Rethinking mortality: exploring the boundaries between life and death

摘要

"It's not that I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens," Woody Allen once quipped. Few of us do. Even though mortality may be the most basic fact of life, it's the one topic of conversation that most people will do anything to avoid. Yet for all of our reluctance to face up to it, death has once again burst into our collective psyche. "Death is having a moment," the Atlantic magazine recently reported. There is a growing "death movement" in response to the widespread sentiment that death has been sanitized in American culture, shielded from public view as dying became medicalized and removed from daily life. We're seeing a spate of new books and Web sites on death and dying, along with "death cafes" and "death salons"-even "death dinners." The renewed interest in mortality has practical value, if it can help us develop sound protocols for "dying well." It also scratches the metaphysical itch for people who wonder what happens when we die.