Somewhere in Melbourne, a coffin leans against a desk beside Dr Hannah Gould, an Australian anthropologist at the University of Melbourne who has spent a decade interning at crematoriums, volunteering as a “demonstration corpse” and studying Buddhist death rites in Japan. It is there that she wrote How to Die in the 21st Century, and the image neatly captures the book’s spirit. Gould approaches mortality not as a subject to be feared or avoided, but as something to be studied with curiosity, honesty and care.
How to Die in the 21st Century is a distinctly Australian book. Its regulations, statistics and case studies are drawn largely from Victoria and New South Wales, making it as much a portrait of contemporary Australian deathcare as a general introduction to dying. Readers elsewhere should treat its logistical details as local rather than universal. For those immersed in death studies, end-of-life doula work or pastoral/spiritual care, little here will be surprising. Gould is writing instead for the far larger audience of people who have never had reason to think about crematorium furnace temperatures, cardboard coffins or the practical realities of death. In doing so, she opens a door that medicine, the funeral industry and polite society have spent much of the last century keeping firmly closed.
Underlying that mission is a demographic reality Gould presents with considerable force. As the baby boomer generation ages, annual global deaths are expected to rise from around 56 million today to more than 90 million by mid-century. Australia’s annual death rate is projected to double by 2040, while the country already faces shortages of palliative care specialists and, in some cities, diminishing burial space. A demographic and infrastructural crunch is coming, and Gould argues that our collective death literacy has failed to keep pace.
The book’s greatest strength is translation. Gould takes technical, often opaque aspects of deathcare and renders them accessible without stripping away their complexity. Her account of interning at Lilydale Crematorium is among the book’s highlights, describing the three-button sequence that begins a cremation, the care taken to tape flowers securely to a coffin lid, and the quiet ritual of a worker named Shane placing a hand on each coffin before it enters the furnace. These moments transform what might otherwise be institutional procedure into something recognisably human.
How to Die in the 21st Century unfolds through six accessible “lessons”: contemplating, dying, disposal, celebrating, grief and memorialising. The structure allows readers to dip into the topics most immediately relevant to them while keeping the overall narrative coherent. Gould also avoids the easy optimism that often characterises popular “death positive” writing. Discussing viewings after traumatic deaths, for example, she acknowledges that the evidence for their therapeutic value remains limited rather than overstating the case.
Australian death culture is far from monocultural, and Gould makes a welcome effort to reflect our diversity. She notes that speaking the name of the deceased is taboo in some Indigenous Australian communities, credits Melbourne Chevra Kadisha with pioneering livestreamed funerals well before the COVID-19 pandemic, and introduces readers to Muslim, Hindu, Baha’i and migrant funeral traditions. These discussions are necessarily brief, but they recognise that there is no single Australian way to die. At the same time, Gould rarely reflects on how her own cultural and religious background shapes the assumptions she brings to the subject. Her family’s deaths provide a moving narrative thread throughout the book, yet they remain largely unexamined as a particular perspective rather than an implicit norm.
Where the book is less convincing is in the practical guidance it offers readers making real-world decisions. Gould correctly notes, for example, that funeral wishes expressed in a will are not legally binding. Yet she stops short of explaining the legal documents that do carry weight, particularly advance care directives and substitute decision-making arrangements. Given that only a minority of Australians have legally valid advance care directives, this feels like a missed opportunity. A book aimed precisely at readers unfamiliar with end-of-life planning could have gone a little further in distinguishing between legally enforceable documents and expressions of personal preference without becoming a legal manual.
In contrast, Gould’s discussion of environmentally friendly body disposal is exemplary. Rather than accepting promotional claims at face value, she scrutinises the evidence for human composting and alkaline hydrolysis and gently dismantles the popular notion of “becoming a tree”, noting that ashes scattered directly around young trees are more likely to damage them than to nourish them. It is a model of careful public scholarship: evidence-based, sceptical of marketing claims, yet never cynical.
That combination of accessibility and intellectual honesty is the book’s real contribution to public conversations about death and dying. The literature on death often swings between Caitlin Doughty’s deliberately confronting style and more therapeutic self-help approaches. Gould occupies the middle ground. She draws on scholarship such as the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death and historians including Thomas W. Laqueur, yet never loses sight of the lay reader she is trying to serve.
How to Die in the 21st Century is therefore an easy recommendation, albeit with modest expectations. Experienced palliative care clinicians, funeral directors and end-of-life doulas are unlikely to discover much that is new. That was never Gould’s intended audience. For everyone else, this is an intelligent, compassionate and engaging introduction to one of the few subjects every one of us will eventually confront. Just don’t expect it to answer every practical question once that conversation becomes an actual death, actual paperwork, and an actual family gathered in a hospital corridor.
How to Die in the 21st Century by Hannah Gould, published by Thames & Hudson, is available now in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. Find it at your local library or favourite local bookstore.
Thanks Cosette – sounds like a useful resource for our pall care ward. I find every death so unique – it’s really tricky to make general claims around spiritual/emotional/social support of the dying and those surrounding them. There are so many layers – cultural, previous experience of death, loss, trauma etc.; family dynamics (eeek!), religious layers (or perceived religious cos so often Catholic still have it wrong that the church ‘bans’ cremation), attending to needs of four generations of one family at a time, understanding the differences within a religious tradition at EOL, personality quirks and coping mechanisms of those present. I think I could write a book about every death!!
That’s a great point, Anne, on the uniqueness of death. This book doesn’t get very close to the emotional aspects of death and has that particular academic detachment. Thank you for reading and commenting!