(RNS) — Lea Schweitz has become a fan of and a facilitator for having conversations we all like to avoid.
She remembers that soon after her Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis two years ago, a caregiver told her she better get her finances together. But between triaging her responsibilities and focusing on healing, she set aside the daunting “get your affairs in order” aspect of her diagnosis, she told RNS.
Then, her 10-year-old’s friend showed up at her Chicago home on Halloween in a Grim Reaper costume.
“The whole thing was hilarious to me,” said Schweitz, a former systematic theology professor. “It was this little snapshot of this long playdate with death that we had gone on.”
Lea Schweitz. (Photo by Kate Kaplan)
Soon after the Grim Reaper visit, Schweitz invited friends to gather and do the end-of-life planning she’d been avoiding. And in February 2024, she started her Substack, “Playdates with Death,” which aims to serve as a place for people from anywhere to come together and do the hard work of preparing for their deaths. The online community meets on Zoom once a month for a “community playdate,” which tackles one of 12 projects for the year, from obituary writing, to creating phone trees for emergencies, to funeral planning, to a Q&A session with an estate attorney. Schweitz has started hosting workshops on related topics at churches.
Americans are starting to talk about death in new ways. The new FX on Hulu show “Dying for Sex,” starring Michelle Williams, is about dying of cancer, and has become a hit. The growing death-tech industry hopes to streamline end-of-life planning. Death Over Dinner is a project that encourages people to discuss death at their next dinner party. And in February, The New York Times’ Tech Tip focused on digital estate planning.
Meanwhile, the International End of Life Doula Association’s membership rose from about 1,700 in 2023 to 2,296 last year. The death awareness movement of the 1970s and 1980s seems to have to morphed into the death positive movement today, which encourages people to talk about and lea …