Kunal Parikh, MD · Sep 08, 2025 · 2 min read
What Is Your Fluency In Death?
Or is it still a taboo subject?
We are obsessed with literacy (rightfully so!): financial literacy, digital literacy, and health literacy are all essential survival skills. Yet there’s one domain we most consistently ignore: death literacy.
Mortality is 100% guaranteed. But that’s where most of us are unprepared. And it inevitably leads to an AVOIDANCE CRISIS. Families fractured by unspoken wishes. Caregivers crushed by uncertainty.
People end up undergoing aggressive treatments they may not have wanted. Communities struggle with isolation and unsupported grief.
Death literacy is not some morbid fascination; it is the practical ability to understand, talk about, and plan for death (our own and others’). It has four key dimensions:
🔸 Knowledge: understanding the legal, medical, and financial realities of dying.
🔸 Skills: being able to navigate end-of-life conversations, advance care plans, and funeral arrangements.
🔸 Values: clarifying what a “good death” means personally and culturally.
🔸 Community capacity: recognizing that dying and grieving are not medical events but rather social ones.
Recently, my grandmother passed away in her sleep. I have had about a month and a half to process this and talk about it without breaking down mid-sentence. Ironically, she would get such a kick out of how peaceful and “comfortable” her death was. A good death. I am working on my death literacy so that I can make sense of her death with less fear and more gratitude, knowing how to hold space for both loss and legacy.
Why talk about it here? She has shaped everything I know about aging and caregiving. My grandmothers have (had?) been my whole “reason”. And they continue to shape my work.
So, here’s a challenge: what if we treated death literacy the way we treat financial literacy — as a basic competency to be taught, practiced, and shared?
Kunal Parikh
Aging Advocate | Digital Health Strategist | Physician
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunalparikh6/
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