When I was younger, I was pretty callous about death.

“I want to die,” I’d toss out after eating too much pizza or getting a B on a paper. It meant nothing to me; all the bands I liked were singing about death that way, and all my friends talked about it without any air of finality. Because when you’re 14, nothing feels final — we still had so much life ahead of us, that death was nothing to fear.

That changed radically for me not much later, when I had real brushes with the aftershocks that a death leaves behind. I stood at wakes for relatives or friends’ relatives with unease. I made small talk with those in mourning, unable to relate to their pain. But I saw it — their tears, their confusion, their own ironically casual tones about the deceased — and that was enough to remind me, oh, right. Death is a thing that happens to all of us, and around all of us. It will happen to me one day, too.

And that’s when I learned to fear it and the feelings that a death of a loved one can create. Maybe that was the wrong lesson to take away, however, suggests Canadian studio Laundry Bear Games. In its debut PC game A Mortician’s Tale, death is not only natural, but something worth utmost respect. It’s an inevitability that deserves as much care as life does.

The short narrative game plays like a combination of Trauma Center: Under the Knife and Cibele: It uses simple emails and overheard snatches of conversations to tell of a funeral home that’s at risk of closure. Young mortician Charlie does her best cleaning or cremating bodies as requested, using a variety of tools in a particular order, all while slowly watching her job change for the worse.

As the months wear on, we watch as the funeral services that Charlie helps to prepare go from intimate experiences to corporatized ones. The intimate ones were strange to explore, as if I were a voyeur walking through a family’s most intense personal experience. But what was most strange was how lax these short sequences felt. Some mourners were crying, but some were just talking about watching Netflix after the service. Others talked about the food.

I was uncomfortable with how A Mortician’s Tale presented death at first, as if it were some tragicomedy. These funerals were so short, too; Charlie spends more time preparing the bodies than anyone does mourning them. It read to me as though, now that these lives had ended, I was expected to just ... move onto the next one. That’s not what death was supposed to feel like, I thought; death was supposed to be some eternal sorrow.

But A Mortician’s Tale instead turns its focus toward the practice of sending the body off to rest, whether that body is intact or reduced to ash. Its concerns are twofold: normalizing death as something not scary, but as important as birth; and looking at the industry of death itself. Because that’s what death turns out to be by the end; it’s an industry that some look to make a quick buck off.

And that’s the part that irked me, just as it should. Under the home’s new, stuffier ownership, Charlie is asked to dash off bodies in the most cost-effective way possible. Her email inbox reminded me that she doesn’t believe in that. She believes in burying the dead as they wanted to have been buried; she believes in sustainable embalming and cremation processes, and allowing the families to have the funeral that feels most appropriate and relieving.

If death is inevitable, why spend it in uncomfortable darkness? It’s a message — of “death positivity,” according to the team — that I’m not accustomed to, but the tiny drips of funeral prep facts and the repetitive nature of cleaning the bodies changed that. Loss does not have to be devastating; life goes on around us. I won’t go back to being so flippant about it, but maybe I don’t have to be so afraid of death, either.