The Death Positive Project

I am going to die, and so are you.

For many of us, especially Westerners, this is a challenging thing to face. We are not particularly good at accepting death — or anything that’s painful or uncomfortable. If something is broken, we want to fix it. If someone is sad, we try to distract them. If an item is old or worn out, we rush to replace it.

But there’s no fixing death. There’s no way around it. The only solution is to accept it. And accepting it, as odd as it may seem, helps us to better appreciate the days we are given.

Katie Hawkins-Garr

People who are death positive believe that it is not morbid or taboo to speak openly about death. They see honest conversations about death & dying as the cornerstone of a healthy society.”  While acknowledging that death is painful and messy, the death positivity movement aims to “break the culture of silence around death through discussion, gatherings, art, innovation, and scholarship.

orderofthegooddeath.com

Producer/Director Simone Fary’s Statement

I lost both my parents in the last few years. Decline and death are an inevitable part of being alive. However, our culture of denial often makes both coping with mortality and the grieving of our losses even more difficult than it needs to be. I want to do right by my children - show by example that death is a normal part of life, and discussing it is not something to fear or avoid. So I decided to create a series of three related multimedia endeavors that I am calling “The Death Positive Project”. They are:

Terry’s Going to Die (and It’s OK) 

15 - 20 minute documentary currently in production.

Logline

Terry M. has lived a full and meaningful 85 years, but is fully prepared for it to end when the time comes. LEARN MORE

Don’t Buy the Box 

This will be both a short documentary film and social media project on alternatives to expensive, impersonal, and environmentally unfriendly urns and caskets. In it I will show and talk about the DIY urn that I created for my maman’s ashes, as well as the efforts of others .

She Lives in Other Ways

“She Lives in Other Ways” is a social media and collage art project dedicated to my late mother (Maman).