It’s my opinion that Americans don’t have a taboo around death at all. The taboo is actually around grief. If America had a taboo around death, it wouldn’t be plastered everywhere.

These things won’t make the grief any easier, but they might make the process feel a little smoother. They’re not classes, treatments, or exercises either. They’re just salt, fat, water and heat. In my years working with death, dying, grief and loss from all the angles that I have, I have found four things that tend to work well for 99% of grieving humans. Grieving people need salt, fat, water and heat.

When you visit a place where you find the dying, you see that it’s also a place where the truth comes out. Everyone’s issues and insecurities bubble to the surface and as an observer, you watch a very important decision being made—to lean into the discomfort of the truth or to run from it. This is where families branch apart, or twist more tightly together—in the face of loss.