A head striking the windshield is enough to end a lifetime of hope and plans. And so when death comes it appears as a threat. The small-town rituals of waking and grieving are giving way to more managed notions of how to deal with death. Our children are shielded from the distasteful knowledge of seeing the body. We tell the little ones that the dead are merely sleeping, or that they have gone away.
Many people feel that the traditional rituals around death are somehow morbid.
Better to have it left in the hands of professionals. No one can attend a funeral or look at death without seeing themselves. It reminds us of our mortality. In denying the rituals of death, we are compelled to deny the foreshadowing of death in our lives. It is no coincidence that our culture is spending increasing amounts of money on excessive medical intervention, anti-aging creams, body mutilations, anything that will help us resist the natural evidence of age and spent youth.