All right, ladies and gentlemen, the cremation has finished.

There's a huge community talking about death, or as they like to call it, DeathTok.

Even I talk about it on my own platform where I documented my abuela's journey with dementia and her last days.

Members of this movement call themselves Death Positive or death curious, and their goal is to help people accept and understand the inevitable.

Death is coming for us all, babes.

I wanted to learn more about this movement.

So I talked with three figures in the death positive community, a famous TikToker, a leader from the Order of the Good Death, and the host of a Death Café.

I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Dead and Buried for four days.

All right.

Stephanie's a student in medical school.

And when she took over Houston's Death Café, they provided the perfect venue for her to explore her passion - end of life care.

All righty.

We're good to go.

So a death cafe is just strangers getting together to talk about death.

Full stop.

It is not set up to be a bereavement or grief counselor or a support group.

Those places are wonderful, but the idea is that we have enough of those places already.

What we're missing in most parts of society is just a place for people to come and talk about death without needing to like, attach a life event to it already.

You don't need a reason to talk about death, the dying process for a lot of people.

It is not pretty.

If I know I'm going to die in six weeks, why not die now?

Why?

Why go through something that's inevitable?

They're terminally ill.

The majority of people do not want an intervention of medical aid in dying.

What I say is, why shouldn't they have the right to make that choice?

I agree.

I think it's just the unity.

It's a really amazing way to just access this humanity that everybody has.

It's like it feels like the most natural thing, talking to a whole bunch of strangers about death.

Maybe that's just me.

The cafe is just one part of a movement to change the way we think and talk about death.

Believe it or not, the Western world didn't always think and talk about death as something that's inherently scary.

In the mid 1900s, a French historian named Philippe Aries was interested in changes in Western culture from medieval times to the modern day.

And he saw that attitudes about death changed radically over time.

For hundreds of years in the Western world.

Death was ever present in the fabric of everyday life.

Basically, people were just dying left and right.

Modern medicine was not existent.

Life expectancies were shorter.

And when you had children, you didn't take it as a given that they'd all survive into adulthood.

Deaths were mourned informally and publicly by everyone, according to ritual.

It was even part of the arts, literature and music of the day.

Imagine people singing about dying the way that we sing about heartbreaks.

It was kind of like that.

Can you imagine every Taylor Swift album being about a dead man I'd for sure by an album.

At the turn of the 20th century, as Western society became more secular and science began to replace ritual, death became something we could fight off with the help of modern medicine.

Death in the modern era often happens behind closed doors and in certain places like hospitals, but in medieval times cemeteries in France, for example, would sometimes double as public spaces for community gatherings and proclamations.

I mean, Hollywood forever in Los Angeles, California hosts movie nights among the dead and Living.

By contrast, modern funerary practices evolved to separate the living and the dead.

But eventually, the ritualistic displays of mourning became less common.

And for an already emotionally stifled society, this was not good.

As Arias wrote by the mid 1900s.

The tears of the bereaved had become comparable to the excretions of the diseased.

That just sounds stinky.

In other words, death had become taboo.

Now, fast forward a half a century or so, and you start to see the first glimmers of a new perspective on death.

You could say this perspective was born on the day Yvonne Preiswerk died in 1999.

Preiswerk work was a Swiss anthropologist who studied funeral rites.

When she died, her husband, sociologist Bernard Crettaz, launched a series of public discussions about death and dying.

He called them cafe mortels and held the first one in Paris in 2004.

Like his late wife, Crettaz had also studied mortuary rites and customs.

So you could say he was no stranger to death.

But with his cafe mortels, he wanted people to actually talk about dying before they found it staring them in the face, as he put it in a radio interview by talking about death and dying all the time.

You prepare yourself a little for your own death, which means you're not terrified of it.

By 2011, the idea of cafe mortels had made its way to the UK, where they were called death cafes and that's when a name was attached to this mindset about how we die.

It was dubbed the Death Positivity Movement.

The term was popularized by Funeral Director Caitlin Doughty in Los Angeles, who has since become a leading figure in the scene.

You might call her the mother of death positivity.

Or to her, millions of YouTube viewers Ask a Mortician We're really big fans over here.

In 2011, Doughty founded a nonprofit known as The Order of the Good Death, whose aim is to, in Doughty 's own words, make death a part of your life.

She then partnered with scholar, activist and museum curator Sarah Chavez to expand the orders, reach through educational programs live events and even grants for others who want to spread the word of death positivity.

I spoke to Sarah Chavez about her work in the death positivity movement.

Being death positive is simply about engaging and talking about death in an honest and open way.

But it's the belief that these honest conversations about death and mortality are really an important cornerstone of a healthy society.

It's also important and part of death positive philosophy.

Understanding and respecting that each person's end of life wishes really should be accessible to everyone.

It is such an intimate thing and we don't really think about that in a lot of ways.

We don't really think about giving each person their own sort of right of passage of crossing over.

You know, I grew up with an abuela, who talked about death very openly.

She has her whole funeral planned.

Okay.

She'll tell you what food is going to be there.

She wants a Tom Jones song played and then she'll end the whole thing with, Oh, I'm going to miss it.

It's going to be a party that so very much that kind of attitude toward death.

This, you know, a lot of openness, but then moving throughout the world, really being met with a lot of shame and silence.

Right around the time that I started getting involved with the Death Positive Movement, I was experiencing this really devastating death and loss.

People didn't know how to talk to me, society and even medical providers.

That in no way supported that loss or my grief.

So what I did instead is I really looked to my family who was from Mexico and to my ancestors, and asked this question prior to colonization, how did they deal with that loss, but still honor life?

And what I found was death was really an integral part of life.

The dead were connected to these ideas and locations that were associated with things that were life giving, like water and the land and food, and therefore, their acknowledgment and care was directly tied to the health and well-being of both the family and the community as a whole.

Also, with grief really holding in your emotions and not having this healthy outlet for your feelings was considered not just bad for the individual, but for the community as a whole.

And that if people look to their own ancestral practices, I think that they too will discover death care and rituals that are meaningful and that can support them as well.

In the past couple of years, death positivity has expanded into other places of our culture, including one of the biggest publishing platforms of them all.

TikTok.

Don't worry, this won't involve any choreography.

In recent years, a community has taken shape that brings together thousands of viewers and creators who are all interested in changing how we think about death.

Some are funerary workers who strive to demystify America's funeral industry.

Others are hospice workers who share their experiences and observations as they help others experience a peaceful death.

There are also death coaches, death doulas, grief counselors and even specialists in dead pets.

Together, these creators call their community Death Tok.

Just kidding.

It's just DeathTok.

I spoke to Lauren.

Eliza, or Lauren the mortician whose irreverent and funny videos have garnered more than 37 million likes on TikTok.

That's a lot of likes, even for dead people.

These bodies are not going to dress themselves.

Guys.

Not again.

Mrs. Norris.

Why do you find that so many people resonate with death content?

I really think that death has become such a taboo topic.

We don't talk about it enough.

And the thought that one day our life is just going to abruptly end.

We're not immortal.

And to have somebody online in really reminding you of that, I think is really important because as important as death is to talk about, I feel like it really helps people remember to live because we don't have infinite amount of years and it's so important to live.

And I hope that people get that from my content.

I think the great thing about DeathTok is that we are given a platform and somebody can sit on their couch and ask me a question that they wouldn't have the bravery to walk into a funeral home and ask a funeral director and it might be a question that they have always wanted to know, but they've been too afraid to ask somebody or they've been too afraid of somebody judging them.

Why they want to know that.

And DeathTok really gives us a safe place to discuss these topics because they're so normal.

They're such normal questions these people have.

And I am honored that what I bring to the table to death talk gives these people a safe place and also provides them some sort of peace.

So you feel like it's like changing the perspective on death because it's like a little bit more accessible, almost.

We're normalizing it.

We're telling people that it's okay to ask these questions.

We're normalizing the topic and we just want to have this safe space where people can open up and ask what they have always wanted to know.

So the mindset that we now call death positivity was born out of grief and inspiration that one man felt for his late wife in 1999 and in the year since then, the movement has matured, nurtured by a global community of caregivers, funerary workers, doulas and nurses.

From the Raw Talk at Your Nearest Death Café to the charismatic creators on Death Tok, the conversations that these pioneers have started continue to spread.

For each of us, death may be the end.

But for the death positivity movement, there's no end in sight.

But we're dying to hear what you think.

Leave us a comment.