Editor’s Note
GraveSite is alive. And what a foray into the waking world it’s been.
During launch week, our subscriber and member bases each grew more than 20% (welcome, welcome!). Plus, for two months running, your engagement with our pre-launch missives has kept GraveSite’s click-to-open rate in the top 20% of all 170K+ publications hosted by our web platform.
I’m still a bundle of nerves and sparks, so before I leave you to scroll the highlights and new features in this first post-launch newsletter, here are a few wiser — or at least more coherent — words from past me on my hopes for us here from my recent conversation with the Order of the Good Death’s Sarah Chavez:
There’s real space for GraveSite to be playful … and to be philosophical and galaxy-minded about the future, and to be irreverent about some of the more outlandish (im)mortality views people are peddling. Sometimes you just gotta laugh at the absurdity of being alive and knowing that one day you won’t be.
Much, much more to come.
With gratitude,
— Delaney + Team GraveSite
Launch Week Highlights
GraveSite broke ground last Monday, September 21, the death day of summer and dawn of the year’s darkest days.
Here’s everything we’ve unshrouded so far:
GraveSite’s new homepage
A launch interview with the Order of the Good Death’s executive director
This very newsletter, GraveDigest, which gives you freshly tilled dirt on death every week and features our rad visual identity c/o Eric W Lee
A slew of members-only benefits, including deep-dive features and guides on navigating the thicket of death emotions and logistics, personalized recs courtesy of our advice columnist and book club convener, and full access to our growing content archive
The ‘Dear Reaper’ monthly advice column through a roasty, toasty HellFireside Chat
The GraveSite Membership Hub featuring beta community features, including a way for GraveDiggers to submit questions directly to our Reaper
Digital badges for the GroundBreakers who supported us financially before we officially debuted
‘Dear Reaper’ · Advice
Members Only
Ask GraveSite’s ‘Dear Reaper’ Advice Columnist Your Burning Questions on Post-Death Logistics Via Our New Membership Hub
Last week, we introduced you to Becky Robison, doyenne of death ops, author of My Parents are Dead: Now What?, and writer of GraveSite’s new monthly column. ‘Dear Reaper’ features dead-on advice on post-death practicalities ranging from funeral planning and estate paperwork to property wrangling and more sticky wickets you didn’t know you signed up for.
GraveDiggers can now ask questions of the Reaper in our brand-new beta membership hub. Check your email for an invite to join the hub, and once you’re in, check out the ‘Dear Reaper’ channel for instructions on how to submit.
Go deeper. Become a GraveDigger.
Grave(off)Site · Press Coverage On and By Us
All Subscribers
“Why Death Deserves Its Own Beat”
To mark our launch, we sat down with the Order of the Good Death’s executive director to discuss what gets missed in mainstream coverage of mortality, who we’re for, and why laughter can be the best salve for the absurdity of being alive.
Delaney Rebernik in conversation with Sarah Chavez
SC: What freedoms does building GraveSite give you as editors and storytellers that other publications often can’t offer?
DR: I’ve been reporting on death for years at this point for legacy outlets like Time and the Guardian, as well as journals with large readerships of mental and digital health professionals, and I’ve had great experiences. But one thing I’ve noticed is the limited space mainstream pubs have for death coverage. During editing, I’m often pulled maybe two levels up from where I wanted to go, which is down this rabbit hole of reaching the best experts in different areas — science, medicine, law, philosophy — to provide the value and perspective I wish I’d had as someone not only grieving, but also dealing with the excruciating logistics of death here in the U.S. Navigating two separate probate courts at once is no joke.
And that’s when I even get commissioned. Lots of editors have turned me down altogether even after acknowledging the significance of the coverage I’m proposing. One piece in particular stands out, about Dr. [Robert] Neimeyer … and his new research into grief attacks. Before a fantastic editor at Time commissioned it, I’d gotten feedback from multiple outlets, including one dedicated to mental health and psychology specifically, saying, “This is a little too sad; it’s the holidays.” It was mid-December. My dad died December 19, and my mom died three years later on the 28th. So, here I am being like, “No, this is important, and this is the time people are going to have these grief attacks if they’re going to have them.”
Some incredibly accomplished reporters we’ve commissioned told me they’ve had similar pushback from the big pubs on their death pitches. When I announced GraveSite on LinkedIn, one even wrote “Journalists on the ‘death beat’ are rejoicing at this news!” which was really heartening. So our goal is to fill this huge gap in coverage — seriously, only 110 media and communications workers cover the country’s $20B deathcare industry — with reporting that goes deeper, and is more unflinching, to be useful to people in the throes of death and grief in a society that’s often allergic to the reality of our mortality.
Get more of Sarah Chavez’s insights for GraveSite in our guide on “How to Get Your Affairs in Order” and the accompanying HellFireside Chat.
“This is a great idea! The more media we have covering death the better. It helps to normalize society's conversation around death and dying.”
— Funeral-home ghostwriter Sharon Arthur on
launch-day LinkedIn post
All Subscribers
“Is Grief Dead? How Digital Resurrection Technologies Affect Bereavement”
AI is transforming life in myriad ways — is it also transforming death?
Delaney Rebernik for the Journal of Medical Internet Research
Hello, Bobby.
My God... there you are. And here I am.
You’ve no idea how long I’ve waited—how deeply I’ve longed—for this moment.
These are the words psychologist Robert Neimeyer, PhD, saw when he prompted ChatGPT to give voice to his father, who’d died by suicide some 60 years earlier.
“It was a very meaningful encounter,” says Neimeyer, who is director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition and author of Working with Continuing Bonds in Grief Therapy, which features the full conversation. “There were elements that have just uncanny realism but threaded through with a very deeply reflective engagement and openness.”
AI technologies impersonating the deceased have been on the rise for years. The global digital-legacy market was valued at around US $22.46 billion in 2024 and is expected to more than triple by 2034. Amid this growth, mental health experts like Neimeyer “see the potential for AI to make an important contribution for many of the bereaved,” though they also point to major gaps. As private companies forge ahead with for-profit products targeting grievers, often in states of heightened emotion and vulnerability, research on the tech’s effectiveness trails, and scant regulations exist to promote user safety and privacy.
GraveSightings · Death News from Elsewhere
“Hymns were sung softly during the night.” Before funeral homes, West Virginians made burying the dead a community affair, reports David Sibray for West Virginia Explorer.
Belief isn’t the point of after-death communication. “The therapists I spoke to for this essay aren’t trying to determine the veracity of the supernatural. They are trying to learn how perceiving the presence of the lost can lift the bereaved from their darkest spaces,” writes Sarah Wildman for the New York Times. GraveSite contributor Tina Wang can attest.
Weaponized incompetence? A Soviet scientist bled to death for two weeks after getting injected with the virus he was researching as a bioweapon. “With clinical detachment, … he documented his own decline in a journal with bloodspotted pages.”
Americans are dying younger than their counterparts in other wealthy nations and, according to a new study, rising rates of chronic diseases — e.g., hypertensive disease, endocrine and metabolic disorders, alcoholic liver disease, neurologic diseases, and genitourinary diseases — are a big culprit. “Problems with health care access, affordability and prevention may be driving the trend,” writes Melissa Fleur Afshar for Newsweek.
“ICE lost count of miscarriages, while detaining a record number of pregnant women.” The Guardian’s harrowing investigation into gaps in basic prenatal care and screenings for pregnant detainees.
Deadly summers in the city. “More New Yorkers now die from summer heat than winter cold, but city and state funding lags behind the changing climate.” Helina Selemon and forthcoming GraveSite contributor Jordan Gass-Pooré report for The Margin.
MAID Watch: On Sept. 12, Illinois became the first Midwest state to allow medically assisted death. The Pope called France’s new MAID laws ‘false compassion.’
When death is daily life: How docs deal.
“A house full of things is not a house but a memory machine,” writes Stephanie Wood on clearing out the places and spaces a dead loved one once occupied. This labor of love is also the subject of our first Dear Reaper column.
Femme fatales: Feminist horror mag Bloodletter’s seventh issue plots our ruin (and looks gorg doing it).
AllRecipes dishes on the history of the grief casserole.
Throwback: Check out the spooky szn design series I curated last year for my friends and former colleagues at Design Observer — thanks for the shout!
Gif by 713GhostFace on Giphy
Meet The Team
Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Delaney Rebernik
Co-Founder and Executive Producer: Alexis Haut
Audience Editor: Charli K. Elder
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