Sublime

Death itself isn’t inherently a taboo subject. So why are our cultural attitudes toward death and dying fraught with dysfunction and fear?

“Guilt. I’ve seen this so many times. She hasn’t visited her for years. Now she’s here acting like she can’t live without her mother. It’s bullshit, Cat,” he said. And I knew he was right.

as if they were heavenly beings, rather than meat and bone like the rest of us.

So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.”

The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

saudade, which indicates a longing, tinged with nostalgia, madness, and sickness over something you have lost.

ghoul.

Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more t