Estranged Death

Wonderful essay on death and how modern America deals with it. The last paragraph says it all:

The bodiless obsequy, which has become a staple of available options for bereaved families in the past half century, has created an estrangement between the living and the dead that is unique in human history. Furthermore, this estrangement, this disconnect, this refusal to deal with our dead (their corpses), could be reasonably expected to handicap our ability to deal with death (the concept, the idea of it). And a failure to deal authentically with death might have something to do with an inability to deal authentically with life.

There is something to be said for experiencing funerals, the loss of someone's loved one even if they had not been particularly close to you. Watching others cope is a great and sobering learning. Those who have had very limited exposure to such events in their lives may have correspondingly limited ability to deal with big pain and loss that may not  involve death. Almost everyone is a capable of celebrating and partaking the joy of birth but very few are nearly as able to deal with the sorrow of death.