STARING DEATH IN THE FACE

Staring Death in the Face

Staring Death in the Face

For many of us, our own death seems distant. Indeed, it is comparatively rare for young adults to die, and when they do, their deaths are most often violent. For children and adolescents, death sometimes comes in the form of accidents or disease; it also touches young lives when parents and (more often) grandparents die. As young adults, most of us face the loss of important persons in our lives—our parents and grandparents—and these losses remind us that we too will not live forever. For those who are middle-aged, the physical realities of aging as well as the increased likelihood of losing parents or age peers due to cancer or heart disease bring death closer. For older persons, death is almost a fact of life. The reality of death is perhaps most evident when we lose loved ones, especially others with whom we have shared our lives.

In this report, we explore the salience of death across the life span. We assume that both age-related and individual differences exist in people's awareness of death. Such awareness is highly relevant to our individual lives and contributes to the meaning we assign to life. Indeed, idiosyncratic variations in the meanings we assign to death can either enhance or suppress our attention to death-related experiences, which may or may not covary with age. The meaning of death may also be rooted in historical events that shape the nature of death itself and our responses to it, and each of these events may have differential impacts on persons, varying by birth cohort. These distinctions parallel those made in differentiating age-normative, history-normative, and nonnormative influences on developmental change across the life span. (Giles 2008)

Meanings Of Death

What death means to us personally dictates how we live our lives as well as how we react to death. Death is often seen as the ultimate loss. Death may involve losses of several kinds:

The loss of our ability to have experiences

The loss of our ability to predict subsequent events (after death)

The loss of our bodies

The loss of our ability to care for persons who are dependent on us

The loss of a loving relationship with our family

The loss of the opportunity to complete treasured plans and projects

The loss of being in a relatively painless state

In addition, for some, death may mean punishment for one's sins. To the meanings of death listed above, researchers has added death as cycling/recycling (as death winds in and out of life), as enfeebled life (the dead are simply less alive or are a less vigorous form of life), as a continuation of life, and as nothingness. As we have noted, the meanings we attach to death reflect not only our unique life experiences but our shared cultural values about living and dying. In this respect, it is important to note that the tendency to personalize death (in which death represents a living person who has preceded one in death and with whom ...