Do not conceal it…but love it: getting closer to biological death to better understand its psychological underpinnings

In recent centuries, death has become increasingly medicalised, institutionalised and distanced from everyday life. This societal shift has contributed to growing discomfort around acknowledging death, especially among adults discussing existential questions with children. Consequently, youth may receive inconsistent or inaccurate messages about death and lack the resources to meaningfully understand it. In our research on mental health interventions that explore existential themes with children, we recognised a key limitation in our approach: our understanding of death was largely theoretical, lacking the embodied encounters that could better prepare us to facilitate these deeply human conversations. To reconcile this, our principal investigator-a clinical child psychologist (CMH)-engaged in two intentional encounters with death: (1) Participating in an anatomy class involving cadavers, and (2) Spending time with an individual undergoing a medically assisted dying procedure. These experiences were followed by an extensive team-based reflexive process. In this commentary, we elaborate on these personal and team-based reflections in greater depth and how they prompted a deeper examination into our own death-related anxieties, assumptions and biases. This process led to a reorientation of our pedagogical and methodological frameworks in how we approach death-related discourses with children. Empirically speaking, we offer insights for clinicians, researchers, educators and parents on how increased proximity to biological death can deepen one's capacity for engaging in existential dialogue with children. We argue that such conversations require more than theoretical understanding-indeed, they call for an embodied awareness that better enables adults to support children in their search for meaning as they confront life's most inevitable and universal reality.