Most parents would rather swallow glass than bring their child to a casket and invite them to touch the cold, waxy skin of a corpse. Most would delete the open-casket photos before the family album ever saw the daylight. That’s the whole problem. We’ve built a national architecture of death denial—funeral parlors that look like hotel lobbies, “passed away” euphemisms, a desperate insistence that the dead are just “in a better place” while we refuse to look at the place they’re actually in. It’s a collective lie, and a psychologist father in rural Indiana spent decades proving it wrong with the most effective tool possible: his daughter.
In a Guardian essay this week, Amanda Sloat describes growing up with a parent who treated mortality not as a secret to be softened but as life’s most honest teacher. Together they kept a running catalog of the worst ways to die—buried alive at No. 1, farm-machinery disasters, mobster cement-shoe drownings. The list was morbid banquet talk, and he made sure she sat at the table. When a neighbor’s father died, he didn’t shield her from the funeral home; he stood beside her and explained exactly how the skin would feel, cool and waxy, the body already beginning its long return. When his own parents died, he took photographs of their open caskets and filed them in the family album, next to the birthday parties. When he emailed his daughter to ask what people would say as they huddled around his own “furniture box,” he wasn’t being macabre. He was practicing the only form of death acceptance that actually works: exposure, repetition, and a refusal to let bodily decay become a spiritual crisis.
And that is precisely the counterprogramming America needs. The modern healthcare system isolates the dying to spare us grief. We call it privacy, but it is a managed silence. We have outsourced the sacred work of accompaniment to shift workers and discharge planners, enforcing visitation windows that shrink to minutes while charging hundreds for the ice chips that moisten a dying mouth. The prophets of Isaiah warned us what happens when a society refuses to look at the end of the road: you call evil good, you call darkness light, and you leave the living unprepared for the only certainty that actually belongs to them. Our death-work avoidance industry turns dying into a looming abstraction so terrifying that we can’t look at it directly; we have built a civilization that treats death as a scheduling error, and we bill the families for the privilege of looking away.
I confess I have stood outside heavy trauma-bay doors, holding my own breath and grateful for the glass partition that kept the frantic codes out of sight. I have been inside the rooms where the machines hum and the curtains part, much like the gatherings detailed in Confront mortality at Thailand’s “Death Fest”, where strangers learn to sit with the final page. I have watched a nurse hold a hand when no one else in the building had the time, and I have watched families pace the parking lots because the visiting hours were strictly enforced. We tell ourselves the professionals are handling it. The truth is we often protect our own comfort at the expense of a neighbor’s dignity. The same retreat from the difficult belongs to the wealthy who buy insulated care and the poor who face the unraveling on concrete floors without a hand to hold. The climate of avoidance we exploit is one our own hands helped build. We want the resurrection without the tomb, the comfort without the vigil, the healed body without the slow surrender.
The Good Samaritan did not outsource the wounded man to the innkeeper and walk back to Jerusalem. He bound the wounds with his own hands, paid for the care out of his own purse, and stayed until morning. The priest and the Levite in the parable did not hate the bleeding man; they were simply busy men with schedules and robes to keep clean. They passed on the other side. That is the exact posture of a medical architecture that prioritizes throughput over presence, and it is the posture of a culture that tells its children to focus on the bright future while ignoring the fragile old man at their elbow. The Catholic bishops, in Strangers No Longer, teach that the migrant is the crucified Christ passing through; the same gaze belongs to the dying man in the next ward. Francis warned of a globalization of indifference that makes us live in soap bubbles, polishing the glass while ignoring the world pressing against it. When a father asks his daughter what people will whisper over his open casket, he is demanding the reckoning we spend our entire lives dodging—to speak love while the throat still works, to offer praise before the ear goes cold. The tradition names this pecado estructural: not just the malice of a single administrator, but the quiet arrangement of a society that makes distance the default setting for human suffering.
Sloat’s father was killed in a car accident on an icy Michigan road in 2019, and the irony is brutal but instructive. He had spent decades preparing his family for his own absence, and when it arrived, the preparation held. His daughter stood next to his body in the funeral home—still uncertain how to arrange her face, still taking the photograph. In the eulogy, she turned to his casket and suggested it was a good time for him to jump out and join the party. He didn’t reply, and that silence wasn’t a failure of his method; it was its completion. He’d given her the one gift no amount of sanitized grieving can produce: the ability to be fully present with a corpse without coming apart. This is not a private inheritance. It’s a public intervention. The growing body of work on death acceptance—from that Thailand festival to the uncomfortable truth that caring about your climate footprint doesn’t end when you die—shows that deliberate, repeated exposure strips death of its panic-inducing power. Sloat’s father practiced this before it was a conference topic. He turned his kid’s childhood into a lifelong death-competence workshop, and the result is an adult who can write about her father’s mangled truck and his beloved black leather jacket without collapsing into sentimental vapor. She’s cataloguing the details, just as he taught her, because the details are what let her keep living with purpose instead of with dread.
We cannot all be the child of a psychologist who rented a room above a funeral home, but we can all borrow his central curriculum. Stop hiding the photographs. Stop softening the language. When a neighbor dies, bring the children to the casket and let them see what a body looks like when it isn’t pretending to be alive. Teach them that the socks they put on this morning could be the last pair, and let that fact do its steady, focusing work. Death is coming either way. The only question is whether we’ll meet it as a stranger in a panic, or as a familiar teacher whose presence has already given our remaining mornings their weight. The door of return stands open whenever you are ready to trade the bubble for the room. Walk past the curtain. Take the hand. Let the silence do its work.