When Alana Romero was a child, they’d leave their bed in the middle of the night, sneak through her family’s darkened home in South Florida, and slip into her sisters’ bedrooms. But they didn’t want to play, gossip, or otherwise annoy her siblings — she wanted to make sure they hadn’t died in their sleep.

“I would wake up, crawl to my sister’s room, just put my hand under her nose and make sure she was still breathing,” Romero, now 26, recalls. “If she was snoring, that was a good sign.” Romero would then check on her little sister one room over. Is she breathing? Yes. Reassured for the moment, Romero would return to their own bed.

Romero didn’t know exactly why she was making these anxious nighttime visits at the time — she kept them to herself. What they did know was that in their Catholic, Latino family, death wasn’t something that was acknowledged, much less discussed. “It’s like, don’t talk about death, don’t do the taboo things, maybe don’t even prepare for [death] because if you just don’t talk about it, don’t prepare for it, maybe it won’t happen,” Romero says.

When a loved one did pass, the circumstances of their death, and the events of their lives, weren’t brought up again, at least not with Romero. It felt like once a family member was gone, they were gone for good. So, like many other children with questions but no answers, Romero carried on as best as they could. She worried, she wondered, she woke up in the middle of the night.

In the US, we’ve long approached death with secrecy and silence. Despite the fact that, according to one survey, nearly half of Americans think about death at least once a month — and a quarter of them think about it every day — many keep these thoughts to themselves. When asked to rank their willingness to talk about various taboos, from money to sex to religion, respondents ranked death dead last, at 32 percent.

Furthermore, a 2018 survey conducted by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement found that while 92 percent of Americans agreed that discussing their end-of-life preferences was important, only 32 percent actually followed through. In other words, people struggle to bridge the gap between an internal awareness of death, and the actual external preparation for it.

 “Death is the ultimate loss of control. It’s the ultimate uncertainty.”

There are any number of reasons why people avoid these conversations. You may not know where to begin. You may not want to upset others. You may not know how to answer your child’s questions. You may be afraid of aging, illness, the callous indifference of insurance companies, and the creeping of medical debt. You may be superstitious. You may feel too young or too old to worry about it. Or you may hate to confront, once and for all, that you are afraid of what you can’t prevent, contain, or wish away.

 “Death is the ultimate loss of control. It’s the ultimate uncertainty,” says Claire Bidwell Smith, therapist, grief counselor and author of Conscious Grieving: A Transformative Approach to Healing From Loss. “We can really get very clear and focused and organized about so many aspects of our lives, yet death is the one that we cannot. We can’t predict it, we can’t control it.”

This studious avoidance of death has real consequences: Less than half of US adults have a will, which dictates financial and estate preferences after death. Likewise, only about 45 percent of adults have a living will, which dictates wishes around medical care. These numbers may be surprising given the Covid-19 pandemic, which exposed a generation of Americans to the existential dread, systemic failures, and grief of a global death event. But after a brief uptick in estate planning during the pandemic, interest waned.

There are, nevertheless, glimmers of change. For example, the resurgent interest in death doulas — people who provide education and holistic, non-medical support to the dying and their communities — signals a desire for more guidance and transparency around death. So does the wave of........

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