Key Points
- Death curiosity, death literacy, and death doulas.
- Home funerals and family-led death care
- Human composting and alternative body disposal methods
Have you ever planned a funeral? Do you have a legal will? Burial or cremation? If these questions are making you anxious, you’re not alone. Most of us would rather die than talk about death. But silence is deadly (boom tish), and there are many benefits to getting curious and opening up the conversation.
In our first episode, we talk to end-of-life doula, independent funeral director, death literacy educator and family-led death care advocate, Bec Lyons, about what all those words mean, constructive grieving, and what’s happening in the fast-evolving death sector in Australia and around the world.
Learn about 'funeral poverty', the history of the commercial funeral industry and how more and more people are taking an active role in preparing their loved ones’ bodies for their final resting place.
We promise it’s not as scary as it sounds.
I’m more death curious now than I ever was and I was always death curious.Bec Lyons
Links
Grave Matters is an SBS Audio podcast about death, dying and the people helping us understand both better. Find it in your podcast app such as the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or LiSTNR.
Hosts: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Producer: Jeremy Wilmot
Writers: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Art and design: Karina Aslikyan
SBS team: Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Caroline Gates
Guest: Bec Lyons
If you'd like to speak to someone, you can reach a counsellor at Beyond Blue at any time, day or night, by calling 1300 22 4636 or visiting www.beyondblue.org.au. Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and Embrace Multicultural Mental Health supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
This episode mentions death, suicide and other potentially difficult content. Please take care.
Anthony: Nadine J. Cohen, hello.
Nadine: Anthony Levin, hello.
Anthony: So, episode one, I guess we should explain who we are.
Nadine: Sure, I'm a writer and refugee advocate living and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal land.
Anthony: And I am a writer and human rights lawyer living and working on Gadigal, Dharug and Guringai lands.
Now, Nadine, we have been friends for a pretty long time. So when you asked me if I wanted to co-host a podcast with you, I was pretty much in immediately. And when you told me that it was about death. I was like, yes, bam.
Nadine: Well, you've always been a morbid guy.
Anthony: Yeah, that's fair. So why the hell are we doing a podcast about death?
Nadine: So death is a very broad subject, but both you and I have been interested in it for a very long time. We've talked about it often, we've both written about it and we both grew up surrounded by it.
Anthony: Well, we sound like heaps of fun.
Nadine: Anyway, we're here to explore death and dying from different angles. What happens to our bodies when we die? How has COVID-19 changed our relationship to death? And is talking about death still taboo?
Anthony: And throughout the series, you'll hear from 12 people working at the coal face of the very broad death sector. Well, 11 people working at the coalface and one very death-curious musician. From death robots to human composting, near-death experiences to solving crimes, every episode is an adventure.
Nadine: I love adventures.
Anthony: Me too.
Nadine: Why are you so interested in death?
Anthony: I don't know. I got problems, I guess. But seriously, I guess I've always been kind of surrounded by death. I mean, you know this about me because we've spoken about it, but both my maternal grandparents are Holocaust survivors and they lost their entire family in the Holocaust. And from a very young age, my grandmother spoke pretty much incessantly about her experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen and the death march that she was on.
And it was a lot as a kid, but it really kind of left an indelible impression on me and made me familiar with death in some frankly unhealthy ways from a very early age. And then I guess I've also been through other experiences later in life. You know, my mum had terminal cancer and she died about seven years ago and I was really and my sister were present for that whole experience, both when she was at home and declining and then when she moved into hospice.
Well, so it really changed my perspective on dying with dignity because my mum basically asked me to help her die. And, you know, euthanasia laws hadn't been introduced in NSW at that time and she was like, well, how can we get to Mexico? I said, well, let me call my friends in the cartel and we'll see what we can do.
Nadine: How is Pablo?
Anthony: Oh yeah, he's well. And what about you?
Nadine: Yeah, so like you, I also grew up in a Holocaust survivor family. Both my maternal grandparents also survived. Their families were also murdered and I grew up in the shadow of that. And, you know, I don't remember a time when I didn't know about death. I don't remember learning about it. Because I always knew that bad things had happened to my family and someone had tried to kill my grandparents.
My first experience with an actual dying person was my paternal grandmother and my family and I were in the room when she died and we watched the line go flat when the machine was turned off. And look, as much as someone's death can be a positive experience it was for me. It was very positive and it really set me up.
She was talking for the last maybe 5-10 minutes and mumbling to her parents and her late husband in French and it was just this really beautiful, you know, I don't know what that means. I don't think about it that much. But at 14 years old it was like, oh she's OK. She's going to be OK. Yeah, like the transition was happening and, you know, right is the wrong word.
And then, you know, my parents both died when I was in my early 20s and I feel like Grandma's death really set the groundwork for me dealing with that in certain positive ways.
Anthony: That's really interesting, this idea that you laid the groundwork for being able to cope better or more effectively when you lost other loved ones later in life, and I feel like we're gonna touch on these themes when we explore all the different subtopics of death and dying in this series, so enough about us. Let's bring on our first guest.
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Nadine: Bec Lyons is a death doula, funeral director and educator who advocates for family-led death care, home funerals and positive change in the end-of-life sector. Bec is joining us from her home in Tasmania to help us explain what all those words mean.
Bec Lyons, welcome to Grave Matters.
Bec: Thanks for having me.
Nadine: I think it might be fair to say that you're the busiest woman in Tasmania, if not the world. You're an end-of-life doula, you're a funeral director, you're a death educator, you're president of the National Death Advocacy Network, you're president of the Australian Funeral Alliance. Have I missed anything?
Bec: Churchill fellow.
Anthony: Oh congratulations.
Nadine: You're a Churchill fellow, and we will talk about that. So let's go back to the beginning. How did you find yourself in this space?
Bec: I answered an ad in a paper. I was working in property management, so I was a qualified property manager and I was applying for all these jobs looking for full-time work and then I saw these two ads. One was for a funeral home and the other one was for like a prison guard at a detention centre. And as it turned out, I got offered the guard job a week into my job at the funeral home, so I'd already accepted the funeral home. And that's where I found my feet.
Anthony: No regrets?
Bec: None. None. It was a very good choice. Also, they quite rightly shut the detention centre down not long after that, so…
Nadine: Were you always, like, were you always drawn to death or always comfortable with death? Is it a space that you eased into?
Bec: Yeah, for sure. I was someone who had had death all throughout my life. My first human death, I was eight years old and it was a person I lived with, and it was a really formative experience. When I was 14, a really good friend of ours suicided and we actually lived in a place in New South Wales that at the time had one of the highest youth suicide rates per capita in the country.
So, we all knew people who had suicided growing up. When you know, I got to be in my late teens and early 20s, I had family members die. And so I just always had death around me and I did ease into it really seamlessly.
Nadine: And that was into the commercial funeral industry, which you did for some time before retraining as a death doula, among other things. What factors led to this transition? What was it about the established funeral industry that pushed you in a different direction?
Bec: It was the way that I found we weren't serving people's grief and bereavement. We weren't doing what people needed and they were not having the experiences they were looking for. And so I started looking at how we could better grief and bereavement experiences for people. And what I found was that all of that really came back to raising death literacy rates and raising awareness and people being able to make informed choices with outcomes that were actually beneficial for them.
Anthony: What was it that people were looking for?
Bec: They were looking for a way to weave grief into a healthy bereavement. They were looking for a place to be supported and held.
And I think funeral directors generally do a pretty good job of holding that space but what I've found in all of my years of doing this is that grief is best served when you're doing. Grief is an emotion that needs something to do, and I think that when you hand everything over to an industry and get a limited set of choices back, there's nothing in that for you to do. Other than maybe go through a few photos, pick a few pieces of music. But the choices are very limited.
We've whittled a funeral down to a two-hour time slot in a chapel with three pieces of music, 30 photos. Pick one of these coffins, have a cup of tea afterwards, three readings and a celebrant, see you at 3 o'clock on Friday.
So what we've done is we've narrowed down the scope of the only thing we get to weave our grief and bereavement around. The ritual and ceremony of funeral is really important but we've made it so narrow now that it just doesn't serve everyone's grief.
And, you know, there's also the issue of funeral poverty. People are getting priced out of that entirely. And so what we're having is all of this disenfranchised grief or grief with nowhere to go because funerals are now becoming financial choices - can we afford that?
And so people are looking for a way forward through that that's not going to cost the Earth, that they're not going to have to remortgage or take out a loan. And the way I found through that for people is to give them the opportunity to do for their person. When the last thing they do for their person is an active service, that's a very different place to grieve from.
***
Nadine: So that takes us into what you and others in the industry have been pioneering to offer new options. And that's particularly family-led death care, a concept that maybe some of our listeners have never heard before. And I wanted you to explain if you could, what's behind it, what are the options within it, the basic premise?
Bec: The idea behind family-led death care is that people stay in control of the process and they interact as much as they're comfortable with the whole way along.
So a family can decide who they interact with and on what terms they engage with the industry. They decide what happens to their person. They can provide the care, the transport, the confining, the ceremony - all of the componentry that goes into creating funeral and caring for a dead body. And the family can do as much or as little as of that as they want themselves.
So you might have a family that says, “We want to keep our person at home when they die, but they're in a nursing home, so I'm going to engage a funeral director to do the transport component only. And so they can pick the person's body up and deliver them to my home and thank you very much, I've got it from there”.
It's family-led and it's family-directed.
Nadine: How are people discovering these new options?
Bec: I think there are three ways that people are finding their way to this stuff. The first is through bad experience, so they're having a bad experience and going, yeah, next time that's going to be different.
The other way is financial. So people are going, I actually just don't have Thanks $10,000 or $15,000 for a funeral. So how can I get what I want in a way that I can afford?
And then the other way is through community and part of that is word of mouth. Part of that is people who do enter into this process and it's almost like, you know, reformed smokers or something. They have these incredible experiences and then they just want to tell everyone.
Nadine: Yeah, it's the same with birth doulas. We're gonna talk about death doulas throughout this series, but the same with birth doulas. Everyone I know who's had a birth doula is now a birth doula.
And I've never had a death doula, but once I heard the concept, I wanted to be one. It's, you know, it’s a fascinating and very helpful space. It's also interesting to me that creating a bespoke funeral is cheaper than going with the package.
Bec: No, you can still overspend on a bespoke service. You can still find people who will end up paying, you know, $15,000. But you can also engage with it. Do it yourself. Have it in your backyard. Make it beautiful. If you're going to spend money, choose where that money's going to go.
Nadine: Yeah, because from what I understand, just coffins are one of the biggest expenses that people get talked into.
Bec: And they’re not legal requirements. There are very few scenarios where you have to have a coffin.
Anthony: Right. And I guess it feels like we've been conditioned to think that you have to have one and I know there are all sorts of cultural traditions that do things in very different ways and that many of them don't involve coffins. But at least in perhaps one of the dominant cultures in Australia, it is commonplace to have a coffin. So even though we may learn about these options, do people feel uncomfortable about choosing something that's outside the box? Pun intended.
Nadine: I'm editing that out.
Bec: Some people do find it a bit challenging to go. We're not going to have a coffin, but again, it's about restructuring and redefining what we consider a funeral to be.
So if a funeral to you is a two-hour session in a chapel with the coffin up the front, somebody speaking, everyone's sitting in rows singing, you know, Abide with Me. If that's what you want, that's what you consider a funeral to be, that's exactly what you should have. And it also shouldn't cost the Earth.
But if you go well, what is a funeral to me? Is it time spent with people sharing stories about our person? Is it sitting around the campfire out the back, telling yarns and having a beer in their honour? Is it getting together all of the ladies and having a high tea because that's what the person loved?
Once you reconsider what a funeral is, suddenly you go oh, so maybe we could shroud our person, have a natural burial on private land, and then all go to a restaurant and have a meal later. Umm. And that can also be a funeral.
Nadine: Yeah and I think also Anthony and I are Jewish and funerals are very ROTE. They're all the same, to be fair for my family that have died, that's what they would have wanted and that's what they got. And so that's OK but I can imagine, for myself or for others in our community, that's not necessarily what we want. And there are ways to do the religious traditions or cultural traditions without sticking to the entire script, I think.
Bec: Yeah, I think you're right. And I think it's an interesting dance, isn't it? Because I often say to people funerals are about the dead but they're for the living. You have to sort of dance between the wishes of the person who has died and knowing that you're going to walk away with a sense that you've respected what they want.
But also that you've given yourself enough so that you can go into a healthy bereavement and feel at peace with living on. And so I think you're right. I think there's this beautiful way we can dance between the two and actually build something really meaningful and special.
And when you look at it in historical perspective in the last 120 years, we've lost over 5000 years of knowledge about caring for the dead. So up until the last 120 years and the development of the modern industry, this was community knowledge. It was stuff we did for each other. It was very squarely in the hands of family, friends and community. And so if you look at the length of human history and it's only this tiny, tiny, tiny blip on the map that we've been doing things the way that we're doing them now.
***
Nadine: And can you explain what happened 120 years ago? I know that there was a primary catalyst that created funeral directors.
Bec: In America, there was absolutely and we follow a lot of their traditions. So they had a civil war and they wanted to repatriate the dead and embalming had been used for different reasons up until that point. But they went oh, we could actually, you know, embalm all these people so that we can put them on trains and take them back so they can be repatriated to their families and loved ones.
And the funeral industry basically went, we can control this. We can make an industry out of this. We can make money out of this. So undertakers were undertakers cause they undertook the movement of the body. But now they have become literally event planners. Like your average funeral director plans the event of the funeral.
And you know, it's morphed into this thing and it's sort of happened because we've professionalised our world. We've medicalised, we've sanitised all of this stuff around death and dying, but the way our society has developed alongside that. You know, we don't fix our own computers, we don't fix our own cars. You know, half of us wouldn't even cut our own lawns.
So, you know, we outsource all of this stuff and the rise of the medicalisation of health and our bodies has just played into that beautifully.
Nadine: And can you talk to that? Specifically, speaking of the body, one of the things that has started to happen again in family-led funerals or death care - people are being presented with the opportunity to also prepare the body once someone has died.
Bec: Sure, how detailed do you want me to be?
Nadine: I would like lots of detail.
Bec: There are things that happen in a mortuary, in a funeral home, that I don't think people are all aware of, that I know they're not aware of. And none of it's bad. But it's about being informed and making informed choices.
And so when you put death care back into the home and you encourage families and communities to be hands-on with their dead and to provide that care, you're suddenly not probably going to stitch someone's mouth shut or insert plastic eye caps with barbs under their eyelids or, you know, pack orifices.
I have actually had to, in one case, pack a lady's throat in the family home and that was on a needs basis. But in three years that's been once.
Nadine: I think that's definitely the first time that ‘pack orifices’ has been said on SBS, so thank you and congratulations.
Anthony: Have you ever said to someone, listen, mate, I've packed more orifices than you've had hot dinners?
Bec: No, I haven’t but I'll bank that.
And look, the difference is that in that case, you know, it was the lady that came home after a particularly traumatic and unexpected death. And that whole process of getting her out of the car and taking her home, that whole process was about the family reclaiming her.
And so I said everything along the way, like she still had her catheter in, she still had intubation tubing. And I said, you know, this is what I'm seeing. Are you OK to see it? They were fine. I talked through everything that needed to happen with her and everything that I felt we should do in her best interests.
And then I gave the husband the option, would you like to do that or would you like me to do that? And so he remained in control of that process, even though I was there. And I was, you know, doing the bulk of that stuff. He never gave it over to me. He never became powerless in
***
Nadine: You mentioned death literacy earlier and, again, this may not be a concept that many of our listeners have heard of. It wasn't a concept that either of us had heard of, that Anthony and I had heard of until we started doing this podcast and researching this podcast. What is death literacy?
Bec: Death literacy is a phrase coined, I believe, by Dr Kerrie Noonan. She works at the Death Literacy Institute. She and her team sort of created this idea that death literacy is something that grows with experience. So people enter into this caring for someone dying or being present when someone was dying, and then they walk away from those experiences with skills that are death literate skills.
They know how to navigate a system, for example, like an aged care system or a healthcare system. So they walk away from that experience with a skill set that they can then take to the next person dying and skill other people. So, it's it's a knock-on effect, you grow your skills by experience and then you walk away with those skills and you can skill other people. You can share that knowledge.
Nadine: You know, it's interesting because then I would say I was death literate before knowing about death literacy. I just wasn't aware of the term. I wouldn't have necessarily phrased it as a skill, but yes, I've been a carer for terminally ill people. I've buried lots of people and I think just as a side note, my parents died 20 years ago when I was very young and I haven't needed to use those skills that much.
Anthony: You just didn't know you were.
Nadine: Yeah, until now. You know, it's 20 years later. My friend's parents are in that age group now and so it's like I've been death literacy dormant for most of the past 20 years, except occasionally, like when your mother died. And and when when other people died.
Anthony: Yes, you were a big support to me when my mother was terminally ill because you'd already been through it. So that was really valuable. And I feel like there's another aspect here which is just the emotional side of death literacy. And I wonder, Bec, if you could comment on that?
Because even though, Nadine, you weren't using those skills until maybe my mother became terminal, you were supporting me. I feel like at that time you were using those skills because you were using them through your ability to connect empathically with my situation.
So, Bec, I wonder, does death literacy encompass that kind of empathy or that empathic capacity?
Bec: Absolutely it does. That's the beauty of how death literacy grows. That's how you get an entire community that knows what to do when someone's dying.
Nadine: So apart from losing a loved one, how can people become more death literate?
Bec: There's a lot of things that are growing across the world now. There are death disruptions happening to the industry. There are movements like the Death Cafe movement; Death over Dinner is another one. People are starting to step in and engage with those conversations.
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Anthony (VO): You're probably wondering what the hell death cafes and deaths over dinner are, so here's a quick explanation: Death cafes are casual events, often held in cafes where strangers come together to talk about death and ask a death care professional questions.
Deaths over dinner are usually more formal and held in people's homes with friends and family. The host registers on an official website, picks themes and questions, and serves a three-course meal while the table discusses mortality.
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Bec: The other thing that we're seeing is the real push now for advanced care planning. And to do a comprehensive advanced care plan, you need to go and get yourself a level of death literacy as well as health literacy.
Because you need to be able to turn your attention to all the things that could happen when you're dying and can no longer speak for yourself. And then you need to think about them enough and make enough informed choices so that you can make decisions about how you want to be treated when that happens.
Nadine: And how does someone go about making an advanced care plan?
Bec: There's a whole lot of research you can do. I mean, you can talk to your doctors as well, but a lot of times people will actually seek out an end-of-life doula and sit and do the planning and then do the gamut.
So while we're doing it, have you got an advanced care directive? Have you done an enduring guardian? Have you got a power of attorney? Do you have a will? And let's make a funeral plan.
Anthony: Yeah, a theme that we're grappling with Bec is whether we're any good at talking about dying. And specifically, is it still taboo to talk about your own death? Do we live in a death-denying culture?
These are kind of instincts that we have and we're really keen to get your take on those.
Bec: I think we've moved beyond the denial of death in a lot of ways, and I think that our society has actually become really good at talking about death when it's abstract. So we're really good at talking about death on a non-personal level.
And it's kind of the hot topic. It's the in thing. There are influencers now with millions of followers in the death space and doing videos about what goes on in an autopsy room or, you know, there's all of this death curiosity until it's real and personal.
We're still not there talking about, Anthony, what's going to happen when you die? If you were to die today, what would your final act be? What would your last words be? How would you feel if you were no longer going to be a son or a mother or a father?
You make it personal, then it's uncomfortable.
***
Anthony: So taking a different turn, back in 2018, you were awarded a Churchill Fellowship, which is amazing. And it was to undertake international research into changes and disruptions in the end-of-life space.
And that meant you got to travel to a bunch of different countries, including Mexico, Italy, the Czech Republic, Sweden, the UK and the US. And during that time you were exploring alternatives to contemporary ceremony and body disposal. Can you tell us some of the standout learnings or discoveries from the countries that you visited?
Bec: The highlights for me I think were the things that are real and happening and possible and hopefully not far off hitting Australian shores. So as much as my heart-centered stuff was really in Mexico and, you know, the Czech Republic, and I was down in Oaxaca in these little villages, sort of outside the city, and met people who have altars to the dead in their houses and like, it's just the most beautiful communities and ways of living with death.
Nadine: Yeah, they're so in touch with it in Mexico. I've been there for Dia de los Muertos as well. It's incredible.
Bec: Yeah, it's stunning. And so that was sort of heart-centered for me. That and the community in the Colorado Rocky Mountains called Crestone that actually have a community volunteer-run pyre. So they do outdoor cremations when their people die and the community there that has sprung up around this end-of-life project that they run is absolutely phenomenal.
But the two things that you know, Australia I don't think is far away from is alkaline hydrolysis and natural organic reduction. So alkaline hydrolysis is a process of reducing the body to liquid and then that liquid going back into the water cycle essentially. So an alternative to flame cremation that has no atmospheric pollution in it.
Anthony: And people call this water cremation?
Bec: They do. It has many names. I shy away from that. It's a process where all of the componentry in our body, the protein-based things, are reduced to a liquid in a pressurised machine and that liquid is made up of 95% water, 5% lye.
And over a two or three-hour period, the body is reduced to liquid and that liquid has a pH of about 14, so it then goes into a holding chamber. It's treated to a pH of less than 9.5 and then released back into the water cycle, so there's no DNA or anything left in that water and it's perfectly fine to go back into the water system.
So what you get is a cremation-style process, but without the atmospheric pollution that comes from flame cremation. What comes out is really white, pure white bone and the same as what happens after a flame cremation - those bones get turned into an ash-style material and handed back to the family.
Nadine: And we are interviewing someone who does natural organic reduction for a future episode but can you explain that as well?
Bec: Natural organic reduction is where the body gets laid into a vessel and it depends on the offering. So some NOR processes are two months long, two or three months. Some are six months long but the idea is the body goes into a vessel above the ground, usually on a bed of, it could be wood chips or alfalfa, or you know, there's a mixture of things that go in and around the person's body.
And the vessel, it's shut up. It's temperature-controlled. They do add some water and they gradually turn. So there's movement as well. And what happens in that vessel is that that body becomes like compost. Or soil, for want of a better word.
Nadine: It sounds kind of self-explanatory, but can I ask you to explain natural burial?
Bec: Yeah, so natural burial is in a shallow-depth grave. So you only need a metre of soil between the top of the body or container and the top of the earth. Ideally, you're wrapped in a shroud or protein-based fibre, so wool or silk. You can also use hemp or plant-based materials.
But you are returning the body to the aerobic layers of the soil where there's movement of oxygen, where there's movement of water that will aid the decomposition of the body and actually return the nutrients in the body back into the ground in a timely fashion.
Anthony: As the resident Grave Matters lawyer, I'm jumping in to note that in Australia there are laws in each state and territory regulating how you can dispose of bodies. A person can't just go off and do their own thing, though some try.
In NSW, for example, it's the Public Health Act. In Tassie where Bec is, it's the Burial and Cremation Act. We'll talk a bit more about this in episode three.
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Nadine: You're very passionate about what you do. What do you love most about your work?
Bec: I love watching a family get to the end of caring for their person and that feeling that they have like, and it's so palpable, that they've just done this thing. And it's like they've done something they maybe up until two days ago, they've never even considered it was possible and they've stepped into it and they've done it and they've cared for their person.
And it's just, it's special. It's really special.
Nadine: Yeah, that's lovely. What are the biggest challenges?
Bec: The biggest challenge is obviously the industry. You know, we don't have the money for marketing. We don't have the platforms that the industry does. We are fighting a busy world and a professional world and stepping into that space going, actually family and community can do this themselves. The big question is how?
And you know when you're up against million-dollar ad campaigns and people that have bigger voices because they've got deeper pockets, that's always an uphill battle.
Anthony: How have your beliefs and opinions about death changed over the years?
Bec: I'm more death curious now than I ever was and I was always death curious. I've certainly changed my beliefs about the role of a funeral director and I've changed my belief about what people need when they're grieving. I firmly believe they need to root the grieving in doing.
And you know, in the last four years, I have had my grandmother, my great aunt, my mum, my dad and my brother die. So I've had five close personal deaths in a four-year period and we've done home funerals for all of them. And so I now know quite intimately myself that grief is a doing thing.
And yeah, I was right. Do you know what I mean? Like, I always observed that in other people. Now I know it intimately.
***
Nadine: One concept that we will introduce in this episode is a concept that spreads across this sector is the idea of a good death and a good death being something different to everyone. And I was wondering if you could explain a bit about what that is and what to you constitutes a good death?
Bec: I think a good death is an ideal and for some people, it's an unachievable ideal. There's a lot of romance that goes on right? And it's, “I'm going to be like 95 and I will have lived this beautifully good life. And I'm just gonna sit down in my atrium surrounded, by my flowers with a cup of tea. I'm gonna put my feet up and I'm gonna just fade away”.
Nadine: That is how it happens, right?
Bec: Yeah, in Hollywood. That's where that happens.
So there's there's all of this stuff around a good death, and it can be problematic because it can set expectations. But the good death is where death-literate people enter into an experience and do the best that they can.
So not everyone's pain gets to be controlled at end of life. Maybe 90% of cases you can manage pain really well when someone's dying but there is some pain that won't be managed at end of life. So does that make it a bad death?
I think a good death is one where someone has thought about it, they've made plans. They've done their best everyone feels held, everyone feels supported and then they walk away from that, hopefully, a little trauma-free. Like that's a good death, right?
Anthony: I mean, implicit in your answer is another question, which is a good death for who or for whom? Am I being grammatically correct for whom?
Nadine: You can say it however you want.
Anthony: Whatever - a good death, who's it for?
Because you're talking about walking away maybe less traumatised. If you walk away from your own death less traumatized, that's a great thing. But, I mean, you're generally, you're walking away from somebody else’s, and so there are always multiple parties involved.
There’s the person who's going through that end-of-life stage and what they might want that to look like. And then there are the people around them who want the death to be, I guess, a positive experience for them too.
Bec: I mean, look, when I think about my mum. When Mum died, you know she was at home. She'd had, you know, a conversation in the hospital. And they said, look, there's nothing more we can do. And she just looked at me and she said take me home to die. And we got her home the same day and we nursed her at home and she died at home.
Now she wasn't ready to die. It came really suddenly. Her body gave up on her, and she had a lot of rapid changes that she wasn't prepared for. They certainly weren't in the plan. Let me tell you that. But she got part of what she wanted. She got to die at home. She got to have her people around her. She wasn't surrounded by medical equipment. She wanted to die at home, and that's what we did.
And even though she wasn't ready, she wasn't happy with, you know, some of the components in her dying process, we just had to roll with things as they happened and do our best through that.
And so I go well, that's good enough. Maybe that's what we need to do. We need to change a good death to good enough.
Nadine: Yeah, I like that. That’s really interesting. You're not going to be able to control every component. You might not be able to control any components.
***
Nadine: Before we go I have one question I wanted to ask you. What is your focus now? What's happening in the world of Bec Lyons now?
Bec: So many things. We're getting natural burial off the ground.
Nadine: Or into the ground, as some might say.
Anthony: Continuing the puns!
Nadine: Yes if you need a copywriter, I am here.
Bec: In the home funeral alliance, we are starting to put together an education session. If anyone knows how to grant write please reach out because we're looking at trying to get some funding in the next year or so to roll out home funeral education.
You know, big picture plans and then just doing the work, actually just doing the work day-to-day.
Nadine: So Bec Lyons, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really wonderful.
Bec: Thank you. Thank you for stepping into this and for giving it a national platform, that's that's really generous.
Anthony: Yeah. Thanks, Bec.
***
Anthony: So that was Bec Lyons. What are your thoughts?
Nadine: I learned a lot. I can't get past how many people she lost in the last few years.
Anthony: Crazy. I thought you'd lost a lot of people.
Nadine: Yeah, in a quick amount of time but that was insane.
And just like, how fascinating. Her fellowship that took her around the world and the communities that she met. I would, you know, I would love to do that. It's incredible. I'm really inspired by her.
Anthony: Her research sounded amazing. I also really love that kind of fork in the road between prison guard or, you know, funeral director slash all the other things she does. And I'm so glad she chose the latter because she's contributed an awful lot to the sector.
***
Anthony: Hey, before we finish, Nadine J. Cohen, I don't think I've ever asked you what the J stands for.
Nadine: You haven't and it stands for just mind your own business.
Anthony: Oh, touché. It's Jedward, isn't it?
No, it's Jamantha, there's like a Sex in the City theme going on, like a Jewish Samantha, right?
Nadine: It's just Jewish. Nadine Jewish Cohen. It's just laying it all out there.
Anthony: Yeah, really telegraph it. Good, good.
But seriously, I'm gonna find out what it stands for, and I'm gonna solve this by the end of the series.
Nadine: The Gauntlet has been thrown down. Yeah, you probably won't, though.
Anthony: I will.
***
Nadine: Anyway, thanks again to Bec Lyons for giving us the lay of death land. Next episode we talk to psychologist Paul Martin and therapist Rosemary Wanganeen about grief rituals, haunted kettles and what to do when you have the sads.
Paul: It all sort of invites us to think about why is it that some individuals are ultimately failed by cultural grief rituals? Why is it that some individuals participate in what their community or what their culture provides for them, and they leave the experience feeling that there's something about the ritual that was provided that didn't quite scratch what itches.
***
If this episode has raised issues for you and you'd like to seek mental health support, you can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or visit beyondblue.org.au.
Also, embrace multicultural mental health supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Visit embracementalhealth.org.au for 24/7.
For crisis support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or in an emergency, please call 000.
Grave Matters is an SBS podcast, written and hosted by Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen and produced by Jeremy Wilmot. The SBS team is Carolyn Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail audio@sbs.com.au.
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