Beginning of Essay
When a person is born, we rejoice, and when they're married, we jubilate, but when they die, we try to pretend that nothing happened. Odd as it sounds, there can be little question that some deaths are better than others. People cross-culturally have always made i ....

Middle of Essay
.... cultures to focus death fears on individuals' postmortem fates, the death fears of modern cultures are more likely to focus on the processes of dying. Thus contemporary fears of dying involve the anxieties of dying within institutional settings, where often life is structured for the convenience of staff and where residents suffer both physical and psychological pain in their depersonalization. They also involve fears of being victims of advanced Alzheimer's Disease: being socially dead and yet biologically alive. In sum, the dreaded liminality between the worlds of the living and the dead have historically shifted from the period after death to t ....