“There has developed in contemporary culture a profound dread of death and the process of dying.”

In our American culture – death is taboo.

As Americans, we do not want to think about death – we do not want to consider that we will die. It’s as though death in the USA is optional!

Great thinkers remind us that to avoid death was to avoid a free life

• Plato said that philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death.
• Seneca said that he or she who learns how to die unlearns slavery.
• Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn how to die.

A good portion of our well-being stems from our ability to meet death and yet there is no culture that shuns death (or suffering) the way ours does. What we shun, we fear – what we fear controls us.

This resistance to the thought of death is so pervasive, that death itself surprises us even though, as we can all agree, we’ve all been dying since time began.

Because of our tunnel vision, we behave illogically. We act as though we may be able to skip the last stop on the line with just one more pill or one more wave of research or one more face-lift.

Richard Heffner (on the PBS series, “The Open Mind”) alluded to what may be one of the many reasons we resist death the way we do in the United States:

“Death’s very nature has changed over the last 40 or 50 years. At one time, a stroke would have been the end of a life. Now death is endlessly drawn out due to the efforts our culture puts on extending life. The possibilities for a gentle closure of life are often given up in our search to extend chronic disease with drugs, surgeries, and medical innovation. Rather than die when our time comes – we prolong death and die – overwhelmed by uncontrolled physical pain, excessive financial burden, unresponsive care plans, and emotional isolation.”