Let’s bring death back to life | Paul Simard | TEDxHEC Montréal

Paul Simard opens by asserting that our current way of life is unsustainable precisely because we have removed death from our daily experience. He contrasts society's celebration of beginnings and life with its deep discomfort around endings and death, noting that people are culturally conditioned to grieve quickly, stay silent about death, and 'get back to living' as fast as possible.

Simard traces how Western society has institutionalized the exile of death: illness is handed to hospitals where death is treated as a failure, dying is managed in palliative care residences, the dead are handled by funeral homes, and even aging is increasingly sequestered in retirement communities. He critiques the very language around death — words like 'passed,' 'gone,' 'transitioned,' and 'lost' — as tools that soften and distance us from the reality of dying. He also points to the growing transhumanist movement seeking to eliminate or indefinitely delay death as evidence of how estranged we have become from an honest relationship with mortality.

Simard then articulates three gifts that death, if welcomed back into life, could offer us. The first is the capacity to be still, slow, and present — qualities crowded out by a culture obsessed with growth and happy endings. The second is a transformation in how we love: seeing others as flowers in full bloom, beautiful precisely because their existence is finite. The third, and most radical, is the gift of limits — the idea that we were never meant to be limitless, but shaped. Using the metaphor of a musical note, he argues that a note is beautiful not despite the fact that it ends, but because it ends, making it part of something larger — a song, an opus written by life, made audible by individuals, and orchestrated by death.

Drawing on his work as a death doula, Simard shares that at the end of life, people consistently let go of material accumulations and achievements, holding tightly instead to love and relationships. He describes death as a 'great transmission' meant to move outward into the world, but notes that in modern society it is met with nowhere to go. He reframes grief not as weakness but as love seeking a new form of expression, and suggests that to grieve forever is a sign of enduring love — a fortune, not a burden.

Simard closes by arguing that living with death is not morbid but a call to full presence, honesty, and reverence. He frames the reintegration of death into life as a 'reclamation' and a 'return to home' — something that echoes in our bones but that modern culture has caused us to forget.