The Words We Use Instead of Death

Passed away. Lost. Gone. Departed. Transitioned. No longer with us.

And now, unalived.

We have come up with an impressive number of ways to say someone died without actually saying they died.

And I get it.

Death is a hard word.

I’m a grief therapist. I talk about death for a living, and even I had to train myself to say it.

Died. Dead. Death.

There’s a sting to those words. They land differently.

My mother passed away.

My mother died.

Same reality. Very different sentence.

Passed away has a softness to it. As though someone slipped away into the night. Even pass feels almost passive. The phrase has been used as a euphemism for death for centuries, historically carrying ideas of departing from this life. The history of “passed away” is fascinating because apparently we’ve been trying to find softer ways to talk about death for a very long time.

Died gives us nowhere to go.

I see this in my therapy room all the time.

Someone will tell me about the person they lost. They’ll say passed away throughout the conversation. At some point, I’ll say died.

And sometimes I can almost feel the word hit the floor between us.

It burns a little.

It lingers.

I used to wonder whether I should soften my language too. These days, I’m more willing to let the word sit there.

Because there is something almost like a trust fall in telling another human being:

My husband died.

My brother died.

My child died.

Can you handle the weight of this word?

Can I say it without watching you scramble to make what happened easier to talk about?

Can you stay here with me?

A friend once told me that her father had transitioned.

We ended up talking about that word for quite a while.

She liked it. Transitioned felt peaceful. It suggested that her father had moved from one place or state into another.

And I remember saying something like, “That's lovely. But death isn't always lovely.”

Some deaths are brutal. Some are senseless. Some leave people furious. Some people have no idea what they believe happens after we die.

There can be enormous meaning in death. Meaning and prettiness are not the same thing.

My friend got quiet for a minute.

Then she said she'd never thought about why she used transitioned. She realized she'd been avoiding the word death without knowing she was doing it.

That stuck with me.

How many of us are doing the same thing?

Language has a funny way of revealing us. The words we choose can influence how we understand the world, something linguists at Stanford have studied.

And apparently every generation gets to invent its own way of doing this.

Enter: unalived.

Unalive spread online partly because people were trying to avoid having content about suicide, killing, and death restricted or suppressed. Dictionary.com traces the history of the word from a 2013 Ultimate Spider-Man episode through its later explosion on social media.

Which is kind of wild when you think about it.

We started disguising death so an algorithm would let us talk about it.

Then we started talking that way to each other.

I don't think everyone needs to start saying died. And I definitely don't want grieving people worrying that they're using the “wrong” language. If passed away feels right, say it. If you believe your person transitioned, say that. The person grieving gets to decide what language belongs to their experience. There is thoughtful guidance on using “died” versus “passed away” that makes this point too.

What I want us to pay attention to is what happens when someone else says the word.

If I tell you:

My brother died.

And you respond:

I'm so sorry he passed away.

Why did you change it?

Maybe you're trying to be kind.

Maybe that's simply the language you grew up with.

Maybe death makes something inside you recoil.

Maybe you've never thought about it.

That’s the interesting part.

Because death is going to find its way into all of our lives eventually. No euphemism changes that.

And I think we lose something when death becomes so unspeakable that we can barely use its name.

How am I supposed to tell you who my brother was if I can't also talk about the fact that he's dead?

How do I tell you what his death did to me?

How do we talk about the bizarre reality of loving someone who no longer exists in the physical world but remains woven through your life?

And how do we talk about our own lives without acknowledging the thing that gives them an ending?

The next time you say passed away, gone, lost, transitioned, unalived, or died, pay attention.

What happens in your body?

Which words make you want to move closer?

Which make you want to back away?

And when someone you love tells you that someone died, see if you can resist the urge to make the word easier.

Let it have its gravity.

Maybe that's part of what it means to take death seriously.

And maybe taking death seriously is one of the ways we take being alive seriously, too.

Looking for grief therapy in Seattle?

I’m currently accepting new clients who want a place for deep, real conversations about death, dying, grief, and what all of it means for the life you're still living.

You can learn more about grief therapy in Seattle and my approach to working with grief.