Rethinking Mortality with Hannah Gould

Hannah Gould visiting Thames & Hudson's office with her coffin.

I am somebody who thinks about dying quite a lot.

It is rather hard not to when the coffin in which I will be buried (more likely, cremated) is propped up behind my work desk. Little of this is by choice or design. First, I am rather unwillingly credentialed in this area by my membership of the ‘dead dad club’. My dad was a connoisseur of many things: French cheese, international travel, backyard gardening, and volunteering for the local footy club chief among them. He died twelve years ago, when I was just twenty-three. At the time, that age seemed perfectly mature (it was the oldest I had ever been!), but in retrospect, it is shockingly young to have lost a parent. Many would be expected to avoid death and dying after that. But I am, tragically, a cultural anthropologist by training, and so have spent the past decade researching diverse cultural practices of death around the world. Somewhere in between Europe and Australia and Japan, I found myself attending yearly funeral industry conventions, volunteering as ‘demonstration corpse’ for mortuary assistant training and interning at local crematoriums.

Today, I research and teach about death to university students. I wrote my PhD thesis on the transformation of Buddhist death rituals in Japan and have spent my postdoctoral years working with the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne, investigating new technologies for body disposal, emerging funeral rituals and the future of our cemeteries. Each year, I teach one class to 100-plus arts undergraduates and another to more than sixty postgraduate medical trainees on the fundamentals of death and dying. (The students also help me decorate my coffin each year.) As a scholar, death fascinates me not just as an individual experience of loss or a problem of existential philosophy, but as a social and cultural phenomenon. Many academic disciplines deal with death, but because in the 21st century we have overwhelmingly made death a medical problem, we tend to rely on expertise from medicine (for the dying bits) and psychology (for the grief bits) to navigate our mortality. But death is so vast a topic that it cannot possibly be contained by one realm of knowledge. As an anthropologist, who studies patterns and changes of human culture, I am interested in a rather different set of questions. How do we collectively respond to death, and how can we make that response better? What happens when our deathcare systems are challenged, falter or change? More fundamentally, how are we to live in the light of our mortality?

It is because of these circumstances, because death is my day job, that I have found myself at more than one house party or on an awkward taxi trip during which people strike up the courage to ask me questions about death. Do I really get my person’s remains back from the crematorium? When I die, I just want to become a tree – is that possible? How do I broach the topic of end-of-life plans with my ageing parents? Who do you recommend as a funeral director? Should I attend my ex-girlfriend’s dad’s memorial? Will I ever stop crying over my dead pet? (That last one is easy: no.)

I do not begrudge the questions. People so rarely talk about death until they are offered an invitation to do so, and so questions take courage. More than that, death today is very different than it was before. Put simply, the same forces that have radically transformed life in the 21st century also shape our experiences of dying, death and grief. Death may be universal, but it is fundamentally a product of our times. And the current times are, well, not great for death.

What do I mean by that? Well, advances in medical technology and social welfare interventions mean that in general we are living longer and dying slower. In most high-income countries today, we might expect to die in our eighties, in a hospital or aged care facility, perhaps after a long period of infirmity and lots of medical care. And yet, paradoxically and tragically, the overall quality of our dying has not substantially improved. Writ large, more medicine has not led to better dying, and at the same time, many people around the world would just like basic access to any end-of-life medicine at all. The 2022 Lancet Commission on the Value of Death declares this to be the great paradox of 21st century dying. We keep trying to throw technology at death to optimise it into submission. But perhaps death is not something so easily solved. Indeed, the challenges of 21st-century death are likely to worsen before they can improve. Populations in North-East Asia, Northern Europe and Australia are hurtling toward an era of ‘peak death’ in which more people will die than ever before thanks to our ageing demographics. If that’s not enough, these changes take place against the backdrop of global pandemics, war, racialised police brutality, climate change and the prospect of total planetary death.

We keep trying to throw technology at death to optimise it into submission. But perhaps death is not something so easily solved.

We have faced death crises before: the apocalyptic centuries of the Black Death, world wars that wiped out entire generations, and nuclear technologies that begat existential crisis. In contrast, death in the 21st century appears to be a crisis of everyday mortality, of the normal functioning of our deathcare systems wrought asunder by many slowly accruing pressures and holes. I am worried about these systems. I am worried about the people, materials, ideas and practices that we have relied upon up until now to care for the dying, dead and grieving. I am not sure they will withstand the future of death, and our dying in the present leaves much to be desired.

I am even more concerned that our culture appears ill-prepared to think and talk about death. We receive no formal education about the end of life and death in our schools and very little, as I was shocked to discover, in medical training programs. And because death is still widely considered a social taboo, we have very few informal opportunities for learning about and discussing mortality, until the responsibility to organise hospice care or a funeral is thrust upon us. In the 21st century, the religious and cultural traditions people once relied upon to make sense of death and ritualise somebody’s passing have splintered. On the one hand, this results in widespread dissatisfaction with traditional funeral rites, and on the other, an explosion of new, creative possibilities for ceremony. There are many people working to reimagine our mortality and to make our death rituals anew. Hold a funeral at a cricket ground or in the pub? In Australia it already happens on the regular. Place cremated ashes into an oyster and grow them into a pearl necklace? In Japan, sure. Compost your body and use the soil to grow tomatoes? Let’s talk about it.

The fact is that the 21st century produces such novel and contradictory responses to mortality that the task of making sense of death, let alone finding meaning in it, at first appears entirely unassailable. People die older but not necessarily better. Biohacking bros invest billions in immortality vanity projects while death positivity supporters advocating for home funerals and natural burial become YouTube stars. Seemingly nobody is comfortable discussing death, but not so long ago my smart phone pinged daily with pandemic mortality stats. Human overconsumption has led to mass species extinction, but somebody in Sydney just spent AU$3000 to cremate a goldfish. What on earth are we supposed to make of death?

This is a book for everyone who will live, die and grieve. You do not need to be immediately facing death to read it. In fact, I hope that you are afforded the time and space to think about death when it is still a distant sight on your horizon. Whatever your context, I firmly believe that contemplating death can make its inevitable experience better for ourselves and for those around us. It also expands our compassion for others who are experiencing grief, who work in the essential service of deathcare, or who are facing the end of life with far less privilege and company than our own. Only the living can advocate to make death better, and it is a task that we have neglected for far too long.

And so, I offer up six lessons in mortality, drawn from my experiences as an amateur mortal and professional death scholar. Think of this as a guidebook to death in the 21st century; I am truly sorry that you have not been offered one before. The lessons – on contemplating, dying, disposing, celebrating, grief and memorialisation – describe what makes death in the present moment different, and how we might respond meaningfully and compassionately to such changes. But first I must offer a note of caution: if you are reading this book with the hopes of discovering a solution to death, then I’m afraid I must spoil the big reveal. Like time or gravity, I think that death is just one of those things that cannot be solved. Perhaps it was never really a problem. That truth is a good starting point for learning to live and die better.

If nothing else, death today is fascinating. What a strange and astounding thing it is to be mortal in the 21st century, to bring to bear such history of medical and technical advancement and social change on the fundamental question of human existence. Of course death has changed – how could it not? If we are brave enough, and curious enough, then maybe we can change it for the better.

Preorder How to Die in the 21st Century by Hannah Gould now. Available March 3, 2026.