DES MOINES, Iowa — With skeletons and ghosts lining the streets, death seems to be around every corner as Iowans near Halloween.
But for Elliott Nassif and Jennifer Leatherby, conversations about death are happening year-round.
Nassif and Leatherby are both death doulas – people trained to support individuals dealing with death or grief. The two met through the School of American Thanatology, connecting over the desire to foster conversations about death in their own communities.
That desire is what inspired them to found the Iowa Death Collective, described as "a community for death care workers and death-positive Iowans."
"It's the same as any other sort of new movement: It's always more popular on the coasts, and then it slowly seeps in and takes forever to get to Iowa," Leatherby said. "So I think our goal was kind of just to like perpetuate that movement and build more education and support for people who need it in death, dying, grief and loss in Iowa."
Death positivity characterizes conversations about death and dying as honest and healthy, rather than morbid. For Nassif, starting Iowa Death Collective was about changing the narrative around death by approaching the idea as "less scary and taboo".
Of course, every movement has to start somewhere. In the case of Iowa Death Collective, the movement started on Instagram in 2021. Since then, the organization has grown slowly but steadily, amassing more than 500 followers.
But Iowa Death Collective isn't just organizing online. Last year, Nassif and Leatherby hosted an event at Horizon Line Coffee called "Death & Decaf", where people interested in the Collective's mission could learn more about death positivity and the organization as a whole.
In addition, Iowa Death Collective routinely hosts Death Cafes on Zoom with Hamilton's Academy of Grief and Loss. Death Cafes are meetups organized across the world, with the goal of "[increasing] awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their finite lives".
Leatherby and Nassif agree that the Death Cafes are a key tool in embracing discussion about death — a topic that often stays hidden behind closed doors.
"You're not going to make any progress if you can't even talk about the thing that you want to talk about," Leatherby said.
While Iowa Death Collective is still growing, there's plenty they hope to see and achieve in the future. Through the Iowa Death Collective, Nassif and Leatherby hope to advocate for better healthcare for those who are dying, as well as better support networks for caregivers and people who are grieving.
The pair also hope to continue hosting Death Cafes and other events in an effort to build community, share resources and come together as Iowans.
"Being able to have conversations around death and dying and grief just fosters empathy, and helps people connect, whether it's across cultures, or across different religious beliefs," Nassif said. "We all die. And so being able to come together and have those conversations is something that I think can be really beneficial to our society as a whole."
In honor of "spooky season", Iowa Death Collective is hosting a Cemetery Scavenger Hunt in partnership with Talk Death Daily. The event will take place at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 29 at Highland Memorial Gardens. For more information, click here.