Death positivity in the Netherlands
The Netherlands is often described, by visitors and residents alike, as a country where it is unusually easy to talk about dying. People mention the legal route to assisted death, the casual frankness of doctors, the way obituaries appear in regional newspapers with full names and home addresses, the church-turned-museum where children draw skeletons during school visits. None of this means the Dutch find death easy. They lose people, grieve, and stumble for words like everyone else. But over the last forty years, several quiet shifts in law, religion, and temperament have made this small country one of the global anchors of what is now called the death-positive movement.
This article looks at why that happened, how it shows up in everyday life, and where the limits are.
What "death positive" actually means
The phrase comes from the Order of the Good Death, founded in the United States in 2011 by mortician Caitlin Doughty. Its core claim is simple: silence around death harms the living. People who avoid the subject end up unprepared, frightened, and isolated when it arrives. People who can speak about it tend to make better decisions, support one another more easily, and grieve in a less complicated way.
In the Netherlands the movement did not need to be imported under that name. The cultural ground was already prepared by three older shifts.
Why the Netherlands
Secularisation
For most of the twentieth century the Netherlands was a confessional society, organised into Catholic, Protestant, socialist, and liberal "pillars" (verzuiling) that handled their own schools, hospitals, broadcasting, and burial associations. That structure has dissolved.
CBS data show that in 2023, around 57 percent of people aged 15 and older did not consider themselves part of any religious group, up from around 39 percent in 2003. Weekly church attendance is now in the single digits for most denominations. The two largest historic churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN), have lost a majority of their members within two generations.
When religion stopped providing the default script for funerals, families had to invent or borrow one. That practical need created a market and a vocabulary for personal, secular ceremonies, and a willingness to discuss what one actually wants to happen.
The euthanasia law of 2002
On 1 April 2002 the Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act came into force. The Netherlands was the first country in the world to give physicians a defined, lawful path to end a patient's life at the patient's request, provided strict due-care criteria are met and each case is reviewed afterwards by a Regional Euthanasia Review Committee (Regionale Toetsingscommissie Euthanasie).
The law did not invent the practice. Dutch doctors and the medical association KNMG had been negotiating a tolerated framework with prosecutors since the 1980s. What 2002 changed was the public conversation. Once the route existed in writing, people could ask their general practitioner about it without breaking a taboo. In 2024 the review committees received 9,958 reports, about 5.8 percent of all deaths. Those numbers, published openly each spring, are themselves a form of cultural permission: dying is something the country counts.
A separate, ongoing public debate concerns Voltooid Leven (Completed Life), the question of whether people who feel their life is finished, without serious medical illness, should also have access to assisted death. The debate has not produced a law and may not, but it is conducted in parliament, on television, and at kitchen tables, with a directness that surprises foreign observers.
Direct cultural temperament
The Dutch self-image of bespreekbaarheid, "discussability," is partly a stereotype and partly real. Sociologists trace it to Calvinist plain-speech traditions, the small scale of the country, and a long history of negotiation between groups that had to share limited land. Whatever the cause, it shows up in the consulting room. A Dutch oncologist is more likely than many European colleagues to use the word doodgaan (to die) directly with a patient, rather than translating it into "if things do not go well."
This temperament does not make grief lighter. It does make planning conversations easier to start.
Where you can see it
Death Cafés
Death Café is an international format invented by Jon Underwood in London in 2011, building on the cafés mortels of Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz. The rules are minimal: people gather in a public place, drink tea, eat cake, and talk about death. There is no agenda, no therapist, no fee.
The Dutch chapter took quickly. Death Café Nederland and independent organisers list events in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Groningen, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Eindhoven, and many smaller towns; some take place in cafés, others in libraries, hospices, or funeral centres. Locations and dates rotate; the deathcafe.com directory and local Facebook pages remain the most reliable way to find the next one. [unverified — exact city counts vary year to year]
Museum Tot Zover
On the grounds of De Nieuwe Ooster, Amsterdam's largest cemetery, the Museum Tot Zover (Dutch Funeral Museum) presents the cultural history of dying. The permanent collection covers Dutch mourning customs, coffins, memento mori, and the everyday objects of a funeral; temporary exhibitions have addressed grief in pop music, child mortality, and the iconography of skeletons. The museum runs school programmes for children from primary-school age upward, evening lectures, and conversation events that bring the public into direct contact with funeral directors, pathologists, grief counsellors, and theologians.
The museum's existence on cemetery grounds is itself a small statement: this is a place where one walks a dog, visits a grave, drinks coffee, and looks at art, in any order.
Pallialine and the palliative-care network
Pallialine.nl is the national knowledge platform for palliative care, maintained by IKNL (the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation) together with professional associations. It hosts the clinical guidelines that Dutch general practitioners, nurses, and specialists use when caring for dying patients. The platform is unusual in that it is openly accessible: the same protocols a hospital team consults are readable by any family member who wants to understand what is happening.
Around the guidelines sits an infrastructure of hospices (high-care, near-home, and bijna-thuis-huizen), volunteer organisations such as VPTZ Nederland (Vrijwilligers Palliatieve Terminale Zorg), and regional palliative-care networks coordinated through the consortia palliatieve zorg. The professional association KNMG and patient organisations such as Patiëntenfederatie Nederland have published joint material on advance-care planning, encouraging conversations long before they become urgent.
NVVE and the Voltooid Leven debate
The Nederlandse Vereniging voor een Vrijwillig Levenseinde (NVVE), founded in 1973, is the largest right-to-die organisation in the country, with more than 175,000 members in recent reports. NVVE provides standard wilsverklaring forms (advance directives), runs information meetings across the country, and lobbies on end-of-life legislation. It also takes part in the Voltooid Leven debate, alongside academic ethicists, the KNMG, religious organisations, and groups such as the Coöperatie Laatste Wil. The debate is not settled, and the positions are not unanimous; what is striking from outside is how visible the disagreement is.
Funerals as expression
Once the church-default disappeared, Dutch funerals diversified. A typical secular ceremony today might take place at a crematorium auditorium, a natural burial ground (natuurbegraafplaats), a community hall, or the family's own garden. Music is whatever the person loved. The eulogy is given by family members, friends, or a professional ritual leader (uitvaartspreker). Coffins are wicker, cardboard, or recycled wood as often as polished oak. Photo slideshows and homemade booklets are common. Dress codes are rare.
CBS and industry data show that cremation overtook burial as the majority choice around 2003, and now accounts for roughly 65 to 70 percent of funerals. [unverified for the exact 2024 split.] Natural burial grounds, almost unknown twenty years ago, now exist in every province.
What death positivity is not
It is worth saying what the term does not mean. It is not enthusiasm for death. It does not promise that grief will be lighter for those who plan well. It does not require sharing one's plans publicly or attending Death Cafés. It does not displace religious traditions for people who hold them; in the Netherlands, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist communities continue to practise their own rites, and Dutch law accommodates them.
The claim is narrower. It is that a society in which the topic can be discussed produces fewer crises at the bedside, fewer family conflicts in the weeks after a death, and more people who feel they had some say in how their last chapter went.
In the app
The app gives the conversation a place to land. You note the practical things first — preferences for the body, who should be told, what kind of ceremony — and add the personal layer when you are ready. Nothing is shared until you decide it is.
Closed beta — access by invitation.
Sources
- CBS, "Religion in the Netherlands," figures on religious affiliation 2003–2023. https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/51/half-of-dutch-population-not-religious
- Regionale Toetsingscommissies Euthanasie, annual figures and "Tien procent meer meldingen euthanasie in 2024" (March 2025). https://www.euthanasiecommissie.nl/cijfers-2020-2024
- Museum Tot Zover, programmes and collection overview. https://totzover.nl
- Death Café international directory (Dutch chapters). https://deathcafe.com
- NVVE, Nederlandse Vereniging voor een Vrijwillig Levenseinde. https://www.nvve.nl
- Pallialine, national palliative-care guidelines. https://www.pallialine.nl
- KNMG, position papers on end-of-life care and euthanasia. https://www.knmg.nl