FREE ESSAY ON IMPACTS OF DEATH

IMPACTS OF DEATH

Personal Impacts of Death
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.
--Margaret Mead
Odd as it sounds, there can be little question that some deaths are better than others.
People cross-culturally have always made invidious distinctions between good deaths and
bad. Compare, for instance, crooner Bing Crosby's sudden death following eighteen rounds
of his beloved golf with the slow motion, painful expiration of an eighty-year-old
diabetic. Bedridden following the amputation of his leg, the old man eventually began
slipping in and out of consciousness. This continues over a period of years, exhausting
the emotional, physical. and financial resources of his family. The essence of a good
death thus involves the needs of the dying (such as coming at the end of full and
completed lives, and when death is preferred to continued existence) as well as those of
their survivors and the broader society.
Whereas the prevalence of unanticipated and premature deaths led to pre-industrial
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 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 surprisingly in our service-oriented economy,
there are challenges to this medicalized, depersonalizing cultural route toward life's
conclusion
SOCIALIZATIONS FOR DEATH
Like those at the dawn of human species, young children understand neither the
inevitability of their own mortality nor its finality. Death fears must be learned.
Paralleling the attempts of anthropologists and historians to map the death ethos of
Western culture over time, there is a sizable research tradition in psychology and
psychiatry on exactly how children's concepts of death unfold developmentally. As social
scientists have studied the long-term social and cultural consequences of mass epidemics
or total war, psychiatrists attempt to gauge how early firsthand death encounters later
affect the motivations, psychoses, and fears of adulthood. And what lessons are learned
in childhood about death? Consider the Saturday morning catechism. The lessons begin with
the selection of breakfast cereals. Consider the products to the right, featuring flawed
but immortal creatures (Frankenstein, a creature created from body parts, and Dracula,
who subsists on the blood of the living). While eating their immortality flakes, children
may watch their favorite cartoon: The Roadrunner. The story line never varies: a coyote
employs a number of strategies to kill (we assume to eat) the bird, only to have each
attempt lethally backfire before he is once again resurrected to resume the hunt. This
cartoon is followed by others bearing similar messages of violence, death, and
indestructibility.
The following is the breakdown of their responses to the question When you were a child,
how was death talked about in your family? 
Openly 39% 
With some sense
of discomfort 19%
Only when necessary
and then with an attempt
to exclude the children 14%
As though it were a taboo
subject 2%
Never recall any discussion 26%
TOTAL 439
For nearly one-half of these students the first personal involvement with death was the
loss of a grandparent; for one out of five, it was the death of a pet. Consider how
different these lessons received by children of America's upper-middle class vary from
those from the lower rungs of society's stratification order. For the former, death
typically comes to the old--to those who have lived full and completed lives. For the
latter, death too often comes prematurely due to violence or accident. Consider, for
instance, the following table derived from the 1988-90 NORC General Social Surveys
(n=4194), summarizing Americans' responses to the question Within the past 12 months, how
many people have you known personally who were victims of homicide? 
PERCENT OF AMERICANS KNOWING ONE OR MORE HOMICIDE VICTIMS 
AGE WHITE AMERICANS AFRICAN AMERICANS
18-25 11.6% 41.8%
26-35 9.5% 30.6%
36-45 8.4% 22.9%
46-55 7.4% 11.9%
56-65 8.0% 23.7%
66+ 3.8% 6.6%
TOTAL 8.0% 24.0%
In addition to individuals' social class, death socialization also vary across the
lifespan. Late adolescence and early adulthood are periods when individuals are drunk
with future time. Senses of immortality are lost during the middle years, when those of
one's parents' generation routinely die (and one realizes that one is next up to bat with
the Grim Reaper) and when the first of one's friendship circle dies of natural causes. In
old age, individuals' futurity dissolves as their time runs out.
Is there a life-cycle pattern of death fears? To find out, consider the responses to the
statement Thinking about dying doesn't bother me much, which was asked to 1,201
randomly-selected Americans in the 1994 AARP Images of Aging in America survey. In total,
31 percent of Americans disagreed somewhat or strongly, females (33%) more than males
(27%). Those 18-34 were most likely to disagree (38%) while those 65- 74 disagreed the
least (23%).