Personal Impacts Of Death

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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 the period preceding it.
Cultural coping mechanisms have not kept pace with the dramatic changes in when and how we die. With a generation or two (rates varying by social class, religion, etc.) having died within institutionalized isolation, Americans are forgetting about how to learn to focus on dying as a human process, how to include the dying in their dialogues, and how to learn the lessons of their existence. Instead, the dying process now too often features silence or diversion. However, not ...

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