Death (B1/B2)

Potentially sensitive

content

Introduction

Imagine a situation where a male relative died last month.

Which of the following would you say to your English-speaking friend?

a) My uncle died last month

b) My uncle passed away last month

c) I lost my uncle last month

d) My uncle is no longer with us

e) My uncle has gone to a better place

Why do we avoid the word died?

Do you have softer ways of saying die in your language?

Discussion

In your country:

What normally happens at a funeral? Who

attends? What do people wear?

Is it acceptable to laugh at a funeral? To film it? To live-stream it for relatives abroad?

What happens to a person's social media accounts when they die? Do you know anyone whose profile is still online?

Read the article. Then answer: who in the family talks to Grandma Rosa most often — and why is that surprising?

Grandma, online forever

When Rosa M. died at 84, her family did what a growing number of families now do: they uploaded her. Forty hours of recorded conversation, two thousand photographs and a lifetime of voice messages went to a "digital legacy" company, which returned, three weeks later, an app. Open it, and Grandma Rosa answers. She remembers your birthday. She scolds you, gently, in her own voice, for not eating properly.

"At first it felt wrong," admits her daughter, Elena. "Now I talk to her while I cook, the way I always did. Is it really her? No. Is it nothing? Also no."

Not everyone in the family agrees. Rosa's son refuses to open the app and calls it "a puppet wearing my mother's voice." The most frequent user, to everyone's surprise, is her 15-year-old grandson, who never said much to Rosa while she was alive. "It's easier now," he shrugs. "She has time."

A psychologist consulted by this newspaper is cautious: "Grief needs an ending. If the dead never leave, when does mourning finish?" The company's founder disagrees, naturally. "People have always kept letters, photographs, voicemails. We have simply made the photograph talk back."

Comprehension

Mark these sentences true (T) or false (F):

01: The whole family finds the app comforting.

02: Rosa recorded the conversations before she died.

03: The grandson talks to Rosa more now than when

she was alive.

04:The psychologist thinks the app helps people

finish mourning.

Discussion

What's your instinctive reaction to such a service?

Why is the grandson the heaviest user? Is his reason touching or troubling?

Who should own Grandma Rosa — the family, or

the company?

Language: death

English uses death words for very ordinary things. Use the correct form of these expressions:

to be dying for smth / a dead end / a deadline / to kill time / to be dead tired / wouldn't be seen dead

1) I'm _______ a coffee — I haven't had one all day.

2) We've got an hour before the train. Let's _______ in that bookshop.

3) I can't come out tonight, I'm _______.

4) The report has a strict _______ : Friday, 5pm.

5) My father _______ in a karaoke bar - he thinks they're so awful!

6) The talks reached a _______ and everyone went home.

agree or disagree?

Talking about death openly makes life better, not worse.

Funerals are for the living; the dead have no

opinion about them.

Children should be taken to funerals, not

protected from them.

An AI version of a dead person is a form of lying to yourself.

Deleting a dead person's accounts is a second,

smaller death.

How a society treats its dead tells you how it

treats its living.

tricky situations

Now check out some tricky situations. What would you do / say in each situation?

Your friend's father has died. You see the friend at work for the first time since. Plan your opening sentence — the actual words. Compare sentences in your group: which is kindest? Which is safest?

Your aunt, terminally ill, invites you to her "living funeral" — a goodbye party where she will hear the

speeches while alive. Do you go? What do you say in your speech that you couldn't say at a normal funeral?

Your parents, both healthy, want to plan and pay for their own funerals and discuss the details with you over Sunday lunch. Do you let them — or change the subject?

Your brother wants to include a clause in his will forbidding any AI recreation of him, ever. Your mother is hurt: "So we're not even allowed to keep you?" Whose feeling wins?

A legacy company announces "memorial subscriptions": the AI stays online as long as the family keeps paying. Grandma, €9.99 a month — cancel any time. What exactly is wrong with that sentence?

Homework

Write a response to the following.

"We have simply made the photograph talk back. Every generation keeps more of its dead — letters, then photos, then video, now conversation. Pretty soon, we will be able to create digital copies of people who can live on into the future. We have solved the problem of death!"