rare books in this, you know, house in Philadelphia. And I would give tours of that. So he has just off the top of my head the actual manuscript for James Joyce's Ulysses, like the handwritten one. It's not in Ireland.

It's in Philadelphia. He's got all the notes and everything for Bram Stoker's Dracula. He's got the only known, extant copy of Poor Richard's Almanac, the first one, the 1733. Just a taste. I mean, it's pretty incredible. It's something about growing up on the East Coast, and in Philadelphia in particular, where I, near where I grew up, there's all these crazy historical things that, you know, here in L.A., it's a little bit harder to find. But there's all these collections handed down through the centuries. There are a lot in L.A. too, but, yeah, it's a little harder to find.

In Philadelphia, the history is sort of just right in your face. and before I was a library and I was a journalist, so I just felt like I knew everything about the city. I knew all the nooks and crannies and fun things there was to be had because it was kind of a small place anyway. But the history, yeah. And so the history and the rare books were the thing that really got me interested. And then I wanted to come to L.A.,

and so I just kind of found what turned out to be a really lucky break of a job in a medical library. and when I got there, during the interview, they're like, okay, this is a hard part of the interview where we ask you all the hard questions, and it was in the rare book room, and I'm like, ah, I guess. No problem. So no one at the library really cared about rare books

and hadn't for a long time, so there's this collection, but no one was really doing anything with it. So I kind of took it upon myself to start learning about them and teaching with them and that kind of thing. And during the course of that, was when I sort of got interested in the way that the corpse and the cadavers were used in the history of medicine and most specifically the way they were sourced. Like where did these bodies come from? Because usually it's not a way that we would find very, you know, consensual or ethically okay today.

Yeah. And so that was kind of my first interest in dead bodies, I guess. I came at it from this completely other way, but I was doing some public lectures about things, you know, sourcing bodies for anatomical learning. And that was when Caitlin Doty, like, saw me do a talk and was kind of like, hey, she looks useful. I think it was kind of the, it wasn't so much, she knows everything about death, but, hmm, organized librarian, hmm. Could be helpful. Yeah. And Caitlin Doty is the founder or in some sense of this death positive movement, at least locally. Yeah, I mean, yeah, she coined the phrase death positive. She is the, you know, alpha and omega.

And so she started, she had started this group before called the Order of the Good Death, which was like this online collective of academics and artists and writers and morticians and various death professionals that were doing interesting things, like new groundbreaking things, talking about history in a new way, kind of changing the landscape of what was deemed acceptable to do or not do in terms of, you know, let's bring back the home funeral. Let's bring back the green burial. Let's do that kind of thing. So she was kind of built this collective. And then she added some new people to the collective after I met her, including me. And I felt like, oh, I'm so unqualified for this. There was, you know, this list of people just doing incredible work.

And we were on this sort of email thread. And we're like, oh, wouldn't be cool if we could just get together. for like a party or something. It was literally that, you know, benign. That gave you a purpose. It was like, oh, what if we got together for a party? And, you know, that would be impossible. Some of the people were in Australia and stuff like that. But then some people were like, well, you know,

if it was kind of like a conference, I might be able to, you know, get permission to go if I was doing a talk at a thing or whatever. And I was like, well, you know, I just planned my wedding in Los Angeles. So I actually know some things about venues and that kind of thing. And then I just kind of ended up organizing, you know, with the help of other people and stuff,

we organized this first, death salon, we called it. So salon, like the, you know, 18th century. Makes us think we're in France. Yes, yeah. Let's get a bunch of thinkers together and see what happens kind of feel. And it was only, it was kind of invite only. There were only like 30 people. And then we did one public event at a bar.

venue, like a place where you would see music. And we got there and there was like 300 people there and we're like, okay. And then the Atlantic did a big feature on us and then it just kind of blew open. And the next thing we know we're in London and we're in San Francisco. I mean, it just really snowballed very quickly. And so Desilin is sort of the physical event now annual. We did a couple a year at one point and then it got to be too much. So it was like once a year now, we go to some city and we take over for a weekend and we have dozens of lectures and different kinds of artistic performances and workshops and parties. And so, yeah, I mean, the one that's coming up in the fall is at, it's in Mount Auburn

Cemetery in Boston. Okay. So it's not. I've walked by there many times. Right. So we are actually in a cemetery this time. and they have these great chapels and we're giving talks in the chapel, but we're having basically, you know, on Thursday we have one, like, small group

that's just all day hands-on home funeral workshop. So that's Thursday. And then Friday is kind of an open-field day where we're going to have people doing talks all over the cemetery and dance performances and all sorts of things that you can just stumble into things, including like guided tours of the history of of Mount Auburn because it has incredibly important. That history again, yeah. It's probably the most important historical cemetery in the country.

It's kind of started that idea of the field cemetery, the place you would walk around and have picnics and things. That was the first iteration of that. And then Friday night in one of the chapels were having this very, this Edward Gorey themed fundraiser, because he's from the Cape and we have the Edward Gory. house is like coming with artifacts and, you know, so that will be really fun. And then Saturday and Sunday, it's just talks all day. This sounds great. But let me back up a little

bit because just the phrase death positivity, we want to get straight. What exactly this is supposed to mean. I mean, you're not in favor of dying, right? It's not like we're saying that dying is good, let's all die, right? But it's more like, correct me if I'm wrong, we're going to die. Let's accept it. Let's, you know, not feel squeamish about it. Let's talk about it and let's trying to make it as meaningful and pleasant as possible. Is that about right? Right. So, you know, we take the phrase death positive, it kind of, for some people, it's sort of, oh, that sounds horrible. And it is provocative on purpose, but the kind of background of it is more like sex positive or body positive, right? So it's, hey, here's this

thing that we feel really uncomfortable talking about. Let's open up conversations, let's explore, the ways that this is dealt with in different cultures and time periods and different communities and what are some of the issues in this like just about as intersectional as you can possibly imagine every sort of slice and dice of possibility like let's explore that let's see you know cross you know like cross time cross culture let's like talk about all these things and what can we learn from that so it's sort of when you open up conversation then it destigmatizes it a little bit. And then you can start to, it's an easy way intellectually.

If you start intellectually, then it's an easier way to get into the personal and the, you know, that kind of dealing with a topic that you don't really want to deal with. We live in this society that's really in death denial. We just pretend it's never going to happen to us. And then when it does, when it comes into our lives because of a family member or something with us, then it's an emergency, we don't know how to deal with it,

and then you just kind of do what you think is the only option, the $10,000 funeral with the embalmed body in the casket, with the viewing in the concrete vault in the ground. Right. Who turns out, not only are those things, not the only option, they're actually very specific to our time and place, and they're not even the way we did things like 100 years ago. Yet for some reason we have this myopia where it's just this one thing.

Actually, you have a lot of options. You know, because some people think that it's illegal not to embalma body. Some funeral professionals tell people that, you know. And so this is like, hey, let's educate ourselves at a time that's not at the time of need. Let's engage with things on a level that's intriguing. You know, I mean, how can you not be intrigued about this great mystery that we all end up dealing with? You know, how is that not interesting? And it's like an easy gateway into more difficult conversations or lines of thought.

And is it fair to say that it is our specific time and place, the United States in the beginning of 21st century here, that is more in denial than average? I did find this wonderful quote from one of your colleagues, Joanna Ebenstein. Only in the United States, she said, were images of death absent from art and daily life. You know, there's plenty of stories. If you're a tourist in Europe,

in Paris or Italy to the catacombs and there's all these skulls and bones all over the place and Mexico of course celebrates the Day of the Dead very famously. Are we weird that way? Is it worse here than anywhere else? Yeah, it's definitely, you know, there may be

some other places where it's just as bad but it is really noticeably bad here, yeah. And it kind of this sort of historical trajectory with that is the Civil War really kind of kind of took us, the Civil War and its aftermath was the thing that separated us from

European heritage in terms of the way that we deal with death, right? Before that, we were more or less doing the same thing. It wasn't that different. But then with the Civil War, it was the first time that people were dying far away from home. So normally, before the Civil War, you usually got, you were born at home, you got sick at home, you were taking care, you were taking care of at home. You died at home, were laid out at home, buried on the homestead, buried at the local churchyard, your family would take care of your body. You know, there was no funeral professionals, there was no undertakers or anything like that. And that's also what it was like in Europe at the time. Yeah, that was pretty much just the way that it went. Usually you probably didn't have as much

land in Europe, so it was pretty much the churchyard, but more or less the same. And then for the first time, you've got a lot of people dying all at once. Still, the amount of people, the amount of soldiers that died into war is more than any other American war all put together. And that's just the soldiers, not even all the civilians. It's like the entire city of Philadelphia, like right now, if everybody in Philly died. That is kind of comparable. Like that level of you know, death in just a few years. And so, and for the first time, normal. if you had, if you're fighting a war, you're fighting in your, you know, local area. There's a battle down the street.

It was a militia that would be gathered. Right, exactly. This time, people were going really far away and dying, and then there's no, you know, their bodies were just left on battlefields and things like that. So if you had some means, there were a couple new technologies that made it so that you could bring people home. And one is the train, but in order to get on the train, you needed to do something to stabilize the body, so it didn't, like, you can't just have a rotting corpse on a train.

So these battlefield surgeons started doing embalming. And that was really the thing, like, okay, we can stabilize this body enough to get it home for a proper burial. Then they took Lincoln's body on a train tour around the U.S. and just embalmed them and embalmed them and bombed them. And so people are seeing this lifelike course of the president and isn't that impressive kind of thing. And then over time, not right away, but over time, then embalming became like the normal thing to do. Embalming never really caught on in other countries. People don't routinely do it.

So it's such a part of our... So even now. Even now. Europe. What about like Latin America? Not really. No. Mexico don't really do it.

You know, it's just like, you know, some people do. but it's not like the default. Was it originally a prestige thing? Were the richest families embalming because they could afford it? I mean, I think in order to, you would have to have some money in order to be able to get someone to go find your son and then perform the service and then get them on a train. All those things would probably cost a lot of money.

And then, yeah, I mean, we used to have a room in our house called The Parlor. Nobody calls it that anymore. It's really old-fashioned. But then we took these professionals who were doing funeral service, like, oh, well, you can't embalm because it's full of nasty chemicals. You need a professional to do this. You can't let the women do it at home. You need a professional that you pay. And so instead of having a body in a parlor in your house, you take it to the funeral parlor,

and then the parlor becomes the living room because it's for the living and not for your dead bodies. Wow. So over time, these little bits and pieces just kind of. of add up to this completely different way of doing it. And then you, you know, we're here in Los Angeles, and it's a perfect example of the sort of forest lawn is kind of the epitome of the death denial cemetery because the tombstones don't stand up because it's going to look like a cemetery. They all have to be flat.

You know, so you can almost ignore that there's a bunch of things. bodies because there's just a big rolling hills and where they bury the children is called slumberland. It's really kind of disturbing with the euphemisms and all the things that they do to try to sanitize away. And, you know, graves in cemeteries in the United States, like modern graves, they have these huge concrete vaults in the ground. So it's not just a casket in the ground. It's a casket inside a concrete vault in the ground. So, you know, ecologically, it's pretty wasteful, but they do that partially so that it's easy to mow the grass. So there's no settling of like, right. It remains level. Yeah. So these are all things where if you told somebody, even in

a European country, like, oh yeah, we have these huge plots of land that would be worth zillions of dollars in any other country. And they're just for dead people for always. You get your grave forever, which is not a common thing either. Right. In Europe and South America, I know that you get your grave for a little while. And at some point, you're cleaned out and someone else gets that place. Right. Because land is a premium and it didn't used to be so much here. We had, we were very land rich. It's not really the case anymore, but it was like for a long time.

So, you know, you get this real estate forever. We put a bunch of expensive and, like, you know, concrete metals and heavy metals and things in the ground with your body. And we try to preserve your dead body as long as possible so that it looks like you're alive. That is so weird. It's like, what are you doing? So when people say things about other cultures and, you know, Caitlin's, Caitlin Doty's latest book from here to eternity, you know, she goes around to a lot of different places and talks about, you know, their death practices.

And from a really, you know, respectful way, it could, like that idea could sound horrible like, white lady goes around, but the way she does it is really well informed and is really sensitive. But, you know, when she's talking about his place in Indonesia, where the village digs up their relatives every year, changes their clothes, takes them around, and, you know, shows their corpses like, okay, here's the new baby, here's the new well, here's the new whatever. People are like, oh, that's disgusting. It's so disrespectful. It's like, no.

It's a different way. It's not. This is not an embalmed corpse. This is a decomposing corpse that has been in the ground for a while. Yeah, it's like a mummy because it's dry. Okay. You know, they kind of look mummified, but it is definitely, there's no mistaking the dead body.

It is very dead. And, you know, that act is done with utmost love and respect, you know. Meanwhile, if you told someone in that village what we do, they would be horrified. You know, so it's like it's so. about where you're from in your time and place. But once you start learning about other ways of doing things, you realize just how weird we really are. And that, hey, you know, maybe if I'm not comfortable with the whole embalming thing,

maybe we don't have to do it. Tell me more about what it was like before we invented this new way of doing it. So you would have not only had a funeral at home in some sense, but you would have died at home probably, right? The idea of dying in hospitals is also a relative. to be modern invention. It is, yeah. Clinical medicine sort of became a thing in right around the French Revolution time.

Before that, the hospitals were, like, charity hospitals. Like, you don't have a family, so the church will run this place for you to go die in, basically. And then when during the French Revolution, they were kind of like, okay, we have a lot of quack doctors who are saying a lot of crazy things, but what? What if we use this group of poor people to train doctors on real people? Instead of just being like an apprentice on someone, you can kind of learn with a lot of people, not just like one or two people,

and that you have to pass tests and things in order to be a doctor, and that was sort of the framework. And so that idea is called the paris school. It's like when medicine was like really getting codified as like, professionalized. Yeah, it's like professionalized thing. But still, for most people, that wasn't even relevant because you could, if you were rich, you could have a doctor come to your house to help you out, but you would still die at home for sure. You wouldn't, it would be scandalous to die in a hospital. If you had money, that would be just unbelievable. And so it's really the hospital stayed for the

poor for quite a long time into the 19th century for sure. And yeah, so yeah, you would be taken care of at home, die at home, often buried at home. The funeral would be at home. You didn't have, they just would wash the body. You might have some flowers out, you know, that kind of thing. And the family would wash the body. Yes, not some trans-professionals. Yeah.

But so now this whole idea of you dying in the hospital after a prolonged illness, your body goes directly from hospital to funeral home and potentially from hospital. from hospital or funeral home to crematory and you come back in a box of ashes without any of your family necessarily being with you during all that process. It can be very destabilizing for people. You know, that one minute, you know, someone's right here

and the next minute they're in a box on my shelf. That's like really hard for people to process. So a lot of the appeal of something like a home funeral is I'm taking care of this family member, and while I'm doing it, I'm understanding the transition between them being alive and then being a corpse. So is part of the death positive movement to encourage home funerals, or is there a set of different possible ways to go, and you just want people to be more cognizant of their choices?

I think, yeah, it's more, did you know you have this option, and you can be as involved or not involved as you want? This is not, it's not illegal to keep a body in your house. You know, people have this idea where the second somebody dies, oh, my God, we have to call 911. This is emergency. They have to leave immediately. And you can't do something like maybe I want to brush mom's hair and make her look nice or whatever. It's this sort of reaction because we're so not used to being around dead bodies where we used to be around them all the time.

That it's like, oh my God, what do I do? It's an emergency. But then if you actually knew you could do things like that, or if you knew you could do a witness cremation, you can go to the crematory and you can push the button and you can be there with your family member like for the last time you know that was that was something that was mentioned in katelyn's first book and she got so many responses like i had no idea that i could have done that i wish i could have done that now i know you know like there's so little information um people don't share those things people and people in the industry think oh people don't want those you know yeah that was seen as a

the Chinese thing. The Chinese do it, nobody else does it or whatever. And then, you know, for people to be like, wait, I could have done this. You know, that is, so the death positive movement,

there are certain things that come up a lot, like, you know, home funerals and green burial and stuff like that. But those things aren't for everybody, you know? And so we don't pass judgment on people

if they want the whole big embalmed everything. It's more, you know, hey, there are other options, and we support your ability to choose. And presumably there's an issue also because a lot of people who will die are infirm. They're already sick, right? And maybe they're elderly. And our culture makes a choice to sort of do everything we can to eke every last minute of life out of people.

Is there a relationship between the death positive movement and end-of-life care and end-of-life choices and death. and death with dignity and so forth? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, we were helpful with getting death with dignity legalized in California. Why don't you explain exactly what that entails? So it's been death with dignity, you know, it's been called a lot of things over the years. And a lot of people don't like using words like euthanasia. that gives you this really bad, you know, association with Nazis,

and that is no one wants to associate it with that. And then I forget what the other one that people were using. It's a little different. But there are certain phrases like that go in and out of vogue. But the one right now. Well, like cultural baggage around the whole idea. Yeah. So right now what people generally call is death with dignity.

And, oh, assisted suicide. That's the other. That was a 90s thing. People don't call it that any. anymore because suicide has this big stigma people big association with it and if you're a 101 and you have been suffering with liver failure for like many months are you really committing suicide i mean is that really what you're doing well even the word commit we don't use commit anymore uh because that's a crime you commit a crime right so that kind of the words you use are

really important and they change over time but anyway that's my little hobby horse about that but the death of dignity is when you get a terminal diagnosis and they say you have something like six months to live there's a specific thing that you could choose to see your doctor and you have to go through many

different hurdles in order to get this so it's not like oh I just want to do this okay fine you know it's not like that the doctor can't administer you know, the medicine because that's against, you know, that do no harm kind of thing. Hypocratic oath, sure. Right. And so it's like, though they can't do that, you can self-administer drugs.

You have to do it yourself. Right. And you have to meet certain cognitive criteria for you to be able to do that. So if you have, you know, Alzheimer's or dementia, you don't have the option of doing that, which, you know, is sad but understandable. Like why you wouldn't, you know, like if you're not. of sound mind in some way, that you feel, the important thing is they have to be 100% sure that you are not under duress in any way, that you're not, you know, someone in your life

isn't trying to force you into it, that it's your choice and you are informed. And then after many, you know, visits and all this. Bureaucratic hurdles of various sorts. It is not, it is a long process. Yeah. Then you are given the drugs to then use or not. Right. For some people, just having it is so relieving.

Like, if it gets too bad, I have an option. Right. A little bit of volition, a little bit of self-determination is there. Yeah, it's like, okay, if this gets as bad as it possibly could, I have the ability to do something about it, and that is comforting to people in the end of their lives. Yeah, some people make use of it, and some people don't. And if you know it's coming, if you know you have a terminal diagnosis,

And you feel like at some point of your choosing that this is your, that this is a good time for you to do that. You know, you call your family over, you have a big party, you do whatever you want to do, and then you have this option. Then that is, that's what it is. That's death with dignity, because dignity part is, I'm going to choose the way I do this, you know. And then I'm going to do it in a safe, comfortable, like, fashion. And this is the law in California now? And how many places? Yeah, so I'm not sure exactly how many states it's illegal in right now, but Oregon was one of the first.

I believe it's in Washington. It's in California, although there was a recent challenge to it, but I think it was overturned and I think things are okay right now. It's a very recent kind of challenge to that. There's a handful of states. It's not everybody. Do we have any idea of how often people are taking the option and actually doing it? I don't know if, I'm not sure what kind of. statistics people are keeping on that. But death with dignity is a thing that falls within

death positivity because it's about choice. Right. Right. It's like this is, you have an option, you have choice, you have some agency in the end of your life. We have a lot of people involved in our lot in our community who are hospice workers. We have death doulas. A lot of death doulas. That's like a really popular thing right now. I have to explain what that is. So pretty much, if there's someone on the birth, if there's a job on the birth side, there is a comparable job on the death side. Yep, makes that.

So death dolas have varying levels, just like birthdulas, of, you know, training and, you know. Responsibility. Well, yeah, certification of various kinds. Like, it's less certified than the birth side because it's less of a, you know, a lot of people perform the service, but don't call it that, you know.

know, hospice workers can kind of be a death dole if that's how you choose to call yourself that. But it's basically easing the transition, right? What you can do to make people comfortable and, you know, that kind of thing. So whatever you do that is a helping in the transition from life to death, same as from, you know, in the birthing process, whatever you need to do to help that person, that all falls within the dula, like, mind frame. There must be enormous political and social forces arrayed against the desire to give people these choices, right? We all remember the death panel's controversy, just the very idea that you would plan to die rather than going kicking and screaming and eking out every last minute can be used as a weapon, right? Do you think that the tide is turning?

Do you think that we're seeing movement in the death positive direction here? the level to which death positivity has connected with people in a very short time frame is pretty astonishing. I mean, the fact that we have multiple bestselling authors and events, people call their events, death positive, people align themselves with that, even if we don't know them, you know? Like the first time I started seeing people calling things death positive and I didn't know who they were, that was a big, you know, deal. But, I mean, the sheer amount of people who are like, yes, this is me, you know, is, it's pretty astonishing. Our community is huge and growing all the time. And so on that hand, this is a need that a lot of people feel like it's been absent. It's not been an option.

Or they've been working in a really, really small area, but they didn't think about all the other people. who can kind of, who were sort of similarly aligned. Like, you know, a lot of the people who are speaking at Desolon this time, they've been working at home funerals for decades, you know. But that was such a teeny little niche of a thing. And most, and they would be working in their community in this, like way. Now we're global and we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who watch videos and buy books and come to events and talk online with each other and do this whole thing.

So it's kind of, and, you know, maybe you were interested in it because you thought Caitlin's videos were funny, but then you're like, actually, I want to start helping people do home funerals. Like, that kind of thing can happen. Nevertheless, we are in a very difficult political climate for that kind of thing. Because death positivity is empowering for regular people. It often results in very inexpensive options. that you don't need a professional for. It is, we are very openly intersectional and inclusive, and we work all the time to be more and more intersectional and inclusive,

and that rubs some people the wrong way sometimes, but that is, you know, we are, you know, ultimately a social justice movement, and if you don't like that, then you might not like us anymore, even if you liked our videos and stuff before. And there has to be a complicating factor of religion, right? Or even just of what people think is going to happen after death, even if it's not in the context of an organized religion.

But certainly, in principle, I would imagine that how one approaches the final moments of your life or the life of a loved one will be affected by whether or not you think that's the end or whether you not think they're going to a better place or a worse place or someplace in between. Yeah, definitely. I mean, religion is a factor, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily a thing that would draw people away from the movement because a lot of very traditions like Judaism and Islam, you know, those, what they still do is greed burial.

They don't embalm. They wrap a body, wash a body, ritualistic washing of a body, wrapping it in a sheet and quick burial, you know, that kind of thing. is, you know, now what people outside of those traditions are fighting to get included into what, quote, unquote, traditional cemeteries is the stuff they've been doing all along. Right. So that, it depends on the religion. Sure. And also those things change over time. I mean, you know, until, I think it was until Vatican 2 or something like that nobody would ever consider.

getting cremated. If you're a Catholic, I mean, ooh, you know. And now it's like, it's okay. It's like, not a big deal. So even in Europe where... Well, in Europe, the rates are even higher. The rates of... Of cremation. Most European countries, you're looking at like 96% of people get cremated. We just passed the 50% mark, but in the 80s, it was something like 12% in the U.S. So we were way, way behind the times. Japan is like 99.9%. So children should not go into the embalming business. school. I, yeah, I mean, I personally would, if my kid wanted to be an embalmer, I would be upset because I don't want her to get cancer. Oh, there's that. It is a very, it's a very dangerous profession in that way, occupationally dangerous, let alone all the other stuff. Right. So,

so, so yeah, I'm not super into embalming as an idea, but, you know, current plans are me, donating my body to medical school, which means I will be embalmed to the nth if I, you know, if that's what happens to me. So it's like you have to make some decisions there. Have you had anyone close to you die since you became involved in the movement? Yeah. Mm-hmm. It was a pretty tragic death too. So this was my niece and she was 24. Wow. And she died of an opioid overdose, and she left behind a six-year-old severely autistic child and an infant.

So talk about what is the worst death you can think. It's hard to be positive about that kind of thing. Right. We're the order of the good death. This is the opposite of that. All and all the things that were surrounding it that I had to go home and go into that, it was like, so it's just everybody's worst nightmare. You know, I mean, just the worst.

And so if that happened, like five years before that, I literally don't know what I would have done in terms of I honestly would probably have just, like, dissociated from the whole thing. If I were out here, you know, 3,000 miles away, be like, oh, I'm sorry, I can't come home or something. I would just completely be like, good luck with that. if I just couldn't deal with it. I mean, a lot of people can't deal with situations, and then they're like, I need to preserve myself. I'm going to piece out on this. But I knew that my mom, like, she needed me.

You know, she needed me, my brother needed me, people needed me. And so I kind of swung into action. And that is a thing that when I am faced with something that I'm, you know, I can't deal. feel, or, you know, I think is like something really difficult. If I can find a way to do some good in the situation, then it makes me feel, it gives me a sense of control over things I had no control over, right?

So me being able to help with, I helped with the arrangements with my brother. You know, I came in and I was talking to my mom about this, that, and the other thing. And then I continually talk to her about my niece, you know, because she got a tattoo with her name on it. And, you know, my mom was extremely affected by it and still is. And so other people, you know, it's been like a couple of years now, just like maybe two or three. Other people just kind of push it out of their minds. But my mom is still in very deep grief. And then I let her be in it.

And I try to support her in that. And we have authors like Megan Devine, I would recommend her book to anybody ever, which is called It's Okay If You're Not Okay. It's okay that you're not okay. And it's like, hey, grief. Like it's not, it doesn't have a time limit. It's not like, oh, that was six months ago. You're still upset about that? Yeah.

Right. You know, well, you know, you really need to get over it or, you know, you could have another baby. You know, that kind of those things that people say. are so horrible, but they come from this idea of wanting to fix things. And so although I just, no, I just said that I was coming in to like do things to help, I knew I couldn't fix it. But we also, and we're, but we're bad at it because it's part of the fact that our culture denies that death even happens, right? So we were not trained, we're not anticipating, we're, we don't have good guidelines for proper behavior, you know, with the best of intentions, people can say

the most heartbreakingly, you know, inappropriate things at the time of death because we won't face up to it. Right. If you don't have much experience dealing with death and all you know is kind of like things that other people say that you end up saying these cliches that can be really, really hurtful to people because they're the one on the receiving end of you saying, oh, well, she's in a better place.

It's like, well, so does that make me a better place? bad person because I want her here and not in some better place? Or what if I'm not religious, then I don't like that idea. You know, or you should be happy to have the time you had. It's like, I can't have both. You know, like, you pretty much have an answer to every of the, all of those cliches, which means like you're not really thinking about what you're saying because if you did, then you would realize that what you're saying is super hurtful, even though you're trying

to help, you know? So, like, familiarizing yourself and getting to learn about these things and really just kind of trying to be there. It's, like, I found it personally very helpful. So I was, it wasn't easy. I won't pretend that it was. I won't pretend I had a dandy old time at, you know, my niece's funeral or anything like that.

But the fact that I was able to go in and help out with some things, then when, like, when I look back, I'm like, okay, well, I feel like I was able to help. And that makes me feel better. And one of the simple things is just letting grief happen in some way, right? There's no clever saying or condolence that you can give that makes the grief go away. Like you said, it will be there and it will go away and come back and people deal with it in their own ways. Yeah, it's like, hey, yeah, this really sucks. Or I don't know what to say, but I'm here.

I'm here for you, yeah. You know? But it seems like a lot of the death positive movement is not just about dealing with the specific deaths, but also the idea of death, right? and creating something more cultural and artistic and meaningful about the acceptance that this is going to come to all of us. Right. So part of the death denial idea, and so that phrase is really, was popularized by this philosopher named Ernest Becker. And he had this best-selling book in 1975 or something called The Denial of Death. And his construct, which is something that is one of the founding tenets of our movement,

is that the fact, so where are these animals that we know, know that we're going to die, right? We don't know about other animals' level of understanding, you know, there's been some changing. But it's, we know for sure that we are, you know, we know, you know, we're special in this certain way that we definitely, like, humans know, that they're going to die someday. and the terror of that is too much to handle. So we try to do these psychological things to distance and change that and ignore that idea. We have this death anxiety and we're trying to do something with it. So basically all of culture comes from the death anxiety thing. So if you are, okay, I know I'm going to die someday.

I really don't like that idea. I want to leave something of myself behind. I'm going to make another human being. I'm going to make some art or record a podcast or, you know, they, you know, strive to the heights of my profession in the hopes that someone will remember me and put my name on a building or whatever. You know, all those impulses, the pyramids and, you know, all those things. Well, writing books or even, you know, having people have good memories about you

to put it in most benign terms, right? To leave some warm feelings behind. Yeah, the idea that you would characterize. about a legacy after you're dead is a really weird thing, but everybody does care, at least to some extent. People don't want to be like, you know, oh, I don't care if anyone talks about me or what people, I don't care what music you play at my funeral. I don't care what you do with my dead body. Throw in a hole. I don't care. You know, those kind of things are pretty unusual. And usually if someone's like, I really don't care at all. I don't care if I'm going to die tomorrow.

I don't care. Whatever happens to me, who cares? Those people tend to like protest too much. I think the general human condition is one of this push and pull, you know. And the more you face your mortality and engage with these ideas in a way usually starting that is comfortable with you. Like for me, it's knowledge acquisition and, you know. Librarian, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's the way I get comfortable by learning things and trying to process them by learning. you know, and you know, you interact with it in your way, and then the repeated exposure then makes each exposure a little less severe. And then you're able to, yeah, when you make plans and you make choices and you talk about it with your loved ones and you have this ongoing relationship with death, you actually end up being a less anxious and more happy person in general. That's usually the reaction. And other cultures have something like this more built in than we do these days.

I mean, you know, if you look at it one way, I have a friend who is, who works on a Buddhist meditation retreat. And she's like, yeah, this is basically Buddhist. You know, to her, she's like, duh. Yeah, we do corpse meditation. We sit and think about what it's like to be a corpse. We do that all the time, you know. So there are certain, yeah, there are certain disciplines and. or religions or whatever, where that's just baked in.

But in our current state in America in 2018, you know, our increasingly also secular state, some of the things that get lost are things like the importance of ritual, of marking passages from one stage to the next. And, you know, why do we care? Why is there a wedding industrial complex? You know, why do we care about that kind of thing? because it matters to mark the change from being a single person to being a married person.

That matters. Like, who gives a crap about having a birthday party? Like, who cares about going from age one to two? I care. I care a lot. I'm a big believer in rituals. Like, all of my PhD students, when they defend their thesis, they get a bottle of champagne, and I get a bottle and put up on the wall.

And some of the other professors are like, why are you bothering with this? You know, they're going to go on and do their thing. but it's a, like you say, it's a right of passage. It's marking an accomplishment, something important in your life. Yeah, it matters. It feels, it's important. And, you know, what I talked about before with going from the hospital and then right into, you know, then they just disappear. You don't get that demarcation of the change of that person being here and then not here.

And it makes it a lot harder for you to process that. Well, we have funerals. So should funerals be more fun? I mean, it depends on the person and, you know, what they wanted, but also what the family. Like, what is the vibe of your family? You know, are you an Irish wake kind of family? You know, mine kind of would sort of be. Irish wakes, for those who don't know, being famous for having lots of drinking and revelry as well as, you know, honoring the dead while they're there. Singing stories about someone you loved, you know, yeah, that kind of thing.

I could see that. You know, I see the appeal for sure. Sure. But yeah, like what's meaningful to you? What feels like what marks a transition? You know, the funeral is for the living, but we have lots of ways to set things up so that your funeral, but also most importantly, the end of your life is a thing that you, you know, aligns with your preferences. That would be the best, yeah. We don't really have, we really have much of that in most of human history. Did you get that. kind of control. And our laws are sort of is something I've been reading about a lot lately because I've been reading a lot about the legal

stuff for my book. And American laws especially are like unusually permissive about the like wishes of the deceased. That's something that in other, even in European countries they're like, what? Who cares about?

They're dead. Who cares? Who cares what you think they want? or what they said they wanted or whatever. But here it's like very important when you say you want, you know. And another aspect is the leaving behind of relics or parts of ourselves, which has, I'm sure, you know, is worth a whole conversation all by itself, but one aspect, you mentioned your book, so I definitely want to get a plug in for the book. It doesn't exist yet.

It's not published yet, but tell us about the book you're writing. I won't reveal what it's about. You can say that. Okay. So I'll give you the nice big 50-cent phrase because that's a good, you're not a good, 50-cent phrase, because that's always a, you know, a big question mark over people's heads. It's, my book is about anthropodermic bibliopogy. Of course it is.

Yeah, I mean, whose isn't? It sells itself. Again, I need to read another book about anthropodermic bibliopogy, which is, so let's break it out. Anthro. Human. Dermic. Skin. Biblio.

Books. Peggy's a little harder. It's like fasten. Fasten. Yeah, so books bound in human skin. That's a... Now, we've got to ask, you're not actually going to have a special edition

bound in human skin, or are you going to go for that? Right, no current plans. It's funny, though, a lot of people ask me, that's one of the first questions to go. Isn't that illegal? And the answer is, it's complicated. We don't really know.

I wouldn't test it, but there isn't, a specific law says you cannot bind a book in human skin, that is illegal, right? But there are a lot of things, there are a lot of laws and our laws in the U.S. are all pretty much based in states. So different states have different laws about whether you can sell human remains. Like, can I buy a human skull. I can in some states and in other states I can't. If there were a law against binding books in human skin, you would have to wonder what provoked the legislature to actually do that. There's a story there for sure. And so there isn't really.

any codified rules to say, no, you can't do this. But just because it doesn't say you can't, doesn't mean you would want to be the one to test what the definition of desecration of a corpse means. But it has been done historically. Yeah. So. Binding books in human skin.

Most people usually associate that idea because it sounds so ghoulish and horrible. The first thing people think is, oh, that must have been a Nazi thing. But actually, it wasn't, you know, we don't have currently any, even alleged books from, that actual era. They're all over 100 years old. But it's usually had a doctor involved.

So we've got history of medicine and rare books and death all together. You're the person to write this book. Yeah, I'm the person. Turns out, I didn't set out in life to be the human skin book lady, but it's kind of what happened. And so it's weird because the rumors of the books, of these books started at the same time that clinical medicine started when I talked about the French Revolution. So there are a ledge of books from the era, but most of them were either, you know, executed prisoners, you know, executed murderers, they would then, it would be an extra punishment to then, while they're dissecting, which was a punishment, getting dissected as a punishment, and only murderers got dissected for a while. They would, you know, the doctors would sometimes

take a piece of skin and then bind a book of their trial. or something as like, hey, look at this. This is an extra punishment. But then the other ones were really just doctors who were book collectors and had access to these materials that no one else had access to. And it was like what Michelle Foucault called the clinical gaze of the way that a doctor looks at patient, they have to have a certain amount of objectification of like distancing,

clinical distancing, to be able to do your job. because if you thought about, okay, I'm going into room B and I'm going to cut open this person's liver, then I'm going to go to rooms, you know, that kind of thing. Like, if you actually thought about what you were doing in the way, like, looking at this person and thinking about all their family and all these things, you couldn't function. It's too much to bear. So you kind of mentally distance yourself. But if you take that to a very far extreme, then it's more like, oh, well, they were going to throw out this skin.

We were going to throw it out anyway. Might as well save it for her book later, you know. And that's what happened. And it happened, like, surprisingly a lot. So the book is... Or it was claimed to happen, right? I mean, so right now we're left with actual books, copies of volumes in libraries or collections that there's some documentary claim

that this is bound in human skin. And part of your job is to figure out whether that's true. Well, so for the longest time, this was just a ghoulish story, right? Oh, did you hear about this book? that exists and it says it's in human skin. And a lot of people, like, thought they were, you know, maybe fake or whatever. But then there is a chemist at Harvard who, one of the conservators at Harvard asked, oh, you're doing these, like, proteomics, like tests, these peptide mass fingerprinting,

which is a very common, easy, you know, chemistry test. You can't do DNA testing on a human skin book because DNA is too sensitive. So if I was handling the book, which I do without gloves, by the way, because that's like a myth in rare books that you don't wear gloves. You don't wear gloves. It's actually less, you're more likely to damage a book or rip a page or something if you're wearing gloves than if you have your bare washed hands. So if I was holding one of those books and then you happen to like take a sample off. of this thing, you might get human traces where the leather itself is not human. But also, every time you do a weird process, which like making skin into leather is a pretty,

you know, intense process. And also age, the DNA just degrades, it degrades, and degrades. So DNA is actually too sensitive and it doesn't really work. But the peptide mass fingerprinting, what you're looking at is the collagen that's in the leather, and that lasts for thousands of years and is very, very stable. But you can only get down sensitivity-wise to the animal family. So he tested, there were three alleged human skin books at Harvard, and two of them were fake, but one of them was real. And then that kind of people freaked out, just completely freaked out.

Our library has human skin books. Yeah. And then, so I was kind of toying with doing, another book that was sort of related to death and also things in collections and in library collections. And since I was going to Boston anyway, I went and talked to Daniel Kirby, the chemist, about it.

And then I was like, every time I go to a library, I was asking around about these books and, you know, oh, do you have one like this? Do you have one? And a surprising amount of people were like, yeah, actually, we do have this book that they say might be, you know.

And so we decided to compare notes and then we also got another chemist on board, and then the curator of the Mutir Museum and we formed this kind of interdisciplinary group called the Anthropodermic Book Project. So we've been trying to hunt down these books in public collections, like libraries and museums around the world. And thus far we found about 50, like, credible, actually existent,

alleged books, and we've tested somewhere like 30 of them. And about, I want to say, like, 18 or so were real and 12 were fake. You know, so it's a not quite even, but pretty close to even split. And each time we test one, it is a whole new revelation. We learn, because it's such a small cohort, you learn so much more about the history each time. You know, there was one book when we tested, and it was this, people are like, oh, there must be like sexy, skim, you know, these like, erotic books. And I was like, no, there aren't any.

And then we tested one that was. And I was like, okay, well, there is at least one. That's actually, we, there were three in France at the Bibliotech National that are actually incredibly old, like 13th century Bibles that were allegedly human skin. But I, I've seen them. I've been there. But I very much doubt that they're real. completely out of the normal range of time.

And I don't think the Bonif is going to give us slivers of their 13th century Bibles. I'd love it. Anyone? To find out that they have books found in human skin. What is that? What is it for them? At Bel-A-Mois about the skin books there.

But yeah, so I've seen them and they're beautiful books on their own, right? But I just, I don't. My spidey senses say probably not, but I try not to. say yes, definitely, or no, unless we've got the test. Yeah. Yeah, we get new results all the time. And there's not any non-invasive tests that we have yet. Right, but this is so minimally invasive. It's like, if you can see the sample with your eye, then that is plenty big. Right. So you can easily take a piece off of a binding and you'll never notice that it's gone. The old DNA test, when they tried to do stuff like that, they would take these huge stamp size squares out of something. It would ruin a book.

You can't do that. So this is more like, you know, you can definitely test it and find out. And it's the beauty of it is that it's a cheap and simple test. And then you have this whole world of knowledge suddenly about this practice. So it just really, I find it really exciting. Every time we get results in, I'm just like so excited about learning, you know, about these books. And it's so interesting to see people's reactions. because people have really wide reactions too.

Some people are like, oh, cool. You know, and some people are like, oh, God, you know, or, oh, I'm so glad this is fake so that we can stop telling the campus tour guys, when the campus tour guys come and say, oh, and they have a book volume. No, we don't. You know, here's a handout about how this is fake. Leave us alone. Learn something else to say about the library.

Does your, we're looking forward to this. Does your book have a title? It's called Dark Archives. but the after colon is not totally finished yet. It's something like books bound in human skin, patient objectification, and the humanizing of medicine or something like that is a long, we're working on it still, but it will be out in the fall of 2019. Excellent, very, very good.

So just wrapping up, any words of advice, how people should change their perspective on death? Is there anything that you've learned that you sort of didn't, have already, when you got into this, how should we just change our point of view? Should we think about death more often? Should we think about it as more fun? Should we think it as more social? What should we do?

I would say, you know, the more that you interact with it, the easier it gets and that you can, you know, you're never going to not, the goal isn't to completely alleviate your fear of death or whatever. That's... Death is still bad. Yeah, it's scary. It's going to be scary. You know, it's a scary thing because you don't know when, you don't know how, you know, that's the ultimate scary thing, right? But the more you talk about it, the more you can feel comfortable about your choices, the more if, you know, if you know what a family member wants and you do the things that they ask you to do, that's one less thing you ever have to think about, like, did we do

right by, you know, somebody. So the opening conversation, and having continual conversations over time because your thoughts might change over time, your life situation changes over time, just keep checking in on that. It really does alleviate some of the anxiety of it. And what I found personally is, and this wasn't something I expected,

but looking back, it does actually make sense, is that when you realize that your life is actually finite, you appreciate your life more. And that was not an intention that I had getting into this. I was just interested, you know, intellectually, mostly. And then, but it's kind of like, I like to kind of liking it to, you know, we grew up in Pennsylvania, right? When you brushed your teeth, did you ever turn off the water when you brushed your teeth? No.

Right? Why would you do that? Not the East Coast thing. Yeah. Why would you do that? Water is infinite. Yes. Water, you turn on the tap. water will always come out.

You have water all over the place. It's just there. Living in Los Angeles, you realize, oh wait, water is finite. And it's really important. And it's not necessarily going to be around forever. Maybe I should be careful about the way I use it.

Maybe I can do simple things like turning off the tap when I brush my teeth. And, you know, now I always turn off the tap. And that's sort of, I appreciate water. When it rains here, I'm like in heaven. I'm so happy every time it rains. If it rains in Philly, I would be like, oh, great, it's so annoying. But here it's like magical, you know, because I appreciate it because it's not always there. And if you look at life that way, then you really live differently.

So when big important things happen in my life, I actually tried to stop and take a moment to acknowledge that it happened when we were talking about the rituals and stuff, those are stopping and taking a moment, you know, those are the things that when you look back over your life, those are the things that stick out is like the moment that you took when that happened. Like, oh, I remember getting that phone call when I got into, you know, that kind of those big things, like you take a moment to like remember it. And then it's just, I don't know, it just adds a lot to your appreciation.

So your life has been enriched by taking your death more seriously. Yes, absolutely. All right. Megan Rosenblum, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thank you.