Oliver Farshi is a British photographer based in New York City.
When I was a boy, my great-grandmother was an ailing presence in our family life. I remember visiting her flat in a suburb of Manchester, England, for the last time. The closets full of old dresses. The weathered linoleum kitchen floor. A piece of the Berlin Wall on a shelf. She was absent though. She had been moved to an old house filled with elderly people. I don’t remember her death. One day she simply ceased to exist.
Death came and went abruptly in my family, but there were hints of a deeper fracture. After one passing I found my father, his beard patchy, sobbing in the darkness of his bedroom. After another I learned that my mother had a single session with a therapist to talk through her feelings. “It’s fixed now,” she assured me. Death was sudden, awkward and uncomfortable, and it led to a silent family agreement to let it go. This was not a grieving but a forgetting.
Over three years, I have traveled across North America meeting nurses, death doulas and doctors. Death here often happens behind closed doors and in clinical settings. I spoke to people who were dying, and I spent time with their families and caregivers. I witnessed deaths. I saw how America does death. It mostly does it badly.
But I also saw death and dying done well.
On my travels, I’ve observed three fundamental components of a good death: ritual, facilitation and remembering.
Ritual can be something as simple as washing a body — an expression of gentle care and acknowledgment rather than a final chore. This washing ritual appears in many cultures and religions, like the Jewish tradition of taharah.
In my favorite variant of this ritual, a loved one washes a person’s hands and says aloud, “I remember when these hands held me as a child.” Ritual is a way to acknowledge, with tenderness and reverence, that death is happening.
In recent years, more people are turning to end-of-life doulas as facilitators of grief, loss and the process of dying. Families of dying people can be struck by a sort of existential whiplash, and many welcome help in navigating the discomfort.
Remembering means cultivating an awareness of death. Bhutan’s culture encourages contemplation of death multiple times a day. The Victorians would pose for photographs with the deceased and hold on to memento mori. Remembering is not morbid fascination; it is the practice of gentle intimacy with death and dying. It creates a pathway for looking at death more wholly and with less anxiety.
Janie Rakow, an end-of-life doula and co-founder of the International End-of-Life Doula Association, a nonprofit that works on these issues with hospitals and hospices, believes there isn’t one right way to do death. “Death is deeply individual,” she told me. “What feels peaceful and meaningful to one person may not be what another person wants at all.”
“Every person, every family, every circumstance is different. And every death should be treated differently, too.”
A good death can be transformative and empowering, for everyone involved. It should not be a privilege. It is something we all deserve.
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