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If there's one time of year we are reminded of death, it is October. Leaves change colours, fall to the ground, and drift away in the wind. Skeletons lounge on porches. Gravestones sprout from front lawns. Ghosts manifest in trees and bushes. The Grim Reaper stands steadfast next to the mailbox. Or a bowl of candy.
For a few glorious weeks, death is everywhere.
Then November arrives, the skeletons go back into storage, and we return to our regularly scheduled programming of pretending none of us are going to die.
Which is actually rather strange.
Because for much of human history, death wasn't nearly so good at hiding.
Halloween's relationship with death goes back a long way, although its history is a little messier than the story we sometimes hear.
The modern Halloween we know developed from a mixture of traditions over centuries. The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated around the beginning of November, marked a seasonal transition into winter and became associated in folklore with supernatural beings and the otherworld.
Later, the Christian calendar brought All Hallows' Eve on October 31, followed by All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day which are days devoted to remembering saints and the dead.
Over generations, traditions mingled, changed, travelled and picked up new ones along the way.
Eventually, we got Halloween. And miniature chocolate bars that keep getting smaller.
History is beautiful.
But beneath all the costumes, candy and plastic skeletons is something our ancestors would have understood very well: The dead remained part of the community.
They were remembered. Visited. Prayed for. Feared occasionally, certainly. But they weren't necessarily tucked neatly out of sight.
And death itself wasn't particularly good at staying out of everyday life either.
For generations, caring for the dead was often a family and community affair.
People frequently died at home.
Their bodies might remain there while family, friends and neighbours visited, kept vigil and helped prepare for burial. Communities had customs for mourning, sitting with the dead and supporting the bereaved.
The word parlour in "funeral parlour" is a little reminder of that history. The parlour was once a room in the home where visitors could gather and that often included gathering around someone who had died.
Death was still devastating, of course.
Our ancestors weren't magically better at grief because they saw more corpses. But death was considerably harder to pretend didn't exist.
Then things began to change.
Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deathcare increasingly became professionalized.
Funeral directors took on work that had once happened largely within families and communities. Embalming became more common in North America. Hospitals became increasingly central to illness and dying. Eventually, nursing homes and other institutions became places where many people spent their final days.
These developments brought enormous benefits.
Modern medicine keeps people alive longer. Palliative medicine can relieve suffering in ways previous generations could only dream about. Funeral professionals take care of practical, legal and physical responsibilities that can be overwhelming for families.
But something changed along the way.
For many of us, death became something that happens somewhere else.
Someone else cares for the body.
Someone else knows what happens next.
Someone else understands the paperwork.
And unless we're forced to confront death through the loss of someone we love, we can go a remarkably long time without talking about it at all.
Until suddenly we have to.
This is where the history lesson becomes rather less historical.
Because while we've become very good at outsourcing the practical business of death, we can't outsource every decision that comes before it.
When someone becomes seriously ill and can't communicate, somebody may need to understand what matters to them.
When a death occurs, somebody has to know what happens next.
And when families have never talked about any of it, a crisis can come with an awful lot of questions.
What would Mom want?
Who should speak for Dad if he can't speak for himself?
Did she want to be buried or cremated?
Was there somewhere he wanted his ashes to go?
Where is the will?
Did anybody ever actually ask?
Death planning doesn't prevent grief.
But it can prevent some unnecessary detective work while you're grieving.
In recent years, something interesting has been happening.
Death is creeping back into the conversation.
Modern day death literacy encourages people to speak openly about mortality rather than treatingdeath as something too frightening, depressing or taboo to discuss.
People are attending Death Cafés, where strangers gather over coffee and cake to talk about death.
End-of-life doulas are helping people and families navigate dying.
Home funerals and green burial have renewed interest in greater family participation and environmentally conscious deathcare.
Organizations are encouraging people to have advance care planning conversations long before a crisis occurs.
None of this is about romanticizing death.
And it certainly isn't about wishing it would hurry up.
It's about taking something inevitable out of the shadows.
This matters when we talk about aging.
Senior care is usually framed around helping someone live well, and rightly so.
We talk about independence, connection, housing, health, safety, caregiving and quality of life. But planning for death belongs in that picture too. Not because getting older means it's time to start measuring yourself for a casket.
Planning for the end of life is still planning for life.
Advance care planning gives people an opportunity to think about their values and communicate them to those who may eventually need to speak on their behalf.
Talking about funeral wishes can spare families from trying to guess later.
Getting important documents organized can prevent frantic searching during a crisis.
Learning about palliative care, hospice and other end-of-life resources before they're urgently needed means families don't have to learn an entirely new language at one of the hardest moments of their lives.
And having meaningful conversations about mortality can tell us something surprisingly important:
What do we want to do with the time before it?
You don't need to plan your entire funeral this October.
You don't need to select a casket, compose your obituary or announce your preferred burial outfit over Thanksgiving dinner.
You can simply get a little death-curious.
🪦 Attend a Death Café.
🪦 Explore an advance care planning workshop.
🪦 Check out educational events from Dying With Dignity Canada.
🪦 See what's happening in your local community deathcare community.
🪦 Ask a funeral home about pre-planning.
🪦 Talk to someone you love about what matters to them.
🪦 Find out where your parents keep their important documents.
🪦 Tell your family what matters to you.
Death doesn't become more likely because we talk about it.
It just becomes a little less mysterious.
Eventually, Halloween ends.
The ghosts disappear from the trees. The gravestones leave the lawns. The cobwebs come down.
And the skeleton goes back into the closet.
Historically, though, we've spent centuries changing our relationship with death. Bringing it close, pushing it away, ritualizing it, professionalizing it and, more recently, beginning to talk about it openly again. Maybe we don't need to return to keeping Grandma's corpse in the parlour.
Afterall, modern refrigeration has been a wonderful development.
But there may be something worth reclaiming from a time when mortality wasn't quite so carefully hidden away.
We can talk about death.
We can learn what happens.
We can tell people what matters to us.
We can make plans that ease some of the burden on the people we love.
And then we can get back to living, because deathcare is senior care not because aging means waiting for death.
It's senior care because accepting that life ends can help us care more thoughtfully for the life that's still here.
So this Halloween, perhaps leave the skeleton out a little longer.
It might have something to teach us.
Written by Michelle Olmstead, Tea & Toast Client Experience Coordinator
Resources
Advance Care Planning Canada - Don't leave your loved ones consulting a crystal ball. Learn how to make your wishes known and plan for future health and personal care decisions.
Bereaved Families of Ontario - Grief can haunt us in all sorts of ways. Find peer support, programs and a community of people who understand life after loss.
Community Deathcare Ottawa - For those who aren't afraid to get a little closer to the crypt. Keep an eye on upcoming local events, workshops and gatherings about death, dying and community care.
Dying with Dignity Ottawa - Find education, advocacy and information about end-of-life rights and choices.
Hospice Care Ottawa - Hospice isn't a haunted waiting room for the inevitable. Explore compassionate palliative care, caregiver support, grief programs and other resources for living as fully as possible through serious illness and end of life.
The Death Deck and the Dementia Deck - Who says talking about death has to be deadly serious? These conversation-card games help get people talking about death, dying, dementia and what matters most.
Death Leaved To-Do Lists - Death leaves a lot behind. Unfortunately, “administrative tasks” are among them.
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