What’s Wrong with end-of-life services
This semester my team and I are discovering end-of-life service. Conducted interviews with relatives of committed suicided person, an extreme end-of-life planner for her mom, and who was dying but recovered from sickness army.
Religion-Bundled Service
“I didn’t know what my mom expecting, she never talked about it. It was painful even just choose a music for her funeral.”
The perspective of death is really different from wedding and it’s religious in general, imagine someone pass away and you need to call for the service, who will you call? Church, Funeral home, your answer may be one of each. If you are the person wants to have a none religious funeral service, do you have any idea where to find it? Emotionally, it may not be the point people would like to search on google, or compare the price, shopping online. The first touch points are experienced close friends, or relatives, so that we can tell that why death business are highly rely on net working and word of mouth and why it is so hard to change: No one would think about it before they need it, while they need it they always seek for someone experienced.
Where is Humanity?
“ My mom has to bring a death certificate to household registration office for cancel my sister’s name in our family, and mobile phone service too ”
Lacking-humanity-services are everywhere, every cancelations of services starts from death certification providing, includes your credit card, bank account, xfinity, Spotify. Cancelation notification may not comes in once, instead, you may probably still get notification of your passed-away-friend’s birthday notified on facebook, or unpaid utility bill 2 months later he died.
Now let us try 1 minutes think about every service or consumer product experience, they are always welcoming and energetic to serve customer’s need, understand user’s need. Then think about cancelation service in all your experience, right, nothing delight, especially for left-behinds, even more cruel.
Grieving is a never-ending journey
” Every year on her memorials day, we will back and talk about her. The conversation was very different every time.”
“I left words to my sister on my Facebook privately, I need a personal grieving place, talking to people will not process everything faster.”
A real grieving is a self-learning process, through talking to oneself to process the loss. Memorials day is not just for remembering one, but also a benchmark to self-learned by comparing the old-self, we are learning new-self being a better one.
A Funeral for dead, or left behinds?
I had a chance to attend Chicago Ideas Week conference. The topic was about death, which included different aspects from doctor, meditators, entrepreneurs, death lecture. This conference gave me a huge insight: We have planned many things and made most decisions for our whole life, to study well, to buy a car, to apply for school, to born a child, vise vera. We also being taught a lot of thing by society, we learned to be a better person, we learned to be positive, we learned lesson from relationship. We’ve learned in our whole life how to gain, how to get more, there’s no lesson teach us how to loss.
Society didn’t teach us how to face dead early, instead, it normed it as an taboo, uncommon topic, awkward atmosphere while we are talking about it. If everyone will die, or will eventually experience someone passed away, how come we have not design a better service for ourselves yet?
