How to speak honestly about death and dying

There are words we use so often around death and grief that we barely hear ourselves saying them anymore. Someone has “passed away”, we have “lost” them, they have “gone to a better place”, “slipped away” or perhaps they “lost their battle”. None of these expressions are necessarily wrong, and I am certainly not interested in becoming the language police because our words can come from culture, spirituality, family traditions, personal beliefs or simply from what has always felt familiar to us. What I am interested in, though, is what might be sitting underneath the words we choose, and whether they are helping the person in front of us or perhaps helping us avoid something that still feels difficult to name.

Sometimes the language we use is genuinely about caring for another person and sometimes, if we are willing to look a little more closely, it may also be about caring for ourselves. When we cannot quite bring ourselves to say that someone died, that someone is dying, or that a person is experiencing grief, it can be useful to ask whether we are softening the language because that is what the other person needs or because saying the actual words feels too confronting for us. That distinction matters, particularly for those of us who work around end of life, grief and loss, whether as doulas, carers, health professionals, educators, community workers or simply human beings supporting other human beings.

Part of growing our death literacy is becoming more comfortable with the language of death itself, because we need to be able to say, “I am so sorry your mum died,” without believing that directness has somehow made us insensitive. We need to be able to ask, “Would it be okay if we talked about what dying might look like?” and trust that honesty and kindness can exist together. Direct language does not have to be blunt or clinical because our tone, timing, relationship and the care with which the words are offered matter enormously.

There is also value in using the language of the person we are supporting. If someone tells me that their husband “passed away”, I have no need to correct them and insist that he died because those may be the words that fit their beliefs, culture or emotional world. At the same time, following another person’s language does not mean that we have to abandon clarity, particularly where meaning may be uncertain. If a family member tells us Mum is “fading”, we might gently ask, “When you say she is fading, do you mean that you think she may be dying?” In that moment we are not policing their words, we are making sure that we understand what they mean and that they understand what is happening.

The assumptions hiding inside familiar words

There are other words that deserve our attention too, and “loved one” is one of them. We use it constantly in end of life and grief spaces because it sounds warm and caring, yet there is a significant assumption tucked inside those two words, which is that the person being cared for, or the person who died, was loved.

That is simply not always the case. People care for parents, partners, siblings and other family members for all sorts of reasons, and while love may be present, there may also be obligation, guilt, cultural expectation, financial dependence, fear, family pressure or simply nobody else available to do the caring. Relationships can contain estrangement, resentment, neglect, abuse, grief that began long before the death and decades of unresolved hurt, so continually referring to someone as a “loved one” may quietly tell the carer what they are supposed to feel.

Imagine caring for someone with whom you have had an extraordinarily difficult relationship and constantly hearing them referred to as “your loved one”. What room does that leave for your truth if part of your grief is relief, anger, resentment, numbness or even a sense that a difficult chapter has finally ended? A person may have cared deeply and responsibly for someone without experiencing the relationship as loving, and our language should be spacious enough to hold that complexity.

Sometimes “the person you are caring for”, “the person who died”, or simply using the person’s name or actual relationship is much more inclusive. The same applies to the word “family”, because family has many faces and the most important person in someone’s life may be a neighbour, a friend, an ex-partner, a chosen family member or someone whose relationship does not fit neatly into a box. Asking rather than assuming allows us to meet the person where they actually are.

Dying is not losing

Then there is the language of battle. We hear expressions such as “she fought so hard”, “he lost his battle with cancer” or “she finally gave up” so often that they can sound entirely normal. For some people, fighting language is empowering and genuinely reflects the way they experience illness. If that is the metaphor a person chooses for themselves, then of course that language can be respected. The difficulty comes when the rest of us automatically place everybody who becomes seriously ill onto a battlefield.

If there is a battle, somebody wins and somebody loses, and that framing can carry an unintended message about the person who dies. Did they not fight hard enough? Were they not strong enough, positive enough or determined enough, or did someone who survives somehow fight better? Death is not a failure: sometimes an illness simply progresses despite every treatment available; sometimes a person chooses not to continue treatment; and sometimes the body reaches the end of what it can do.

We can say that someone died from cancer, that they lived with motor neurone disease for four years, or that the illness continued to progress despite treatment without implying failure or defeat. The person did not lose at dying, and neither did their family or their healthcare team.

Living with an illness, right up until the final breath

One of the language shifts I care deeply about is moving, where appropriate, from describing somebody solely as dying from an illness to remembering that they are also living with it. Of course, somebody can be dying, and naming that honestly is important, but dying is not the only thing they are doing.

A person with advanced cancer is still living with cancer today, just as a person approaching the end of life with motor neurone disease is still living today. They are living with all the changes, uncertainty, losses and limitations of that illness right up until their final breath is exhaled, which means that two things can be true at once: a person may be dying, and they are also still living.

When the language of dying takes over completely, there can be a subtle shift in the way people are treated, with decisions beginning to happen around them rather than with them, and others sometimes stopping asking what they want because there is an assumption that there is no longer much point. Life can become dominated by medications, appointments, symptoms and what has been lost, even though there may still be relationships to tend, choices to make, people to see or not see, conversations to have, food to enjoy, music to hear, rituals to create, memories to make, arguments to resolve, humour to share and ordinary Tuesday afternoons to live.

At Preparing the Way, we talk about the three Cs: capacity, choice and control. Capacity means continuing to recognise what a person can still understand, decide, communicate and participate in rather than seeing only what has been lost. Choice means continuing to offer real options wherever options remain, whether that relates to care, visitors, food, environment, information, comfort or how time is spent. Control means supporting the person to retain as much influence as possible over their own life and experience, even when illness has taken control of so many other things.

This is one of the reasons language matters so much, because the words we use can quietly remove agency or help return it. If we remember that a person is still living until they die, we are more likely to remain curious and to keep asking what matters today, what is still possible, what they want more of or less of, what could be done differently, and where choice and control can still be supported.

Some words carry more history than we realise

Language around suicide is another important example because for many years people routinely spoke about someone having “committed suicide”. The word “committed” carries the history of suicide having been understood as a crime or a sin, and that history can reinforce shame and stigma in ways that may not be obvious when we use the phrase automatically.

Today, we can simply say that a person died by suicide. I In the same way, describing an attempt as “successful” or “unsuccessful” can unintentionally frame death as the successful outcome and survival as failure, whereas language such as “died by suicide”, “took their own life” or “suicided” is clearer and less stigmatising.

Again, this is not about finding a perfect phrase and never making a mistake. It is about recognising that words carry meaning, even when we do not consciously intend them to, and that a small shift in language can sometimes make a very difficult conversation feel safer and more respectful.

Who am I protecting?

One of the questions I invite people to sit with is deceptively simple: when I soften the language around death, who am I trying to protect?

There will absolutely be times when gentler, culturally specific or spiritually meaningful language is exactly what the person in front of us wants, and that language should be honoured. There will also be times, however, when we discover that our euphemisms are protecting us because perhaps the word “dead” feels too confronting, perhaps saying someone is “dying” feels as though we are removing hope, perhaps saying “suicide” feels unbearable, or perhaps we have simply never practised saying these things aloud.

Death literacy is not only about knowing what happens as somebody approaches the end of life, understanding advance care planning, knowing what services exist or understanding what happens after somebody dies. It is also about developing our own capacity to remain present when difficult truths are spoken, so that another person does not have to soften what they are experiencing to protect us.

Can somebody tell me they are frightened of dying without feeling that they need to make me feel better? Can a grieving person say that they are relieved someone died without worrying that I will judge them, or tell me that they did not love the person they cared for without feeling ashamed? Can somebody use the word “suicide” without seeing me flinch or rush to change the subject? These questions go to the heart of what it means to be a safe person in conversations about death, dying and grief.

The aim is not to erase euphemisms from our vocabulary, and it is certainly not to correct grieving people or insist that there is only one acceptable way to speak about death. It is to become more conscious of the words we choose, the assumptions those words may carry, and whether our language is serving the person in front of us or protecting us from our own discomfort.

We can say that somebody died and still be deeply compassionate, acknowledge that somebody is dying without taking away all hope, respect another person’s spiritual or cultural language while remaining clear about what is happening, and remember that even when somebody is dying, they are still living, with capacity, choice and control wherever those things can still be supported, right up until their final breath.