Key Points
- Death infrastructure
- Memorialising Covid-19
- The Happy Death Movement
If you still have the pandemic blues, you’re in good company. As a global health crisis, COVID-19 forced many of us to bear witness to a scale of death that went well beyond our normal experience. It turned our lives upside down and disrupted our capacity to mourn.
Amid sudden and unfamiliar restrictions, we became unnaturally glued to daily mortality rates while thousands of people died in isolation. We attended virtual funerals, became instant virologists and in many countries, death infrastructure was severely strained.
The news cycle has since moved on, but the virus is sadly here to stay as we continue to ride the wave of novel variants. So what can we learn from this infectious little bastard? How soon is too soon to start memorialising this period?
Associate Professor John Troyer is too kind to say ‘I told you so’, but having spent his career as a death studies academic, he knows a lot about diseases and death.
When everything began to hit, particularly with pandemic response plans, it was as if no one had read any of the reports that had ever been written by any of us ever. They were sitting on a shelf and no one cared.Dr. John Troyer
In this episode, John walks us through the origins of PPE and the AIDS epidemic, pandemic response plans, memorial practices in the wake of COVID-19, and the benefits of joining the Happy Death Movement.
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: Dr John Troyer
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 . Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
Content warning: This episode mentions death and other potentially difficult content. Please take care.
Anthony: Nadine Jacuzzi Cohen.
Nadine: Look, there's nothing I love more than bathing in a hot cesspool of germs.
Anthony: So, Nadine, today we're gonna talk about something that's been plaguing the whole world for the last few years. Can you guess what it is?
Nadine: Is it Nickelback?
Anthony: Close, it’s COVID-19.
There is no denying that COVID has changed us, I think we'd all agree. And a lot of people said to me at that time that they felt like we were living through a war or as close as you can get without shots being fired. And I definitely had that sense and I specifically remember watching footage of the Italian army moving corpses in Bergamo, which was just wild.
Do you remember that?
Nadine: Yeah, I do. And like for me, The most powerful image or the image that I really just went oh God, this is serious, this is what's happening, was morgue trucks in New York with bodies piled on the streets.
Anthony: Yeah, exactly. I just think that at that time, we were forced to witness a scale of death that was beyond our normal comprehension. And in many of those countries, it was also beyond the capacity of their death infrastructure, as I later learned.
And in today's episode, we look at some of the cultural and political implications of the pandemic - how it changed our perceptions of dying and mass death; and whether it might have lasting impacts on how we dispose of and say goodbye to the dead.
The way COVID disrupted our capacity to mourn is also something I'm really interested in, and we're going to touch on it with our guest today.
But just before we introduce our guest, Nadine, did you lose anyone during COVID? Apart from, say, Pete Evans?
Nadine: The number one loss. I'm still grieving.
No, no one close. A great uncle passed. He was 100. Shout out to him. I don't think it was even COVID but that is the only death I remember. And we did have to do the whole Zoom funeral thing, we couldn't go. But that was the only for me, the only death that impacted me at all.
How about you?
Anthony: Yeah, look, I did lose a cousin overseas. He was already ill and in hospital, but he got COVID and then it accelerated his decline and he died. And he was our age. He had kids. It was pretty sad, yeah.
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Anthony: Our guest today is Associate Professor John Troyer, a death studies scholar-at-large and former director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath in England.
John has written extensively about death technologies and the AIDS epidemic, including in his latest book, called Technologies of the Human Corpse. He also tweets - or Xes? I don't know what to call it - at the Death Reference Desk (@DeathRef), which is a steady stream of super interesting articles and death memes.
Dr John Troyer, welcome to Grave Matters.
John: Thank you guys, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Anthony: John, well, before you became a renowned death studies scholar, you grew up pretty well acquainted with death, you might say. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood?
John: Sure, so I grew up in the funeral industry. My father, Ron Troyer, was a funeral director for 35 years in the States, in different states - Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota. And really, the bulk of my life was spent around either Cincinnati, Ohio or then in Wisconsin.
And really, I really identify with small-town Wisconsin, which is where I'm sitting right now as we talk. It was, you know, all I've ever known from childhood was just being around death and dying and dead bodies and funerals.
I didn’t really understand that I had grown up in a way that was different than a lot of other people, until kind of I was like a teenager quite frankly, like, because I would talk about how things have been done differently...
You know the example I use a lot is, on Christmas morning, it was fairly common every year to have to wait to open the gifts because someone would have died the night before and Dad had to go do the removal on Christmas morning.
And it happened, and routinely someone would die on Christmas Eve and of course, my dad would go and do the removal, you know, as respectfully and you know, you feel for the family. But Mom would always have to say like you know, I'm really sorry, kids but, you know, someone died so Dad had to go, you know, do the removal and get the body. So we have to wait to open the presents and you're like, OK.
I mean, I can remember that have a lot so I think, in a way, you just become acclimated to it.
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Nadine (VO): Despite that acclimation, John writes in his book that in 2018 he was completely unprepared for his sister's untimely death from brain cancer, aged 43. It was an experience, he says, which changed his relationship with death.
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John: When I say I wasn't prepared, I think what I was always trying to get at is that it wasn't that I wasn't prepared for death, I just wasn't prepared to see my sister die before me, if that makes any sense. In the way that I don't know if we could ever be prepared for a sibling to die.
Anthony: I mean, that's entirely understandable. And you've been through an incredible amount of loss. But I have to say very briefly that I found the inclusion of the section about your sister's death in your book really moving, and I'm really glad you included it.
John: Yeah, I am too. And I've talked about this too. Like, lots of people have been emailing me saying like, thank you for writing this. Which I, you know, I don't ever set out to write things like that, but then I really, it spoke to me about a lot of what I was going through. Mostly it was just because my parents died so close together, right? And then my sister, you know, not being here.
Anyway, but the thing about my sister's death that I wrote about, and I've talked about this in different places, is that it arguably, I think, makes what is this overall book a better book. I just wish it didn't take my sister's death to do it.
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Nadine (VO): So how has COVID-19 changed death care practices over the last three years?
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John: One of the areas I work in too is the history of the AIDS epidemic, particularly the early AIDS epidemic. So when we talk about COVID, to me, there's been a certain mirroring that goes on with HIV which is there will be short-term immediate impacts. And we saw that over 2020, 2021, 2022 in different countries in different ways and how the dead were handled and you know rapid changes.
I think the part that I know so many people still struggle with is not being able to see the person when they were dying, in the hospital or wherever they were. And you know, trying to at best say something on the phone, which was something that had already happened before, if you were in another country if someone was dying. But this was - you could have been in the same city and you weren't even allowed to see them, and that was very difficult.
So there were immediate things. There will be longer-term impacts though too, and I think something that happened as a result of COVID that was already around but hadn't really taken off as much as COVID enabled it to would be, for example, webcasting or watching funerals online. That technology was always there, it was already like basically just off the shelf and then suddenly you have an event in which it suddenly becomes necessary to use those tools, and we as a species are very good at using whatever media communication tools we have at our disposal for our funerals and our dead.
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Anthony(VO): John lost both of his parents during the pandemic and experienced some of these changes first-hand.
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John: So in the case of my mom and dad's funerals, both of those funerals were streamed, partly because we had family and friends in other parts of the world. I think that the continuation of webcasting of funerals, even though it's no longer required, is something that is going to continue for the foreseeable future, simply because you'll have people who will in part come to expect it but it just is more convenient for some people.
Now the trick is gonna be that people will forget that it was something like COVID that really instigated that kind of massive change. And that's the same way with… so let me give you an HIV example.
One of the things that comes out of AIDS is actually better preparedness and universal precautions for handling the dead. And so in that chapter, I referenced PPE and actually put in brackets ‘personal protective equipment’ because I was like, no one's going to know what it is. You know what I mean?
And so one of the things that comes out of the experience of AIDS is actually trying to develop more universal precautions for handling the dead and as a result, what you saw in the funeral industry was - and you can make the case maybe it was overkill - but what you saw were funeral directors who are using PPE as we understand it today, already in place, because that's what you did to handle the dead. So that was a direct legacy of something like, of HIV. And I think that that was also one of the things that came out.
But I mean we could talk about, it's one of those tricks with something like a pandemic. It will inevitably have changes that will be long term in many cases and that, we’ll only start to understand them in about 20 years, you know and probably kind of forget that that's what caused it or it was sort of behind it. But we'll see those changes too, I think.
Nadine: How do you think it's changed the way we relate to dead bodies?
John: So that's a good question because I think that one of the things that COVID showed was just how quickly something like a pandemic or something like a novel virus or disease, in the same way that HIV was in its own day, how quickly it can just change everything. And that the status quo that you would have expected - in that I will always be able to be by this person if they've died, you know, hold their hands, touch them, see them dying - how quickly that can be taken away.
One of the issues with HIV was that there were concerns that after an individual died, if they died from complications from HIV AIDS, that some of the HIV virus was still active and could leap out of their bodies. There were all kinds of, you know, they were being handled as if, treated as if they were radioactive in many cases. Like, funeral directors wearing like lead-lined protective gear which was completely, you know, unnecessary, that was completely overkill, like you don't need anything like that.
And you didn't see that with COVID, which I think made sense because there was a better understanding of what virology had taught us about different viruses and how they interact with the body and what they can mean and what they, you know, don't mean and things like that. But I think that that idea of how quickly those rules can be changed is something that for a lot of people it was very distressing.
Anthony: You've actually worked on pandemic response plans and how to prepare for what are called mass fatality events. Why then, did it feel like the world was so poorly prepared for COVID-19?
John: So people can't see my face right now, but I'm just like, it was, oh my God….
Nadine: He looks agog, people. He looks AGOG.
John: No, I mean, OK so I mean, let me say I've worked on it. I have. So I have friends who are legit full-on world-renowned experts. A good friend of mine, Lucy Easthope, who's written a really good book here in the UK and she's she's actually been the person I've worked with the most. But over the years - and this goes back to my time actually as a graduate student in the States at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Go Gophers!
And so let me take you all the way back, all the way back to then.
So after September 11th, 2001, the United States formed a whole new bureaucratic part of government called the Department of Homeland Security, DHS. And the Department of Homeland Security was ultimately then tasked with coming up with pandemic response plans, in part because - and this is the irony of ironies about this - George W Bush, when he was President, read a book about the history of the 1918 pandemic flu and it kind of scared the bejesus out of him. And so he was like, you know, like, we gotta do something about this.
So somebody like DHS becomes tasked with coming up with a pandemic flu response plan, to which it made this huge assumption about the work and about what funeral directors would do. And the assumption was this: when there was a pandemic that could knock out tens of thousands, millions of people, funeral directors would simply be there to take care of the dead.
To which funeral directors in America were like, wait a minute, why are you assuming we're going to do this and not just head for the hills with our families like everybody else? And to which the government was like, well, but you're the people who care for the dead, that's your job. And they're like, no, it's not that simple.
So that's what set that in motion. Then a whole series of what should be effective response plans for a mass pandemic effect, some of which your listeners might be interested to know, come from what would be a response plan to say, for example, a nuclear disaster.
Fast forward now to me being in the UK and there were a couple of different iterations of different kinds of response plans. For example to pandemic flu responses; to a certain extent, some things like aeroplane crashes. But let's just stick with flu, pandemic flu or viral outbreaks and what we do.
So, for example, one of the things I was asked was, you know, how would something like nationalising crematoria work?
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Nadine (VO): Cast your mind back to March 2020 and you might recall seeing a newsreel of Spain using an ice rink in Madrid as a morgue. Yeah, that happened.
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John: One of the big things that's in the playbook is you take control of an ice rink and you put a tarp over the ice rink, which when I read, I was like, oh, so they got their playbook going.
This is all my way of saying like, this has been worked on for many, many decades. and then I can only really speak to the United States and the UK because those are the countries that I know best.
When everything began to hit, particularly with pandemic response plans, it was as if no one had read any of the reports that had ever been written by any of us, ever. And they were sitting on a shelf and no one cared.
I ended up in at least one conversation with someone in a part of the government here asking me about, like, COVID response, like pandemic response planning and I just simply said well go find the reports we wrote, like they must be on a shelf somewhere and they didn't know what I was talking about. Yeah.
And so I think that if anything comes out of COVID as far as this goes, I would just hope there be a general literacy about the work that's been done within preparing for these things. Because there are reasons we prepare for these things so that when they happen, you can mitigate - not completely get rid of - but you can mitigate some of the problems.
And I think that's been one of the great failures in the UK, but also in the United States. The United States had its other political problems too, because Donald Trump being president was, like you couldn't have picked a worse president.
Nadine: On every level.
John: And I'm not saying that I mean, well yeah, just like, you couldn't have picked a worse president to have in charge in something like that.
Anthony: One thing that I've observed about bureaucratic rationality is that reports get written, they get shelved, yes, and then you can lose institutional knowledge when people leave the organisation, the people who wrote those reports and care about them. And new staff come in and they're not familiar with that work.
And I think when you couple that with what is called disaster psychology, you know the idea that initially, when there are mass fatalities, people are shocked, but that wanes and people become numbed to it.
I think those two things are pretty damaging for the cause in terms of preparedness because you've lost knowledge that's been prepared for this very event and you've also got this phenomenon of people kind of putting their heads in the sand in order to just survive and get by and get on with life. And those two things don't bode very well, it seems to me.
John: Right, yeah. You know, you can look at the history of AIDS about this, like the number of reports that were written about government, or lack of government, responses to AIDS or any number of different kinds of… even if you want to look at SARS. The original SARS, or even MERS, which was Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, which I will say, you know, we should be thankful that, actually this sounds terrible, what I'm about to say and I'm not saying this to be cruel to families who lost family members who died during SARS-CoV-2.
But you know, the original SARS in the middle part of the 2000s, the mortality rate on that, the case fatality rate, meaning the number of people who died, was about 10%, right? And whereas COVID, what we had, I think it came out - and I'm sure we'll have listeners who will be like, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about - but I think I think SARS-CoV-2, when we went through, I think it came out to about, I want to say maybe 1 or 2%, maybe 3.
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Nadine (VO): John's not wrong. When the pandemic began, the World Health Organisation estimated that globally about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases resulted in death. In 2023, the figure is just under 1%, but calculating mortality rates is really complicated due to factors like data gaps across regions, demographic variants and differences in the way countries record deaths.
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John: But the one I want to get to is MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome from the mid-2000s or later in the 2000s, which was… We got lucky there because that case fatality rate was about 30%. Yeah. And if COVID had been 30%, then we would have really been in a - that would have been an existential question.
Anthony: And that reminds me of the estimated mortality rate of the Black Death, which was, I think, 40%?
John: Yeah.
Anthony: So MERS is nearing that level of threat.
John: Yeah and if you think about it, and again I'm not trying to diminish the impact of the deaths of the people who died, in many cases died very preventable deaths, not through their faults. And I think that because, and I always want to go to great measures to make sure we're not saying that someone's death was their fault in this situation. But oftentimes it's just a lack of, you know, preparedness in a lot of different ways but…
There's an argument that goes like this: one of the reasons maybe we in the West haven't learned our lessons per se around things like novel viruses and, you know, viral contagions like COVID is because not enough people have died. Whereas in parts of the world where that have been impacted by Ebola, which is not the West, and the hemorrhagic fevers, they have really paid attention because if we had a massive hemorrhagic fever breakout in the West, that would be equally catastrophic.
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Anthony (VO): The comparison to Ebola sounds controversial, but John's pointing to something called excess mortality. As historian Neil Ferguson argues in his book Doom, death tolls can be misleading. To understand the significance of a disaster, we need to know more than the raw number of dead. We need to know how many more people died because of the pandemic relative to an average baseline.
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John: But you don't want to get to the point where a lot of people have to die. Like, do all these people really have to die for people to pay attention?
And so that was one of the things I keep coming back to is I want to believe that everyone who died during the AIDS epidemic died if we can say, for a reason. That those deaths meant something, that we learned from that.
Anthony: And I think that's something that's important in this conversation because, for example, I've read that Spanish influenza was 150 times more lethal than COVID. I mean, more Americans died from influenza than in the war.
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Nadine (VO): Anthony's talking about World War One.
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Anthony: So I think some of those statistics get warped sometimes and it's worth thinking like, well in the West, in our experience, was it just that not enough people died? Is it because we got numb to the death rate? Like, one of the things we've talked about is becoming desensitised to the statistics of how many people were infected and died that day.
Nadine: I don't know if this was in every state in Australia, but every day at 11:00 AM we all tuned in to the COVID press conference, the daily one, and there was the Premier, the head of State and Dr Chant, the head of health care for the state Dr Kerry Chant. And every day it was this many new people have been infected and this many people have died.
At the beginning of which - and this was, I think this went for a year at least - I mean, like my friends and I would all be like on Zoom, like watching together. And what started off as oh my God 20 people have died became oh just twenty people have died.
You know over that time because we got so desensitised to the numbers and that there was such a foreign concept that 20 which was bad at first became fine at the end. And those deaths matter. You know, it's again it's as you're saying like it was as if those deaths didn't matter.
John: Until not that many months ago, in America, there were still upwards of 1000 people dying a day of COVID or of complications from COVID. I mean, not that many months ago. And I remember, particularly in England, the day that 1000 people died and it was big news, you know what I mean? And it is like, it's big news if 1000 people die from something or other.
You can make a case like, you know, that many people can die for lots of different reasons, however, this was what we were talking about. But then, over time again, it just becomes one of those things where you just become used to the number of people dying every day from any number of causes. Which is - again not to diminish the impact - but I think that that's part of how we come to develop a a kind of, if you will, language or even a grammar around death and dying, like how we articulate it.
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Nadine (VO): One of the ways people have tried to counter the numbing impact of the COVID-19 death toll is through memorials. For example, the Hero Art Project in Washington's National Mall contains the portraits of healthcare workers who died from coronavirus.
So how enduring are such memorials likely to be in the wake of a global pandemic?
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John: I was just talking with a friend of mine about COVID memorials.
So how is it gonna be memorialised? That is an open-ended question to which no one has an answer. So for example, there are very few 1918 flu pandemic memorials. In fact, almost none. For an event that was that seismic, you would think that there would be a lot there just aren't. And in fact, a lot of the memorials that can be discussed are sometimes, they tend to be more ephemeral and they tend not to be, if you will, institutionally sanctioned in any way and as a result, disappear.
So the AIDS quilt is a really good example from the late ‘80s into the 1990s and that was one that just started as an arts and crafts project almost, to sort of remember individuals who had died. But you know, the last time the quilt was fully unfurled in the mall in Washington, DC was 1996 and that was the last time it was unfurled because then it just became too big to actually unfurl. And then it got caught, and actually then gets caught up in the early 2000s of legal disputes about like ownership and other things. And these things all happened, but it didn't start out as what it became, which was the Names Project, which was to name all the dead.
I think COVID is in some ways the same thing. You can take, for example, what's called the National COVID Memorial in London which is across, it's on the Thames, it's across from Westminster. So it's across from, you know, the seat of power and what that was, is that was a guerrilla action by a group called Led by Donkeys, which had been, you know, trying to, you know, draw attention to the complete failure of the British Government, in many ways, to do anything about COVID.
And so one day they just decide - and this is actually kind of brilliant - they show up at the, you know the strip along the Thames, you know, down on the embankment, with a sign that says National COVID Memorial professionally and then people in like high VIS vests and like clipboards. So they look very official and they just start drawing these hearts on the wall, for every person who died of COVID in England.
And once it started and once it got to a point, it was never stopped, even though it was effectively a graffiti action. Once it started and got to a certain point, it couldn't be stopped. And in fact, it couldn't be stopped because politically speaking, it was not possible to stop it. And so families became actively engaged. Groups became actively engaged, filling the hearts, going and playing games and stuff like that. And it's still there.
Now the question will become for that is how is it funded going into the future? Because eventually, if it's not, all the hearts will fade away. And maybe that's OK too. Maybe that's part of this through the ephemeral nature of the monuments.
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Anthony: On a completely different note, can you tell us about the happy death movement? What is it?
John: So the happy death movement is a term that the death studies scholar, writer and academic Lyn Lofland coined in 1978 in her book, The Craft of Dying. And she says the happy death movement is sort of the… it's not a pejorative, it's not a criticism. It's sort of like the happy warriors trying to get everyone to talk about death and actually interestingly what she says is they're very much into making people more positive about death.
So there's a real vestige to what is described today as being the death positivity movement, coming out of the 1970s, but also to like, embrace this radical notion of hospice in which you know, hospice is a space in which you know that once you enter, it's because you're going to die and you're going to be comfortable but that it's not about curing per se.
And that there's this whole shift about people trying to get cool with death, which I think she does fairly describe as sometimes being a thanatological chic. You know, thanatology meaning the study of death. But that's like thanatological chic being something that is… I think there's always that tension between a lot of different parts of what I would describe as being death world.
But I don't think the happy death movement has gone away at all.
Nadine: I love that the 1970s happy death is the 2020s death positivity cause we're more intellectual about it now.
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Anthony (VO): This series is partly predicated on the idea that death is taboo and we want people to feel more comfortable talking about it. But John argues that we don't live in a death-denying culture at all. In fact, he says that the idea of death as a taboo is a convenient fallacy.
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John: In order for something like a happy death movement or any death movement writ large to call itself a social movement, it has to have something it is fighting against. It has to have an enemy. There must be an enemy evocation. So in this way, that's what the death taboo becomes. It becomes an enemy evocation, a foil, setting aside the fact that it doesn't really exist. But it is very useful,
So what I would say is the reason the death taboo persists is because, I would argue, that we hear and talk about and see death and dying every single day, the least of which on sort of popular, press reporting, whatever it might be about people dying or whatever it might be from different diseases or murders or whatever.
There is perhaps a different question around, are we talking about death and dying of ourselves or like this death of the self? And that can be a different question about our own death and dying. But even that, I would say, is something that is not taboo in the way that it's forbidden or is impossible to do, it's just that we're not encouraged to do it enough.
And indeed I've done this experiment with different people with audiences before in which I give the audience two options. What I'll say is we can talk about, say for example, the music we'd like played at our funeral, just a good thing to start, or we can all talk about our credit card debt, which one do you want to talk about? And it's always the music.
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Nadine: We've been talking a lot about the concept of a good death, which is very personal, on this show. What would you describe as contributing to a good death for you?
John: I'm going to start by saying that, contrarian than I am, I tend to try to avoid the language of the good death. I know what you mean, I don't think it's an unfair thing to ask but I'm always concerned that it creates an unfair expectation about a qualitative experience of death. That in which something is a good death or something is a bad death, as opposed to being sort of death.
That said, I think there are ways that are preferable to die than others, and that I think is true. And I think that that has been the work of hospice care and palliative care and whatever it might be. The thing that is most important to me after I die is that if I die in a way that my organs and bones and tissues can be used for transplantation, then that is my primary request. I am signed up to be an organ, bone and tissue donor in both the UK and the United States, as well as I would help globally, and I would want that to be honoured if I die in such a way that it’s possible to do so.
After that, as far as my method of death or whatever it would be? It's interesting because I, you know, I've had to think a lot, I've thought about this a lot with just having been around, you know, the death of my sister, my mom and then my dad. And you know, they each died in different ways and I was OK with how each of them died. Like I never had any problem or any regret, whatever that might be. But you know, I guess and this is going to sound really…
So for a long time, what I would say is I want to die in a way that there was some value to it. Like I don't want to just die and not have any meaning. And that's totally weird, like how you describe meaning, whatever that might be. That kind of thing.
But now what I think, and this is going to sound like it's very, very sad or self-serving or whatever it might be, but it's not. This is just something I think about, which is this: I'm now the sole surviving family member of my family and I wonder who's going to be there with me when I die. Or am I going to die alone?
And I don't necessarily think I'm not worried about it. I'm not anxious. I'm not going to suddenly now have a panic attack on you, like on on microphone, something like that. But I think it's important I'm honest about these things because I think it's important for those of us who study death and dying, to be honest about the fact that we too can encounter these kinds of questions around our own deaths, which I think it might be possible to unfairly project us as being somehow above it, and we're not.
So I wonder who's going to bury me, right? Who's gonna who's going to be responsible for my remains? Because there's no one else, right? There's no one else to do that for me. And that doesn't weigh on me. But it it does impact how I think about what is, you know, what is the next 25/30 years of my life?
John: Before the listeners are all like oh my God….
Nadine: We're all gonna die alone!
John: They’re all like throwing side-eye or they're like oh my God, this is really sad. But what I'm saying is I don't approach it as being, I mean sure there’s a certain sadness to it or whatever, but also too like this is very real, it's every day, it's a very real kind of thing and that is important to talk about. Because there's nothing taboo about it but it's important nothing to be upfront when you start thinking about these things.
Anthony: Because it might affect the choices that you make, right?
John: Yeah, it does, absolutely. I think it absolutely affects your choices. It can, you know. Or what kind of choices you can make because some people can't make a lot of these choices, you know, those kinds of things.
And so, you know, I have a lot of freedoms and a lot of privileges that enable me to do these kinds of things, and that's great and I’m always upfront about that.
What is a good death for me? It would be not dying alone. So I shouldn't laugh but I feel like people are like, listening in their cars or however they're getting this, and like staring at the wall like oh my God…
Nadine: I better have some children quick!
John: Yeah.
Anthony: You've touched on something totally universal. And I don't think there'd be a person alive that would say anything different to what you've just said.
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Nadine (VO): We asked John if thinking about his own death made him reflect on the time he spent with his parents in lockdown before they died.
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John: So I kept getting stuck here in America, in Wisconsin during the pandemic because of lockdowns. So I came here in March of 2020, earlier than I expected because all the flights were being cancelled, and I was here for six months. And then in 2021, I came back for Christmas and then got stuck here for like five months. And I spent that time with my parents and I will cherish it.
So strangely and weirdly for me, I am nostalgic for COVID and the lockdowns, because that was when I was spending time with my parents, and I will be forever grateful that I had that time with my parents. Because, but for COVID and the lockdowns, I would not have spent it with them. I got all that time with them over the three years and I got time with them that so many other people, friends of mine, did not get. And they had to watch their parents die or know that they died and didn't get that time. And so I'm deeply conflicted by a lot of it. Because, on the backs of all the other losses people experienced, I got to spend so much time with my parents. That, to me, has been profoundly important.
I just find myself even now being like God, I wish I could go back in time to the COVID lockdowns when I was here with my parents. And you know, my mom would be like, they'd be behind me, like trying to warm something up on the microwave and I would be doing an interview like a podcast interview or something and they would use the microwave and it would totally screw with the Wi-Fi signal. And so I'd have to be like Mom, Dad, God, I'm being interviewed. Turn off the microwave. God.
Anthony: That was like your Will Ferrell moment, where, like she's in the kitchen making meatloaf. Like Mom, what is she doing in there?
John: Or like I'd be trying to teach like teach a class on Zoom and I'd be like Mom turn off the microwave, I’m trying to teach my class, God. You know what I mean? And I just think about all those memories now and I’m like, I'm so glad that happened.
Nadine: Thank you so much, John.
John: Thanks to you both, I really enjoyed the conversation and the opportunity to talk about, you know, all things death and dying.
***
Nadine: So that was Dr John Troyer. What a delight.
Anthony: Yes, he was.
Nadine: And so, Mr Lev, Mr Levin, Tony, Tones, Tone Loc.
Anthony: Tone Loc!
Nadine: Tone Loc. Getting ‘90s, my obsession with the ‘90s.
Anthony: Yeah.
Nadine: What are your thoughts?
Anthony: I am particularly intrigued by the idea which John spoke about that we instrumentalise the death taboo movement to kind of mobilise a social movement around death. And I think it's interesting precisely because it's counterintuitive to me anyway. And as John acknowledged, there's death everywhere. It's all around us. It's in news cycles. It's in our streaming content. It's in video games.
But for me, it's not in the more intimate spaces, between us and our loved ones, in conversation. We're not asking each other those deeply personal questions about our own deaths and I feel like it's kind of, it's as if we're so busy consuming all that graphic and gory content, which gets quite abstracted, that we don't really have to confront it in our personal relationships.
Does that make sense?
Nadine: Yeah, yeah, I think it does.
I honestly am just grappling with the amount of loss he suffered in such a short time. And we had another guest back in episode one who had suffered, you know, four or five deaths over a recent period. And obviously, John intellectually gave us so much to think about, I'm just quite struck with that today.
Anthony: And it's interesting because he spends his entire career engaged with this topic, and then at a time when things were already so difficult for everyone, globally, he went through this whole other layer of personal loss with his parents and his sister. Yeah, you're right. I imagine he learned so much from that experience just having to deal with it and confront it.
Nadine: Well, I imagine he's still learning, you know, and it's gonna be a large process and a long process.
Anthony: Yeah, I agree. I found his story about spending time with his parents in lockdown really touched me. And, you know, we were laughing about it, but it was quite beautiful that he felt that there was a bit of a silver lining in all of that experience and that he got sort of stuck with them, so to speak, and he cherishes that.
***
Anthony: So thanks again to Dr John Troyer and thank you for listening. Our next episode is about donating your body to help solve crimes.
Nadine: After you die, of course.
Anthony: Exactly.
And we talk with scientist, Dr Maiken Ueland about the fascinating field of forensic taphonomy. That's a lot of Fs. Let's just say join us next week to learn more about the science of decay.
Maiken: So first we have the individual, they'll look just like they did while they were alive and we call that the fresh stage. You'll get a bit of insect activity, there'll be a bit of a smell. And then we'll go into a bloat stage. Sounds quite graphic, but it's just a a slight distension of the abdomen.
And then we'll have a rupture event, which again sounds very graphic. It's not like a balloon popping, it's a lot less dramatic than that. What that is to still be an opening that happens and all of the fluid and gases will be released into the environment.
***
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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 Caroline Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail audio@sbs.com.au.
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