What if we were a little less scared to talk about death?

When Alana Romero was a child, they’d leave their bed in the middle of the night, sneak through her family’s darkened home in South Florida, and slip into her sisters’ bedrooms. But they didn’t want to play, gossip, or otherwise annoy her siblings — she wanted to make sure they hadn’t died in their sleep.

“I would wake up, crawl to my sister’s room, just put my hand under her nose and make sure she was still breathing,” Romero, now 26, recalls. “If she was snoring, that was a good sign.” Romero would then check on her little sister one room over. Is she breathing? Yes. Reassured for the moment, Romero would return to their own bed.

Romero didn’t know exactly why she was making these anxious nighttime visits at the time — she kept them to herself. What they did know was that in their Catholic, Latino family, death wasn’t something that was acknowledged, much less discussed. “It’s like, don’t talk about death, don’t do the taboo things, maybe don’t even prepare for [death] because if you just don’t talk about it, don’t prepare for it, maybe it won’t happen,” Romero says.

...read more at archive.is