In just 18 months, Meghan Johnson lost both her parents.
Searching for grief support, she found little that created dialogue or extended beyond memes.
Along with her close friend, Taylor Franklin — who was also grieving a parent — Johnson co-founded the Madison Death Collective in 2024 to spark genuine conversations about loss. What began as an Instagram page is now an expanding community.
Johnson runs the collective by tapping into her background as an artist and apprenticed death midwife, curating events centering local death and grief workers, creating spaces for compassionate connection. These gatherings, she says, gently push back against the cultural pressure to stay strong, offering room to feel, mourn and simply be human together.
What do you think is the biggest challenge our community faces?
When you experience grief and death, there are few spaces where you feel comfortable being able to actually express that, or even acknowledge it, because of the way our culture exists. We often only get three days of bereavement if a loved one passes.
We have structures and restrictions on how people can grieve, so people police themselves and suppress grief. That’s not working in our culture. If you look anywhere you can see how suppressed grief is playing out. I think that’s tied to our ability to grieve collectively as well. I say this without judgment, because I find myself in this space, too.
When you think of global warming, or any number of tragic things happening on earth, it’s hard to not go numb. We do not have safe communal spaces or rituals around how we express those feelings.
Many of us want to creatively approach this differently. With the Madison Death Collective, we come together and build a new world, even if it’s in our imaginations. What if we lived in a world where we could grieve?
I think that is a creative project. The Collective is creating these conversations through an artistic and creative lens. We are coming together as artists — and when I say artist, I do not mean someone who has to have an arts degree, but the artists that are in all of our inner children — to talk about this.
We do not need credentials to come and talk about our grief together.
What do you wish people in our community understood better?
I wish we could come together and acknowledge our grief and our pain. To acknowledge that our fears and death are so intertwined in all of that.
I think it’s a powerful angle to bring people together. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, “What really matters?”
What is one change you would make if you could that would make life better for people in our community?
Sometimes, when we have difficult conversations, we love to cloak them in structure and agendas and corporate-speak. I think what we really need is to drop so much of that and just be human.
I think what’s really beautiful about death and art is that they both do that to you. They’re both very powerful — like when you go to a museum and you see a piece that just changes your brain. Maybe it’s a painting, sculpture, installation, film or a piece of music, but something where you’re just like, “Wow. We are beautiful magical creatures living on this earth, doing wild things.”
I love that art can do that and remind us of the creatureliness of us. Death does that, too.
Part of what drew me to death midwifery is the experiences that I went through with caregiving and terminal illness. I was terrified as a child of having to lose my parents. That was the scariest idea to me. And when I went through it, while it was scary and sad, it was also extremely profound in a way you can’t put words to it. And again, art does that.
So I would love for us to drop some of this structure. We would love to follow a rigid path like Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, but that is not what it is to be human. We have to wash that off a little bit.
What in our community gives you hope?
We have had a number of events where people have shown up and immediately shared their grief and gratitude, and also shared about serendipitous things that have happened to them. I think whatever is happening in this space that we’re creating, which is just so brand new and transforming still, is really great.
When Taylor and I started this, we knew we were going to do what we once needed. I had no idea if anybody else was going to like this thing.
And gratefully, it has brought so many wonderful people to us. That gives me a lot of hope and it says to me Madison was ready for something like this. Madison is craving more stuff like this that’s a little bit on the edge, a little bit avant-garde.
Seeing the need for this has given me hope…people actually seem really ready for this.
This interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.
Visit the Madison Death Collective’s Instagram page and website for upcoming events.
