I’m at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, trying to get comfortable around the dead. I’ve never seen it in my favor to ponder life’s end; there’s enough to worry about on this side of the soil. But I'm not just here to make myself comfortable with the uncomfortable. I'm here to meet people who, seemingly on better terms with death than I am, have made it their profession. I was recently drawn to the boisterous laugh of a woman at a party, and when we started talking she introduced herself as a 28-year-old death doula who helped people die well. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Why would a young, healthy person do such a thing?

It’s February, and the trees on the grounds are skeletons of themselves. Sunlight filters through branches in hazy billows. It’s eerie, and I remember why graveyard picnics always put me off. Inside the administrative offices, rooms are similarly bare: wobbly maple desks stabilized by crumpled paper, a few framed photographs with scratched glass covers, and old IBM typewriters—they still use typewriters—instead of MacBooks. The windows look out on Green-Wood’s public crematorium, where mourners sometimes burn offerings to the dead. An employee types my name onto a certificate of cremation and sends a wink my way. “Gotcha!”

Everything feels old—except the people working here. They all seem strikingly similar to me. Two of us are wearing shoes from the same shop on Bleecker Street; another turns out to be my neighbor. But while I shiver at the thought of eternal rest, they spend their days and nights enabling conversations, programs, and rituals around it.

Harry Weil, Green-Wood’s Vice President of Education and Public Programs, is part of this wave. He joined the cemetery staff at age 32, and dons a manicured mustache and a snug button-down. “There are so many more young people than I thought there would be involved in the field,” he tells me. His office, which hasn't been updated in a century, was originally a “lounging room” for visitors—who traveled to the cemetery by ferry or carriage from across New York—to rest after their journeys. The original moldings still crown the ceiling, and dark walnut walls give the room an almost reverent calm.

“I had no interest in death work,” Harry says. He had originally earned a PhD in art history, and taught for years. Often, Harry brought his students to Green-Wood for field trips, drawn to the expansive landscape and its struggle for relevance. When he burned out on academia and a job opened at the cemetery, he followed a hunch. “I just wanted to be somewhere beautiful every day,” he admits. But in this job, Harry has become a kind of architect of modern mourning. 

He runs workshops on grieving through dance, evening tours of the grounds, and community forums like “grieving and weaving.” The events grow more popular each year—and the audience gets younger and younger, he says. “In the absence of a dogma or doctrine that dictates how you dispose of remains, [there’s a vacuum in] how you act, how you feel when someone dies” he says. “Young people are trying to fill the gap.”

Harry Weil's desk at the cemetery.

Photo: Harry Weil

One of these young people is Will, who was around 24 when he first joined Green-Wood’s staff. He was on a walk and saw a sign on the cemetery gates advertising a curious gig: gravedigger. He knew nothing about it, but he was hardworking and strong.

Gravediggers at Green-Wood go on an initial eight-week trial; are you worthy of the union, and can you handle the emotional toll? As a final test, he had to dig a five-foot grave on his own. It was a summer day, so he started before sunrise when the air was still crisp. “When you finish, you’re welcomed into a small brotherhood.” Upon passing, the other gravediggers took him out for drinks. “All these men were crying and hugging me, telling me how proud they were. That shit just doesn’t happen.”

The “shit” he was referring to was the simple sense of feeling connected, at a young age, to something beyond oneself.

Tiva Baloi, 25, echoed the sentiment. She runs public school programming at the cemetery by day and hosts intergenerational conversations around death in the evenings. Her prompts, at these sessions, start relatively light––“what song would you want at your funeral?”––but soon the conversation shifts to a depth I’ve rarely seen between strangers.

A 26-year-old is convinced that, like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, she’ll join “the 27 club” of rock stars martyred young. She’s talking to a man of 74 who forgets he’s mortal. In the ’80s, those same 27-year-olds were his heroes, but now he’s had friends die from overdoses, and it brings him rage. He can’t handle people messing with their mortality and reminding him of his own.

A 30-something mentions that she’s already thinking about how she’d like to be reduced to soil, so she can bring her loved ones flowers every spring.

A man chimes in only once: “I don’t feel like a 90-year-old. I feel like a person.”

Tiva nods. His reality isn’t exactly relatable to her, but vulnerability and candor are the point of these gatherings: opportunities for communal interaction at a time when self-actualization, says the culture that raised us, is a far weightier goal than affiliation.

It’s odd to see so many young people bouncing around Green-Wood. Cemeteries are strange spaces, ones that modern society hasn’t quite figured out what to do with. During the nineteenth century’s rural cemetery movement in the U.S., it was a radical idea to carve out beauty from the bramble and build lush, artfully landscaped cemeteries designed like public parks. They were places of communion. Green-Wood is regarded as one of the best examples—and founded in 1838, was one of the first—of this movement; its popularity and design inspired Central Park. But while these sweeping green spaces are rich with history, they can feel hollow of new relevance—especially as most plots are full and cremation, anatomical donations, and “green burials” (where a person is buried in a manner that enables natural decomposition) are on the rise. Cemeteries, much like the dead that populate them, no longer hold a clear, agreed-upon spot in our society.

“They’ve always been liminal places—misunderstood, symbolic, and wide open for reinterpretation.” Harry says that most visitors these days aren’t mourning anyone in particular—but that doesn’t mean they’re not grieving.“Before, because of religion, grief was prescribed,” Harry says. “But now, there’s space for imagination.”

For some, that means reclaiming rituals of the past. For others, it means inventing radically new ones. “It’s no longer a priest or rabbi in a church or temple,” Harry says. “More often, it’s a person with pink hair quoting something from The New Yorker.”

The Green-Wood Cemetery, 2024.

Photo: Esther Segretto

The Green-Wood Cemetery during Plantasia, a concert series hosted by Pioneer Works.

Photo: Esther Segretto

The Green-Wood Cemetery, 2024.

Photo: Esther Segretto

*

Traditionally, there were structures of support for the dying—and the living––across cultures the world over. In Egypt there were the shepherds of souls, guiding the deceased through the afterlife. Romans had collegia funeratica who provided practical and emotional support during death and funerals. Most major religions have practices focused on a good goodbye: Buddhist monks offer spiritual guidance; priests might perform last rites; the Jewish tradition of Shemira calls for the deceased to not be left alone between their death and interment.

It’s a familiar story: the precipitous decline, beginning in the twentieth century, of formal religion in the West. Notwithstanding those mall-sized megachurches whose parking lots still fill on Sundays across the South, many Americans of my generation grew up in towns whose old places of worship have been converted to apartments. Young people subscribing to a formal religion, at least in bastions of secularism like Brooklyn, is now the exception rather than the rule.

Erica Hill, co-founder of Sparrow—a modern funeral home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—says there was a turning point for many young people during COVID. “It was the first time, probably since the Vietnam War, that there was a global daily death count,” she says. “And now, with social media, people—especially young people—are constantly exposed to images of mass death and violence around the world.”

So in this new dark age, even as formal religious affiliation remains at an all-time low, there’s also been much talk about re-enchantment. It’s a return, especially among young people, to spirituality––a grasp at anything to make sense of our time. There’s Joe Rogan’s clique of men discussing a “moral” life, Peter Thiel as Silicon Valley’s champion of Christianity, or the trad wife movement, where women romanticize a return to pastoral lives and gender roles rooted in biblical fundamentalism.

Engaging with death is another way to contemplate the divine. And it’s happening on TikTok, with a rise of young women in scrubs or funeral blacks speaking tenderly about how a body shuts down, what to say when someone is dying, how to grieve. They are death doulas, hospice nurses, morticians—guides to the underworld with ring lights. Julie McFadden (@hospicenursejulie) talks you through terminal restlessness and the final breath; Hadley Vlahos (@nursehadley) shares tender reflections from hospice patients that read like love letters to the living. With acrylic nails and irreverent humor, Lauren the Mortician (@laurenthemortician), shows you how to dress a corpse.

Their follower counts stretch into the millions, and their audiences—mostly under 30—are spellbound. There’s something astonishing about the intimacy of it all. You’re watching a young woman smile softly as she tells you her father died with his favorite socks on. You’re learning how to prepare your own advance directive in between videos about eyeliner.

I tapped into this world by way of a 34-year-old death doula I interviewed. These influencers prompted her decision to go into end-of-life care; they made her realize how little she thought about death—and how that risked a shallow life. She had no force connecting her to something eternal, nor a formal space to examine the divine. I told her that I relate; without infrastructure to ground me, I often feel like a floating head, unsure of what I’m standing on. Rather abruptly, the doula said she had to leave for her botox appointment.

Without judgment, I couldn't help but notice the strange paradox between embracing one’s own demise and spending large sums of money to look invincible. There seemed to be a gulf between accepting the end of life and denying how it looks in process.

This, Harry says, is the risk. “The downside is that instead of death being controlled by a religion, it’s controlled by a personality.” If the old divinity system was governed by dogma and tradition, the new one is dictated by personalities. The TikTokers, many of Joe Rogan’s followers, the trad wives, and I are all part of a generation that seems more focused on individuality than belonging—on becoming, that is, personalities. The fear, it seems, is that we trivialize death even more, so much so that any semblance of divinity falls even further from our grasp.

Searching, as a young person, is never straightforward. But it’s a particularly hard time to not have belief systems, or some formal communion, that might bolster us in the face of finality. AI forces us to grapple with our vulnerability, while modern medicine and wellness culture orients around the extension of life and the rivalry of age. The climate is deteriorating, and we’re relentlessly exposed to disaster by the media ingested through our phones. This moment begs for some kind of faith, of which we have the least we’ve ever had.

But we have bodies, and our bodies die. If a secular society has discredited the forms of grief prescribed by religious cultures, then we need new ones. Grieving alone won’t work.

*

Erica Hill was a creative producer in fashion and film before she started Sparrow. She lost two of her closest friends in her early 30s and struggled to process the grief.

“I would go to funerals for friends, and they felt so stiff,” she told me. “These people were young, and [their] funerals were so formal.” Erica presents as decidedly unfussy: no makeup, relaxed golden-brown hair, steady and thoughtful in a way that makes it hard to imagine anything ruffling her calm. She’s also styled for the moment: aviator-style reading glasses with sage-tinted lenses and a crisp white shirt. When I step into Sparrow’s modern, minimalist building, she gestures to what looks like a trap door on the wooden floor. “That’s where we bring the bodies up,” she says.

She built Sparrow for people like her. The space is light-filled and contemporary, with skylights overhead and bottles of Saratoga sparkling water available for the taking. The teal walls are hung with artwork by a friend she used to work with in the Catskills, who died at 21 of ovarian cancer. It’s a far cry from the hushed, shadowed interiors of traditional funeral homes. There’s even a gift shop that sells bright ceramic urns, art books, and tote bags. The most popular item? Shower steamers that release aromatic essential oils into the mist.

On Sparrow’s website, you’ll find Q&As with locals answering questions like: “What’s your fantasy destination funeral?” and “If there is a Heaven, who are three people you’d want to hang out with there?”

Erica’s partner in the venture, Alexander Anthony Agard, worked in end-of-life care for a decade before growing disillusioned by what he saw as a conventional, overly somber quality in American funerals. The day I visit, he is about to sit at the hospital bedside of a man in his 30s, and help him plan his funeral, one-on-one. Alexander and Erica shared a vision of what a funeral home could and should be: “a place of community, a place that [doesn’t] look or feel scary. Somewhere people might actually feel comfortable and want to hang out,” she says.

And that’s exactly what they’ve created. Sparrow has struck a chord. It’s become something of an unofficial clubhouse for New York-based death doulas, who gather there regularly to talk shop. The meeting room that’s otherwise used for “exit parties” fills, at the end of a workday, with women (and just one man), averaging around their early 30s, rushing in late from their day jobs, over-caffeinated and eager to chat. Conversations range from the morality of charging for services, to trends in assisted suicide, to the latest training updates from INELDA (the International End of Life Doula Association), the most widely recognized certification program in the U.S.

At the meetup I attended, 25 people showed up. Some had entered the field after a personal loss, but many hadn’t. “I think it’s a collective calling of the times,” Erica said. What priests once did, civilians are doing for their friends. She also notes, though, that it’s not always clear whether they’re drawn to this work to help others—or to better understand themselves.

A few Fridays ago, she hosted one of Sparrow’s occasional “gastro experiences”—part dinner party, part death salon. “We have a lot of regulars,” she said, “but this one drew a different crowd.” One woman came to celebrate her birthday with a friend. A group of women arrived for a girls’ night. No one in the room worked in end-of-life care. All, by Erica’s guess, were in their 20s or 30s.

Guests were told to dress for their own funeral. They took turns explaining their outfits and sharing what they wanted to have happen to their bodies when they expired (their preferred "disposition," in this world's argot). There was a grazing table, complete with edible “dirt” made of crushed crackers. The event was morbid, a little funny, and surprisingly sincere.

“They just seemed to crave a space to process finality,” Erica said.

Erica assumed Sparrow would primarily attract secular people. “But in fact,” she said, “we get a lot of individuals who are quite religious. We’ve had Catholic, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish services. People just want a space that feels of the time.”

The “celebration room,” where services are held, has soft gray ombre walls. It’s intentionally neutral—designed to be filled by the wishes of the people who walk through it. Some families stick closely to tradition; others use the blank canvas to create something wholly their own.

At one service, the woman being memorialized didn’t like flowers—so the family built a lemon grove in the center of the room: four trees encircled by chairs. Everyone took a lemon home and planted a seed. There was a woman who, in her family’s words, had always “lived her life in a box.” So instead of a casket, she was laid on a table draped in ornate silk fabrics—blocks of color in blues, reds, rust. A cherry tree stood on either side, and she was finally free in the world. Guests laid out on yoga mats and meditated around her. 

One of Erica’s favorite services was for a man who lived simply, devoted to a few quiet passions. He laid in a smooth, plain pine casket. He loved opera, so his loved ones brought in a pianist, a cellist, and an opera singer. His diaries and travel souvenirs were placed around him. Only 10 or 20 people attended, and they stayed late into the night, just listening to the music.

“It doesn’t feel rebellious toward religion at all,” Erica said. Then she paused. “We live in such a divided society. How do we process that grief?” I asked her, then, if she believes people have a bent towards divinity. “Divinity is at odds with finality,” she said. “How can we not have a bent toward it, in the face of so much strife?”

*

Back at Green-Wood, it’s a cool afternoon in early April. Gabrielle Gatto, a death educator at the cemetery, wants to show me the catacombs. Gatto is also a death doula (“Sparrow is my second home”) but is strikingly full of life with her baritone cackle, big dark waves falling down her shoulders, and lips painted bright pink. She unlocks the gate and leads me down into the frigid air.

“Even on the hottest August day, this place feels like an ice box.”

Gabrielle likes having proximity to mortality. She even has a rule on first dates, that she announces within the first few minutes, that she’d like to reserve ten minutes to talk about death—because she always wants to talk about it, but can get carried away.

“I promise you, the more you think about your own death, the more you’ll live your life thoughtfully. But that’s ancient wisdom. We’ve just forgotten it.”

There’s a long pause. The silence is thick, as is the packed concrete entrapping us. Suddenly, Gabrielle begins to belt Ave Maria into the underground air at an elite register.

“The acoustics in here can’t be beat. Give it a shot.”

There’s a sliver of light illuminating the underground passageway where we’re standing. I glance at the side recesses where coffins go, shuffle my feet, and decide I’ll just stand still. I don’t feel like I should lean on anything, and no song comes to mind to sing. 

“Ha…okay how about this: do you know what you’d want your epitaph to be?”

There’s a tension in the air between Gabrielle and me, both age 31, and between myself and the other like-aged death workers I’ve met. It’s a tension like talking about sex with a stranger, each breath full of both risk and relief. Like a child, I still sometimes wish that I did not know I would die—that the subject could be preserved for an older, wiser version of myself. 

They all seem to wish that, too; being surrounded by grief doesn’t necessarily make mortality easier to stomach. “There are good days and bad days,” Will the gravedigger told me. One of the worst came a few months back, when he dug the grave of a 17-year-old girl who died of brain cancer. He watched, after digging this girl’s grave, as 80 of her friends held one another up from falling.

“What are the good days?” I asked.

“When no one dies.”

Harry Weil feels similarly. “I do not like talking about death! I’ll happily lead programs on it, but won’t talk about my own; it frightens me.” His work at Green-Wood hasn’t changed that. “There’s still no scripture for finality. It’s so abstract, and that’s completely terrifying.”

Down a trail, Gabrielle points out to me where most of the cemetery’s green burials are happening. The plot looks like the core of a tree, with circles of graves rippling out from the center. She tells me that the tree symbolism is likely purposeful, and explains to me what heartwood is: the core of a tree that is actually dead, yet sustains the living part of it. “If that’s not a metaphor for what comes before and connects us, I don’t know what is…but we’ve seem to have forgotten that whole shtick.”

We climb into a golf cart that’s typically used by Green-Wood’s security staff. Gabrielle is driving slow, which is unlike her. “You know, I should say that paradoxically, I’m prepared for my own death, but I’ll never actually be ready for my parent's death.” We’re quiet, both seemingly at a loss for how to make sense of our joint paralysis at the prospect of finality—something that people, throughout history, have faced by leaning on gods.

“That’ll never be okay,” she says, slamming the golf cart’s brakes in front of a flowering Magnolia tree. Its pale petals, just blossomed, are delicate as silk. “Oh my god. Look at that. No really, look at that. Little fluffernutter.”

Last year, Green-Wood hosted its largest event to date: a party, put on by Pioneer Works, to watch the partial solar eclipse. “Nearly 10,000 people came,” says Gabrielle. “People weren’t even looking at the sun; they just wanted to be witnesses to something bigger than themselves.” I thought of all the people gathered together, eager to belong to something amongst one another. All this desire and shared observance, not so coincidentally, being enacted in a cemetery.

At the gates, I wave goodbye to Will, who is about to leave for gravedigger karaoke that evening. The death workers I met were often getting together after hours: the death doula bowling league, the silent book club of death. “At the end of the day, funnily enough, we don’t talk about death too much.” says Will, “It’s heavy.”

I was sad not to be invited. ♦