THE OBJECTS WE LEAVE BEHIND, THE RITUALS WE CARRY FORWARD

Sociologist, grief coach and death doula Anne Meekers and trend researcher and innovation strategist Stefanie Schillmöller challenge the way our culture approaches grief, remembrance, and mortality. From personal loss and collective mourning they explore how design can create space for loss, shape new rituals, and help us stay connected to the people we love long after they are gone. They talk about a simple but radical question: If design shapes how we live, how should it shape the way we say goodbye?

To be loved is to be seen. In your project Casa Coco, people come together around grief, creating a space where emotions are witnessed and shared. In that sense, grief becomes something to be seen too: reframed as something beautiful, natural, and continuous, rather than something to overcome. In a society that often avoids talking about death, what kinds of shared rituals or spaces do we need to make grief feel more visible, supported and accepted?
Anne Meekers:
After Coco was stillborn, I suddenly understood how uncomfortable people are with grief. Not just death, but grief that stays. Grief that doesn’t fit neatly into a few weeks off work or a single funeral. What hurt me most wasn’t only losing her. It was how quickly the world expected me to return to normal. Meanwhile my body was still postpartum, my milk was coming in and I was still her mother. I didn’t need people to fix it or tell me everything happens for a reason. I needed people who could stay. Who could say her name. Who could sit with me in it without looking away.

That’s also where the Casa Coco Grief Collective comes from for me. From wanting to create the kind of space I couldn’t really find. A space where grief doesn’t have to be hidden or overcome, but where it can be witnessed together.
Because I don’t think grief is something that ends. The relationship continues. Love continues. Death is part of life and grief is part of love. Maybe a more death-accepting culture begins when we stop treating grief as something private or uncomfortable and start making space for it as a natural part of being human - collectively, openly, and without shame.


Before losing Coco, you worked as a designer focused on creating experiences and solving problems. How did grief change your understanding of what design can - or cannot - do?
Anne Meekers:
Before Coco died, I think I saw design mostly as a way to solve problems or improve experiences. But grief confronted me with something that cannot be solved. After she was stillborn, I became hyper aware of all the ways systems and spaces are designed around efficiency, productivity and moving on. The hospital waiting rooms. The language people use. The lack of rituals. Even how quickly grief becomes invisible once the funeral is over.

And as a grieving mother, you feel all of that in your body.
What changed for me is that I no longer think good design is always about fixing something. Sometimes design can simply create space for an experience to exist. To be witnessed. To be carried differently.

Casa Coco also came from that realization. Not from wanting to heal grief or make it disappear, but from wanting to create spaces where grief and love can continue to exist together openly. Because death is part of life. And I think design has a responsibility not only to support how we live, but also how we lose, mourn, remember, and stay connected to the people we love.

Stefanie Schillmöller:
I recognise what Anne describes in almost every good example I've encountered in my six years of researching this field. The successful ones aren't the ones that try to resolve or make grief more manageable. They give it form. A ritual, an object, a ceremony — something you can actually live inside of rather than be subjected to. And what strikes me is how rarely the design industry has consciously chosen to go there. Most of what exists was designed by accident, or by people in the middle of their own loss. That's both moving and a little alarming because it means one of the most universal human experiences is still largely an undesigned space.

In a world structured around speed, productivity, and constant movement, what does death force us to notice that everyday life allows us to ignore?
Anne Meekers:
I think death completely interrupts the illusion that we are in control.
We spend so much of our lives distracted by productivity, plans, deadlines and constant movement. And then grief enters your life and suddenly none of those things matter in the same way anymore. After Coco died, I noticed how much everyday life is designed to keep us from really sitting with vulnerability, mortality or even presence. But death forces you to slow down. It confronts you with what cannot be optimized or fixed.

For me, it made love feel much more visible. The fragility of life, but also the depth of connection. It made me notice how desperately people want to avoid pain and at the same time how deeply we all long to be seen in it.
I think grief strips life down to what is actually essential. Not performance or productivity, but connection, care, community, memory, the body and, time. And maybe that’s why grief can feel so isolating in our culture - because it moves at a completely different rhythm than the world around us.

Stefanie Schillmöller:
What Anne describes at a personal level, I see mirrored at the industry level. We've built entire economies around distraction, speed and the idea that the next version will be better. And the fast growing death economy tends to inherit those same values. Faster funerals. Frictionless grief. Digital legacy platforms that turn memory into content. But the people I talk to who've actually sat with loss come back with a completely different brief. Not 'how do we make this easier' but 'how do we make this real.' Death forces us to ask the question that productivity culture spends billions helping us to avoid: what was this actually for, what is the point of all that?

In some cultures, death is marked through celebration rather than silence or solemnity. What can we learn from these practices and could celebration and mourning coexist without canceling each other out
Anne Meekers:
After Coco died, I realized how much our culture associates grief with silence, heaviness or something hidden away. But I don’t think celebration and mourning are opposites at all. I think they can exist together.
Because when we celebrate someone’s life, we are also acknowledging the depth of the loss. And when we grieve deeply, it’s usually because there was deep love there first. What I find beautiful in cultures that approach death more collectively or ceremonially is that death remains part of life. People gather, tell stories, cook, cry, laugh and remember. The person is still included in the community in some way. I think we’ve lost many of those shared rituals. Grief has become very private and isolated. And that can make people feel like they have to choose between being devastated or being grateful, between mourning and celebrating.
But my experience with Coco is that both can exist at the same time. I can feel immense pain about losing her, and still celebrate that she existed, that she changed me, that she is part of my family. For me, remembering her is not only sadness. It’s also love, connection, ritual and presence. And I actually think allowing grief to be more visible and shared could create more aliveness too. Because when we stop avoiding death, we also become more connected to life itself - to each other, to our bodies and to what really matters.

As technologies like AI and longevity science increasingly reshape how we think about mortality, identity, and even permanence, how do you think design influences the way we imagine death, remembrance, and what it means to stay connected after loss?
Stefanie Schillmöller:
Design is already shaping these narratives. The question is whether it does so consciously or by accident (and right now, mostly by accident). When AI generates a synthetic voice of someone who has died and this gets played at their funeral, that's a design decision. When a cemetery becomes an urban park or when a hospital gown is redesigned to look like a dress – that's a design decision. Each one tells a story about what death means, what grief is allowed to look like, and who gets to be seen.

What I find both exciting and worrying is that most of the designers shaping this space don't know they're doing it. They're building platforms, products, experiences — and death arrives as a side effect. The opportunity is to do it deliberately: to ask what objects, spaces, and images help people live with mortality rather than escape it. What does a memorial look like when it's designed for the living, not just the dead? What visual language do we need for grief in a world where presence no longer ends at death?

In nature, dying is not an end, but part of a larger cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Can design interrupt linearity and act as a kind of “soft resurrection” of presence, memory, and relationships?
Anne Meekers:
I really feel that. After Coco died, what disappeared physically did not disappear relationally. My relationship with her didn’t end. It changed form.
And I think nature understands that much better than we do. In nature, death is never separate from life. Things decay, transform, return, nourish something else. There’s continuity in it. I think design can help us reconnect with that understanding. Not by pretending we can bring someone back, but by creating ways for presence, memory, and connection to remain part of everyday life.
For me, rituals, spaces, objects, gatherings, even the act of speaking someone’s name — these are all forms of keeping a relationship alive. Not in a literal sense, but emotionally, collectively, symbolically.

Maybe that’s what a “soft resurrection” is. Not denying death, but refusing the idea that love or connection suddenly disappear because someone is no longer physically here. I think design has the power to create containers for that continuity. To remind us that grief is not only about absence, but also about ongoing connection.

Today, memory feels increasingly placeless. Remembrance can happen anywhere, a kitchen, a forest, a digital space. For example, you remember Coco through the objects you create and build the Coco corner with. what then defines a “site” of memory and can it make us rethink what contemporary spaces of memory can look like?
Stefanie Schillmöller:
Actually, I'd push back on the word 'placeless'. It implies that something has been lost, that remembrance used to have a proper place, but now it's floating aimlessly. I don't see it that way. What I observe is a multiplication and personalisation of expressions. In modern, secular societies, there are fewer strict norms and no prescribed rituals. People are filling that open space with their own creations. These include home altars, forest walks, playlists, bake-offs using grandma's best recipes, etc. Memory hasn't become placeless, it's become very personal.

What makes any place a site of memory is simply that: intention. A deliberate act of return. This could be in a kitchen or a concert hall. This year, the Grief Awareness Week (Trauerwoche 2026) that I am involved in is entirely focused on sound – music, voice and spoken word – as a means of remembrance. It turns out that a song can hold someone just as well as a gravestone, sometimes even better.

Anne Meekers:
I wouldn't say memory feels placeless to me. Rather, that it transcends place.Since Coco died, I've noticed how many different things can suddenly bring her close. A corner in our home, an object I've made for her, a song, a smell, a conversation. There isn't one place where I remember her. There are many.
The Coco corner is special because it's a space I've intentionally created for her. But some of the strongest moments of remembrance happen unexpectedly, when a place or moment triggers a memory.

What I've learned is that remembrance doesn't only live in cemeteries or monuments. It can live in the spaces we move through every day. For me, memory is less about a fixed location and more about all the ways Coco remains part of my life.

If we talk about the topic we inevitably have to also talk about nature. What could a sustainable, ecologically responsible approach to death look like and do you also see this as an opportunity to fundamentally change our relationship with death?
Stefanie Schillmöller:
For a long time, death seemed like the most sustainable thing we do. We die, we return to the earth, the cycle closes. Sustainability simply wasn't on the radar. But once we understood that this isn't actually how it works, that we're putting embalmed bodies full of toxic pollutants into lacquered wood coffins lined with synthetic materials six feet underground, or cremating them with enormous amounts of fossil fuel, we started to actively look for alternatives.
And that's when it became one of the most interesting innovation playgrounds around: Mushroom coffins that biodegrade in 45 days and neutralize toxins along the way. Human composting that turns a body into nutrient-rich soil or 3D-printed reef structures made from cremated remains that regenerate endangered marine ecosystems. These aren't fringe ideas anymore, they're funded, operating companies!

And what strikes me most isn't the technology. It's the narrative shift. The new story is: we can enrich life after death. We can be part of something larger than ourselves. That's not just a sustainability story, that's a completely different relationship with mortality. Death isn't an ending but a start for something new. That's the first genuinely new story about death that Western culture has had in centuries!


There is a connection between our need for a legacy and the way we shape death such as through monumental temples, graves, and statues built as forms of remembrance. How might design help us rethink memory differently, perhaps less permanent, but more meaningful
Stefanie Schillmöller:
The temples and statues framing comes from a worldview where legacy meant scale. But what people actually carry forward isn't the monument – it's the stories, the values someone lived by, the impact they had on you. That kind of legacy doesn't need marble.

But I want to make a distinction: Personal and communal remembrance need different design responses. For personal grief, what helps isn't permanence, it's presence. For collective mourning – the Holocaust memorial, spaces of historical reckoning – permanence still matters. Not because of ego but because society needs things that force an encounter, a conversation that might otherwise never happen. The question isn't how permanent. It's what purpose the permanence serves.


Do you already see any compelling examples where design is beginning to approach this topic in a sensitive way?
Stefanie Schillmöller:
There are many compelling examples: mushroom coffins, reef burials, dementia care objects that reach people when words no longer can, video games that help children grieve. But rather than listing them, I want to say something about why they matter collectively.

The dominant end-of-life aesthetic in the West hasn't evolved in over a century. We've wrapped death in greys, blacks, and uninspired rituals, a design language that signals: this is something to avoid. And so people avoid it. Not because they're indifferent, but because nothing in their visual or physical world invites them in.

I genuinely believe that to change our relationship with death, we also need a new visual language. One that brings beauty, curiosity, and honesty to a topic we've made deliberately dreary. The challenge is not to make things easier, but more human.

Image 2,7 ©Anna Rose

Interview by Tina Enöckl