the kindest mode of death meaning essay

The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life Essay

Introduction, works cited.

Death is one of the inevitable aspects of life, and all human beings will go through the process at some point in their life. Although death physically separates individuals from their family and friends for good, it can be motivational. It can be the reason to live well with others, do good to anyone, a reason to correct yourself, and stay healthy always. Human beings do not like death, but it gives a sense of awareness that the end is the same; what matters is how one spends their life Death is a powerful force, and it may be the only thing on the earth that can change the world (Vajta 24). Devastating as it may seem, death has a surprising amount of power. It is the only thing over which human beings have no control. If it is the time for a person to die, they will die; nothing can change it.

Death is the most agonizing experience when it involves the people you cherish. When a loved one passes away, people are left wondering why it happened and trying to ignore the same. It is normal to be filled with resentment, wondering why you were not able to be there with them. Instead of dwelling on the fact that they are no longer alive, a mature person accepts the conclusion and considers what they would want you to do in their honor if a loved one passes away. You will be able to utilize death as a motivator if you approach it with an open mind. When one is about to give up, they will hear the voice of their departed loved one telling them not to worry. Typically, no human is ready to die, and most people wish to live forever, and that is why it is essential to cherish all moments. This essay will explore the significance of death in the human experience of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , the poem I heard a Fly Buzz – When I died, and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery. These works give a more understanding of the theme of death from different perspectives.

The story of Hamlet is centered on an important topic that depicts a never-ending emotional conflict. In the story, death permeates every scene, from the opening scene’s confrontation with the Ghost of a dead man to the final scene’s carnage, which claims the lives of nearly every significant character (Shakespeare 1-206). There are many deaths in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but his fascination with death and the Ghost of King Hamlet is visible in his depiction of the issue.

Hamlet is perpetually preoccupied with death and contemplates it from a variety of angles. While the idea of self-harm fascinates and repulses him, he is equally entranced by death’s physical reality, as evidenced by the famous gravedigger scene (Shakespeare 20). The play Hamlet can be viewed as a long conversation between Hamlet and death. The more Hamlet grows as a character throughout the play, the more he comes into contact with various viewpoints on mortality and death and how they relate to Hamlet and others.

The character initially regards life as a torturous prelude to death and the afterlife, but as he grows and learns more about himself, the considerable toll death takes on humankind dawns on him. Through these characters, the playwright reveals his ambivalent take on the central issue. Hamlet idolizes death as a teenager from the beginning of the play, and he lives his life as if it were a journey to the grave (Shakespeare 1-205). Despite his apprehensions, he makes an effort to get in touch with the Ghost. Hamlet is terrified of dying since he doesn’t know what will happen once he passes away. In a well-known soliloquy, Hamlet expresses his concern about death and engages in a conversation about it. While confronted with murder, injustice, and the end of his life, Hamlet appears callous toward death. Hamlet contemplates death and the afterlife as part of his desire for vengeance in Shakespeare’s play. However, Hamlet’s plans to exact revenge on his father are merely a prelude to his eventual consideration of suicide. As William Shakespeare portrays with veiled mockery, his obsession with death slowly drives him insane.

For example, when Hamlet murders Ophelia’s father, he loses sight of where he buried his body, leading him to rage about the horrible things that happen to dead bodies after they are eaten. Because Hamlet was obsessed with death and his black clothing, Shakespeare had him appear depressed. With Shakespeare’s graveyard scene, we get a better sense of Hamlet’s concern with death. The picture of a graveyard appears several times in the play, revealing the character’s attitude toward dying. Only Hamlet is unnerved and saddened by seeing the grave because death is seen as a threat to him. Because he is preoccupied with death, Hamle t has little regard for life, including his own.

God’s ways are inscrutable, in reference to O’Connor’s story A Good Man Is Hard to Find . According to the author, the most important ideas are about living a meaningless life, dying without any achievement, and the possibility of revelation. As she tells a basic, and at times hilarious, story about everyday people and prejudices and narrow-mindedness, she reveals how modern life is devoid of spirituality. To raise awareness about this issue, the author wrote the book. On the subject of location and genre, it’s important to remember that this is a “road story,” which implies a journey from one place to another on an individual level.

However, the narrative’s symbolic level is formed by a concealed meaning that is always there behind the scenes. For the most part, it is clear that the roads represent life’s journey and that everyone who takes them experiences some mental and spiritual metamorphosis. Flannery O’Connor’s writings are similar in this regard. It’s a scenic drive from Georgia to Florida with views like this: “Stone Mountain and the blue granite. “There was Stone Mountain, which had blue granite outcroppings on both sides of the road, as well as vivid red clay banks with purple striations, as well as diverse crops that formed rows of green lacework on the mountain’s sides. Even the ugliest of the trees glistened in the silver-white sunlight that drenched them.” family grandmother, including her son Bailey and his family, are in the backseat of the car as they drive through picturesque countryside, not paying any attention to it (O’Connor 13). Nobody else seems interested, except for the elderly lady who has a nostalgic attachment to “things as they used to be” and believes that travel can be educational for young people

Death comes unexpectedly most times, and no one knows the day. During their vacation, the family stumbles into a car accident in a remote location and is then murdered by a gang known as the Misfit. A transition from life to death occurs externally as a result of this. The internal movement, on the other hand, is from end to life. This implication is most prominently emphasized by the novel’s Grandmother figure, who is unnamed. Her inability to give herself a name shows that she is a typical contemporary product lacking originality. As soon as we meet her, we notice that she’s intelligent, cunning, and self-centered. In her mind, “people are not as good as they used to be,” a phrase that is both her life motto and a reflection of how she views herself; she clings to the past with bitterness. As a result, she has a false sense of self-worth and values. An incredible metamorphosis takes place after meeting the Misfit and feeling like her life is on the edge of ending.

Interestingly, her epiphany arrives via a religious dialogue with a serial killer rather than the typical route (O’Connor 20). As a side effect, this implies that the author has more wisdom than the average person. The Misfit is a strange character, and his name stands for the universal feelings of isolation, loss, and emptiness. They do not belong in the world that was created for them by God. And, contrary to what Grandmother assumed, the problem is not that individuals have aged and become less attractive. Humans see themselves reflected in the environment around them and the people they interact with. There is not much distance between the assassin and the well-dressed elderly woman who does it to look the part in case she is killed in an accident. They grew up in nonspiritual households; therefore, they didn’t have a personal relationship with God. The Misfit is aware of this, while the grandmother is unaware of it. To avoid being discovered, she hides behind Christian stereotypes such as regular church attendance, prayer, and not robbing law-abiding citizens, among others.

Conversely, Emily Dickson brings the theme of death in her works by showing how the fear of death follows from the fear of life. Her poem “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died ” presented death as quick and painless. The poem then alludes to death’s most terrible aspect as a result of this seemingly simple explanation. Initially, she gives the fly as innocuous and little more than a slight annoyance to the narrator, but in the last verse, she shows off the fly’s truly nasty side. There is a funeral in the poem, and the setting’s symbolic nature is used to depict the narrator’s mental separation in a figurative way (Dickson 4-7). They are used as a metaphor for the poet’s agony, which is expressed through the mourners. As they go, they are putting literal pressure on her, and it would not let up until she falls unconscious.

To conclude, death should serve as an additional motivation to live a better life in every moment. After all, humans should be aware that whatever occurs after they die will be very different from what they are accustomed to in their lifetime. Though dwelling on mortality all of the time is fruitless, reflecting on the finite nature of our time may be beneficial. From this perspective, the only goal that should be pursued is avoiding feeling bad about their acts. The three works present death in a special manner. Normally, human beings do not like talking about death rather than about life. Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected.

Dickinson, Emily, and Petra Press. I heard a fly buzz when I died . Petra Press, 2006.

O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find: And Other Stories . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ainsworth, 1902.

Vajta, Katharina. “Identity beyond death: messages and meanings in Alsatian cemeteries.” Mortality 26.1 (2021): 17-35.

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Read our detailed study guide on the essay “Of Death” by Francis Bacon. Our study guide covers Of Death summary and analysis.

Of Death Summary

Bacon opens the essay with a simile of death and darkness. He starts his argument the men fears that death in the same a child fears the darkness. The fear of darkness increases among the children when the horrific tales about the darkness is narrated to them. Same is the case with men. With the stories of death is narrated to them, the fear inside them increases. It is natural to think about death, however, to think about it with composure is a virtue of the wise men. To worry about the sin after committing is the characteristic of a holy and religious man but to fear the death as the supremacy of nature is man’s weakness.

In spite of sufficient awareness, the human beings still associate a lot of superstitions and mix it with vanity. For instance, one might have read in the friars’ book of meditation that by inflicting certain pain on oneself one can realize the true nature of pain during death. One can experience regret for the cause of others death, by doing so. Moreover, by wounding the legs severely, one could die suffering less pain. The other vital parts of the human body like heart, brain, lungs, etc. do not experience as much pain as a wounded leg can.

It is well said by a philosopher that the assumption of forthcoming death frights men more than the death itself. The advent of death becomes more disturbing and horrifying with the grunts and screams of the dying man along with the frustrated and weeping faces of the dear ones. Such harshness of the situation makes the death appear to be more frightening than it really is.

Bacon argues about the advent of the death on a man from a totally different perspective. As per him, it becomes easy for a man to die when he sees his dear one weeping for him. He feels relief that he is not abandoned by him. Therefore, to Bacon, death is not an enemy for those who have so many attendants who can battle for him.

Whenever someone in the fire of avenging the other kills him, no doubt, revenge triumphs over death but the love insults it. We have heard about the story of King Otho who killed himself. His subject overwhelmed to mourn and drove some of them to suicide. To Bacon, death serves to be vindictive to love as it is considered to be the link between the dead and the one whose heart is filled with love.

Bacon quotes another philosopher Seneca that one will be sensible to imagine and longed-for the death as it brings relief from the sorrows and sufferings of life. In certain condition, someone’s life might be too wearisome to tolerate, and death passes relief to them. Some people live a life without any excitement and actions in it. Such a life could neither be regarded as pleasing one nor the sorrowful. However, one cannot bear such a wearisome life for a long period of time. Eventfully, resulting in death.

With the emperor of Rome was dying, Augustus Caesar, his farewell words are “Farewell, Livia. Never forget the days of our marriage”. Tiberius, another king of the Rome commented on Caesar’s farewell words that “although his bodily power is gone, the power to hide his feeling still remains”. Moreover, bacon mentions two more emperors of Rome, Vespasian, and Galba, who just like Augustus faced the death bravely.

Bacon argues that the Stoics made a lot of costly preparations upon death that make the death appears more dreadful than it really is. To die is a natural phenomenon. For a little infant, it is as much as painful to born as for the young man to die. However, the one who dies early is just like the soldiers who are wounded in hot blood and seldom feels pain.

Bacon concluded the essay by praising the virtues of bravely pursuing to die for the country or noble cause. Whenever a man dies, serving his country, or for a noble cause, the gates of fame opens for him and he receives a lot of adoration even from those who envy and condemns them during the life.

Of Death Analysis

Of Death is an argumentative essay by Francis Bacon in which he argues about the positive aspects of death. One has to die either today or tomorrow. So it is better to die courageously and bravely so that you can win people’s appraisal.

Critical Appreciation:

Brevity, directness, wit, and to the point arguments are one of the qualities that Bacon’s essay contain. The systematic way of writing makes bacon’s essay to move from one point to another logically. Moreover, the subject matters he discusses in his writing style are all based on the real life and the reader found an epigrammatic wisdom in it. With the use of metaphors, similes referring to various historical stories makes his essay comprehensible and agreeable.

This essay is the reflection of Bacon’s wisdom and experience that he acquired during the life. Bacon reinforces his arguments with the use of metaphors, similes, and quotation from wise and famous philosophers. The essay comprises of aphoristic sentences that engage the readers.

Bacon attempts to give the readers a nerve to face the death by arguing that the actual pain or death is not as much as we think about it. He starts the essay with a simile of death and darkness and the similarity in the fear that is associated with both. He argues that the death is not as horrifying as it appears to be. However, mourns and groans of the dying person along with the weeping and harsh expression of his dear one makes the sight of death horrifying.

Bacon also argues about the people who are under the strong influence love, revenge and grief. To such people, death doesn’t appear to be terrifying. Bacon mentions few Roman emperors who faced the death with valor, courage, and bravery. He after arguing about the terrifying side of the death mentions that the death has a bright side, too. It is only after the death of a person that he is appraised and his good deeds are remembered. All the envy and bitterness vanishes with the death.

By reading the essay we not only come across Bacon’s rich thoughts about the death but also find some distinctive fictitious qualities in the essay. He by the use of simile he makes his meaning more clear that a man who dies for serving his nation or for any other earnest cause is just like a young soldier who is wounded in the hot blood.

The essay, Of Death, is full of the richness of content and meaning. It is also Bacon’s model of concise and eloquent prose, just like all other essays.

More From Francis Bacon

• Of Adversity
• Of Ambition
• Of Discourse
• Of Followers and Friends
• Of Friendship
• Of Great Place
• Of Marriage and Single Life
• Of Nobility
• Of Parents and Children
• Of Simulation and Dissimulation
• Of Superstition
• Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature

Montaigne on Death and the Art of Living

By maria popova.

In one of his 107 such exploratory essays, titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne turns to mortality — the subject of one of this year’s best psychology and philosophy books — and points to the understanding of death as a prerequisite for the understanding of life, for the very art of living .

Montaigne examines our conflicted relationship with dying:

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. […] The end of our race is death; ’tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail: ‘Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,’ [‘Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards’ — Lucretius, iv. 474] ’tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it. The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ … provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. … I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ’tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age. … How many several ways has death to surprise us?

Rather than indulging the fear of death, Montaigne calls for dissipating it by facing it head-on, with awareness and attention — an approach common in Eastern spirituality:

[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests: ‘Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.’ ‘Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected, will be the more welcome.’ — [Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.] Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, ‘Let him make that request to himself.’ — [ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40. ] In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age.

One of Montaigne’s most timeless and timeliest points strikes at the heart of our present productivity-culture, reminding us that the whole of life is contained in our inner life , not in the checklist of our accomplishments:

We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self: — ‘Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo Multa?’ [‘Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?’ — Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]

He presages the “real artists ship” mantra Steve Job made famous five centuries later:

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action: ‘Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.’ [‘When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.’ — Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.] I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.

The essence of his argument is the idea that learning to die is essential for learning to live:

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. […] Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other.

With a philosophical lens fringing on quantum physics, Montaigne reminds us of the fundamental bias of the arrow of time as we experience it:

Not only the argument of reason invites us to it — for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? — but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? … What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. … Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

He returns — poignantly, poetically — to the meaning of life :

All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

Half a millennium before Carl Sagan, Montaigne channels the sentiment at the heart of Pale Blue Dot :

Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity.

He paints death as the ultimate equalizer:

Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved?

The heart of Montaigne’s case falls somewhere between John Cage’s Zen philosophy and the canine state of being-in-the-moment :

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.

He concludes with an admonition about the solipsistic superficiality of death’s ritualization:

I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays is now in the public domain and is available as a free download in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg .

Public domain illustrations via Flickr Commons

— Published December 12, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/12/12/montaigne-on-death-and-the-art-of-living/ —

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May 3, 2023

Contemplating Mortality: Powerful Essays on Death and Inspiring Perspectives

The prospect of death may be unsettling, but it also holds a deep fascination for many of us. If you're curious to explore the many facets of mortality, from the scientific to the spiritual, our article is the perfect place to start. With expert guidance and a wealth of inspiration, we'll help you write an essay that engages and enlightens readers on one of life's most enduring mysteries!

Death is a universal human experience that we all must face at some point in our lives. While it can be difficult to contemplate mortality, reflecting on death and loss can offer inspiring perspectives on the nature of life and the importance of living in the present moment. In this collection of powerful essays about death, we explore profound writings that delve into the human experience of coping with death, grief, acceptance, and philosophical reflections on mortality.

Through these essays, readers can gain insight into different perspectives on death and how we can cope with it. From personal accounts of loss to philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, these essays offer a diverse range of perspectives that will inspire and challenge readers to contemplate their mortality.

The Inevitable: Coping with Mortality and Grief

Mortality is a reality that we all have to face, and it is something that we cannot avoid. While we may all wish to live forever, the truth is that we will all eventually pass away. In this article, we will explore different aspects of coping with mortality and grief, including understanding the grieving process, dealing with the fear of death, finding meaning in life, and seeking support.

Understanding the Grieving Process

Grief is a natural and normal response to loss. It is a process that we all go through when we lose someone or something important to us. The grieving process can be different for each person and can take different amounts of time. Some common stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It is important to remember that there is no right or wrong way to grieve and that it is a personal process.

Denial is often the first stage of grief. It is a natural response to shock and disbelief. During this stage, we may refuse to believe that our loved one has passed away or that we are facing our mortality.

Anger is a common stage of grief. It can manifest as feelings of frustration, resentment, and even rage. It is important to allow yourself to feel angry and to express your emotions healthily.

Bargaining is often the stage of grief where we try to make deals with a higher power or the universe in an attempt to avoid our grief or loss. We may make promises or ask for help in exchange for something else.

Depression is a natural response to loss. It is important to allow yourself to feel sad and to seek support from others.

Acceptance is often the final stage of grief. It is when we come to terms with our loss and begin to move forward with our lives.

Dealing with the Fear of Death

The fear of death is a natural response to the realization of our mortality. It is important to acknowledge and accept our fear of death but also to not let it control our lives. Here are some ways to deal with the fear of death:

Accepting Mortality

Accepting our mortality is an important step in dealing with the fear of death. We must understand that death is a natural part of life and that it is something that we cannot avoid.

Finding Meaning in Life

Finding meaning in life can help us cope with the fear of death. It is important to pursue activities and goals that are meaningful and fulfilling to us.

Seeking Support

Seeking support from friends, family, or a therapist can help us cope with the fear of death. Talking about our fears and feelings can help us process them and move forward.

Finding meaning in life is important in coping with mortality and grief. It can help us find purpose and fulfillment, even in difficult times. Here are some ways to find meaning in life:

Pursuing Passions

Pursuing our passions and interests can help us find meaning and purpose in life. It is important to do things that we enjoy and that give us a sense of accomplishment.

Helping Others

Helping others can give us a sense of purpose and fulfillment. It can also help us feel connected to others and make a positive impact on the world.

Making Connections

Making connections with others is important in finding meaning in life. It is important to build relationships and connections with people who share our values and interests.

Seeking support is crucial when coping with mortality and grief. Here are some ways to seek support:

Talking to Friends and Family

Talking to friends and family members can provide us with a sense of comfort and support. It is important to express our feelings and emotions to those we trust.

Joining a Support Group

Joining a support group can help us connect with others who are going through similar experiences. It can provide us with a safe space to share our feelings and find support.

Seeking Professional Help

Seeking help from a therapist or counselor can help cope with grief and mortality. A mental health professional can provide us with the tools and support we need to process our emotions and move forward.

Coping with mortality and grief is a natural part of life. It is important to understand that grief is a personal process that may take time to work through. Finding meaning in life, dealing with the fear of death, and seeking support are all important ways to cope with mortality and grief. Remember to take care of yourself, allow yourself to feel your emotions, and seek support when needed.

The Ethics of Death: A Philosophical Exploration

Death is an inevitable part of life, and it is something that we will all experience at some point. It is a topic that has fascinated philosophers for centuries, and it continues to be debated to this day. In this article, we will explore the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, considering questions such as what it means to die, the morality of assisted suicide, and the meaning of life in the face of death.

Death is a topic that elicits a wide range of emotions, from fear and sadness to acceptance and peace. Philosophers have long been interested in exploring the ethical implications of death, and in this article, we will delve into some of the most pressing questions in this field.

What does it mean to die?

The concept of death is a complex one, and there are many different ways to approach it from a philosophical perspective. One question that arises is what it means to die. Is death simply the cessation of bodily functions, or is there something more to it than that? Many philosophers argue that death represents the end of consciousness and the self, which raises questions about the nature of the soul and the afterlife.

The morality of assisted suicide

Assisted suicide is a controversial topic, and it raises several ethical concerns. On the one hand, some argue that individuals have the right to end their own lives if they are suffering from a terminal illness or unbearable pain. On the other hand, others argue that assisting someone in taking their own life is morally wrong and violates the sanctity of life. We will explore these arguments and consider the ethical implications of assisted suicide.

The meaning of life in the face of death

The inevitability of death raises important questions about the meaning of life. If our time on earth is finite, what is the purpose of our existence? Is there a higher meaning to life, or is it simply a product of biological processes? Many philosophers have grappled with these questions, and we will explore some of the most influential theories in this field.

The role of death in shaping our lives

While death is often seen as a negative force, it can also have a positive impact on our lives. The knowledge that our time on earth is limited can motivate us to live life to the fullest and to prioritize the things that truly matter. We will explore the role of death in shaping our values, goals, and priorities, and consider how we can use this knowledge to live more fulfilling lives.

The ethics of mourning

The process of mourning is an important part of the human experience, and it raises several ethical questions. How should we respond to the death of others, and what is our ethical responsibility to those who are grieving? We will explore these questions and consider how we can support those who are mourning while also respecting their autonomy and individual experiences.

The ethics of immortality

The idea of immortality has long been a fascination for humanity, but it raises important ethical questions. If we were able to live forever, what would be the implications for our sense of self, our relationships with others, and our moral responsibilities? We will explore the ethical implications of immortality and consider how it might challenge our understanding of what it means to be human.

The ethics of death in different cultural contexts

Death is a universal human experience, but how it is understood and experienced varies across different cultures. We will explore how different cultures approach death, mourning, and the afterlife, and consider the ethical implications of these differences.

Death is a complex and multifaceted topic, and it raises important questions about the nature of life, morality, and human experience. By exploring the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, we can gain a deeper understanding of these questions and how they shape our lives.

The Ripple Effect of Loss: How Death Impacts Relationships

Losing a loved one is one of the most challenging experiences one can go through in life. It is a universal experience that touches people of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds. The grief that follows the death of someone close can be overwhelming and can take a significant toll on an individual's mental and physical health. However, it is not only the individual who experiences the grief but also the people around them. In this article, we will discuss the ripple effect of loss and how death impacts relationships.

Understanding Grief and Loss

Grief is the natural response to loss, and it can manifest in many different ways. The process of grieving is unique to each individual and can be affected by many factors, such as culture, religion, and personal beliefs. Grief can be intense and can impact all areas of life, including relationships, work, and physical health.

The Impact of Loss on Relationships

Death can impact relationships in many ways, and the effects can be long-lasting. Below are some of how loss can affect relationships:

1. Changes in Roles and Responsibilities

When someone dies, the roles and responsibilities within a family or social circle can shift dramatically. For example, a spouse who has lost their partner may have to take on responsibilities they never had before, such as managing finances or taking care of children. This can be a difficult adjustment, and it can put a strain on the relationship.

2. Changes in Communication

Grief can make it challenging to communicate with others effectively. Some people may withdraw and isolate themselves, while others may become angry and lash out. It is essential to understand that everyone grieves differently, and there is no right or wrong way to do it. However, these changes in communication can impact relationships, and it may take time to adjust to new ways of interacting with others.

3. Changes in Emotional Connection

When someone dies, the emotional connection between individuals can change. For example, a parent who has lost a child may find it challenging to connect with other parents who still have their children. This can lead to feelings of isolation and disconnection, and it can strain relationships.

4. Changes in Social Support

Social support is critical when dealing with grief and loss. However, it is not uncommon for people to feel unsupported during this time. Friends and family may not know what to say or do, or they may simply be too overwhelmed with their grief to offer support. This lack of social support can impact relationships and make it challenging to cope with grief.

Coping with Loss and Its Impact on Relationships

Coping with grief and loss is a long and difficult process, but it is possible to find ways to manage the impact on relationships. Below are some strategies that can help:

1. Communication

Effective communication is essential when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to talk about how you feel and what you need from others. This can help to reduce misunderstandings and make it easier to navigate changes in relationships.

2. Seek Support

It is important to seek support from friends, family, or a professional if you are struggling to cope with grief and loss. Having someone to talk to can help to alleviate feelings of isolation and provide a safe space to process emotions.

3. Self-Care

Self-care is critical when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to take care of your physical and emotional well-being. This can include things like exercise, eating well, and engaging in activities that you enjoy.

4. Allow for Flexibility

It is essential to allow for flexibility in relationships when dealing with grief and loss. People may not be able to provide the same level of support they once did or may need more support than they did before. Being open to changes in roles and responsibilities can help to reduce strain on relationships.

5. Find Meaning

Finding meaning in the loss can be a powerful way to cope with grief and loss. This can involve creating a memorial, participating in a support group, or volunteering for a cause that is meaningful to you.

The impact of loss is not limited to the individual who experiences it but extends to those around them as well. Relationships can be greatly impacted by the death of a loved one, and it is important to be aware of the changes that may occur. Coping with loss and its impact on relationships involves effective communication, seeking support, self-care, flexibility, and finding meaning.

What Lies Beyond Reflections on the Mystery of Death

Death is an inevitable part of life, and yet it remains one of the greatest mysteries that we face as humans. What happens when we die? Is there an afterlife? These are questions that have puzzled us for centuries, and they continue to do so today. In this article, we will explore the various perspectives on death and what lies beyond.

Understanding Death

Before we can delve into what lies beyond, we must first understand what death is. Death is defined as the permanent cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. This can occur as a result of illness, injury, or simply old age. Death is a natural process that occurs to all living things, but it is also a process that is often accompanied by fear and uncertainty.

The Physical Process of Death

When a person dies, their body undergoes several physical changes. The heart stops beating, and the body begins to cool and stiffen. This is known as rigor mortis, and it typically sets in within 2-6 hours after death. The body also begins to break down, and this can lead to a release of gases that cause bloating and discoloration.

The Psychological Experience of Death

In addition to the physical changes that occur during and after death, there is also a psychological experience that accompanies it. Many people report feeling a sense of detachment from their physical body, as well as a sense of peace and calm. Others report seeing bright lights or visions of loved ones who have already passed on.

Perspectives on What Lies Beyond

There are many different perspectives on what lies beyond death. Some people believe in an afterlife, while others believe in reincarnation or simply that death is the end of consciousness. Let's explore some of these perspectives in more detail.

One of the most common beliefs about what lies beyond death is the idea of an afterlife. This can take many forms, depending on one's religious or spiritual beliefs. For example, many Christians believe in heaven and hell, where people go after they die depending on their actions during life. Muslims believe in paradise and hellfire, while Hindus believe in reincarnation.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the belief that after we die, our consciousness is reborn into a new body. This can be based on karma, meaning that the quality of one's past actions will determine the quality of their next life. Some people believe that we can choose the circumstances of our next life based on our desires and attachments in this life.

End of Consciousness

The idea that death is simply the end of consciousness is a common belief among atheists and materialists. This view holds that the brain is responsible for creating consciousness, and when the brain dies, consciousness ceases to exist. While this view may be comforting to some, others find it unsettling.

Death is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that continues to fascinate us. While we may never fully understand what lies beyond death, it's important to remember that everyone has their own beliefs and perspectives on the matter. Whether you believe in an afterlife, reincarnation, or simply the end of consciousness, it's important to find ways to cope with the loss of a loved one and to find peace with your mortality.

Final Words

In conclusion, these powerful essays on death offer inspiring perspectives and deep insights into the human experience of coping with mortality, grief, and loss. From personal accounts to philosophical reflections, these essays provide a diverse range of perspectives that encourage readers to contemplate their mortality and the meaning of life.

By reading and reflecting on these essays, readers can gain a better understanding of how death shapes our lives and relationships, and how we can learn to accept and cope with this inevitable part of the human experience.

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Well-Being and the Good Death

• Published: 13 July 2020
• Volume 23 , pages 607–623, ( 2020 )

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• Stephen M. Campbell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9215-2540 1  

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The philosophical literature on well-being and the good life contains very little explicit discussion of what makes for a better or worse death. The purpose of this essay is to highlight some commonly held views about the good death and investigate whether these views are recognized by the leading theories of well-being. While the most widely discussed theories do have implications about what constitutes a good death, they seem unable to fully accommodate these popular good death views. I offer two partial explanations for why these views have been neglected in discussions of well-being and make two corresponding recommendations for future work in the philosophy of well-being.

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All of us have some preferences about how we will die. We care about such things as what will cause our death, when and where it will happen, who will be with us, how much warning we will have, and how we will experience death. While such preferences are sometimes grounded in a concern for the well-being of others or a desire to promote some social or spiritual cause, preferences regarding one’s own death are commonly self-interested or, as philosophers say, prudential. In other words, they are grounded in a concern for one’s own well-being. Accordingly, they provide insight into an individual’s substantive normative view about what makes a death go better or worse for the one who dies. This is commonly referred to as the theme of the good death . Footnote 1

Despite its obvious significance to self-conscious mortal beings like ourselves, particularly as we draw close to the end of our lives, there has been very little discussion of the good death in one place where one would most expect to find it: the philosophical literature on the good life, which is primarily devoted to identifying a plausible substantive theory of well-being. Footnote 2 Explicit discussion of the good death has been curiously absent from philosophical discussions of the good life. Footnote 3

It might be thought that there is nothing problematic about the silence surrounding the good death. After all, the silence is only apparent. Most theories of the good life are understood to be comprehensive and pertain to all portions of a life, from beginning to end. So, even if well-being theorists have not explicitly addressed the theme of the good death, they have been implicitly addressing it. For instance, those who defend hedonism (which identifies well-being with pleasure and the absence of pain, broadly construed) are thereby defending the idea that the best death for an individual is the most pleasant, or least unpleasant, death. Footnote 4 Likewise, desire-fulfillment theory, perfectionism, and objective list theories each provide their own distinctive picture of the good death.

The purpose of this essay is to highlight some commonly held views about what makes for a better or worse death and examine how these views might fit into the existing theoretical landscape. In particular, I explore whether the four leading theories of well-being are able to fully accommodate these popular views about the good death. The findings of my preliminary investigation into this matter are that, by and large, they cannot. If these views about the good death happen to be true, the most popular and widely discussed theories of well-being appear to be inadequate in this domain. Moreover, even if these views are not true, it seems both odd and problematic that commonsense views about the good death have no representation among the dominant theories of well-being.

In Section 1 , I offer some terminological clarifications. In Section 2 , I present four types of factors that are commonly thought to affect the goodness or badness of a death. In Section 3 , I focus on three specific factors and examine whether they are recognized by the leading theories of well-being. In Section 4 , I conclude with two partial explanations of why these views about the good death have been overlooked and some corresponding recommendations for future work in the philosophy of well-being.

1 Preliminaries

What is meant by “the good death”? Since I will make frequent use of this familiar phrase, let me begin with some clarifications about how I will understand and use it. First, inclusion of the word “the” is not meant to presuppose that there is a single, unique type of good death. If deaths can be good, presumably there will be a diversity of ways that death can go well for people. This is especially plausible if there is a diversity of goods in life (e.g. knowledge, pleasure, appreciation of beauty, virtue) as this would suggest a range of possible good deaths corresponding to the different prudential goods and various combinations of them. However, even if there is only one sort of thing that makes our lives go well, it is likely that there are many different forms that the good can take.

Second, in talking of “the good death,” I do not mean to restrict attention to the positive side of prudential value. Not unlike discussions of “the good life” that address both the prudentially good and the prudentially bad, it is important to attend to the full spectrum of possible deaths, from the very good (if such a thing is possible) to the very bad. This is particularly important because, while it is uncontroversial that deaths can be bad, there is room for debate as to whether any death qualifies as all-things-considered good. In any case, my focus in this essay is less on the overall prudential assessment of deaths and more on features that contribute to making a death go better or worse for an individual. A less misleading phrase for our topic might be “the better or worse death.”

Lastly, “death” in the present context does not refer merely to the bare event of death, the event of a person’s permanently ceasing to exist. Footnote 5 Nor does it refer only to the process of dying , which might be understood as a process of physical deterioration leading to the event of death. Instead, let us understand “the good death” to refer to a good end of life or even a good final chapter of one’s life. The literary metaphor is illustrative. In a biography, a chapter about an individual’s death is not typically restricted to the dying process, much less the bare event of the death. It tends to be far more inclusive, encompassing relevant events leading up to the dying process and the event of death, as well as events that occur in the aftermath. Understanding “death” in this broader biographical sense, the good death concerns how well or poorly the final portion of a life goes for the individual living that life.

2 Good Death Factors

What makes a death go better or worse for the one who dies? Let me begin by acknowledging that all of the leading theories of well-being identify factors that may very well have prudential significance. The fact that a death involves pleasure or suffering, satisfied or frustrated desires, achievement or failed endeavors, virtue or vice, knowledge or ignorance, healthy or unhealthy relations with others, etc. can be reasonably thought to impact the quality of a person’s death. Arguably, these are often or always good death factors : things that directly impact how well or poorly a death goes for the individual who dies. By “directly impact,” I mean that these features have non-instrumental prudential value or disvalue, either in and of themselves (and thus have intrinsic prudential value) or as part of some larger whole (and thereby have contributory prudential value). In other words, these things make a death go better or worse for a person apart from whatever other non-instrumental goods or bads they might help to bring about.

My aim in this section is to highlight four aspects of death that are often taken to have non-instrumental prudential significance: the place of death, one’s company in death, the cause of death, and one’s manner of facing death. Granted, it is worth asking whether these factors have intrinsic or contributory value, and whether they are basic components of well-being or there are deeper features that are essential to them that explain their prudential significance. Footnote 6 While I will draw some (mostly negative) conclusions about this issue in Section 3 , it is not possible to pursue it in a systematic way here. With these clarifications in mind, let us turn to four types of putative good death factors.

2.1 Place of Death

“My grandmother died in the hospital. It was the first time she’d ever been in one….The hardest part about it was that the very last thing she asked me was to take her home….In my grandma’s case there was such clarity of thought, and when the last thought on your mind is ‘I want to be home’, then that must be the most important thing there is….If you look at this landscape every day it becomes a part of who you are….So how can you see yourself in the hospital—a place that is so totally foreign to the nourishment of the soulful self.” — Ron Short, playwright. Footnote 7

A person’s location at the time of death is one obvious candidate for a good death factor. Humans across a range of cultures express a preference to die at home. Footnote 8 This wish is not universal, but it is relatively common. It often manifests itself as a desire to die in one’s homeland rather than abroad, or to die in one’s home rather than the unfamiliar setting of a hospital. No doubt, one reason why one might have a preference to die at home concerns the quality of one’s experience while dying. People may predict that their experience leading up to death will be more tranquil and less alienating if they are in a familiar setting. In that case, dying at home might be valued instrumentally inasmuch as it is seen as a means to a more positive state of mind. However, in some cases what would lie behind that positive experience is the perception that being in one’s home is something that directly makes for a better death. This might be grounded in the fact that you bear a special relationship to your home—it is where you belong, it is where you experienced so many valuable and intimate moments, it is connected to your identity. These are properties of dying at home that might explain why many people desire it. If it is doubted that people ever really care about such things apart from their impact on their experience, let us keep in mind that people often have strong preferences about where their bodies are buried or where their ashes are scattered. Such preferences obviously need not be about one’s own mental states. Even atheists who reject the idea of an afterlife often have preferences about this.

2.2 One’s Company in Death

“[Lou] told Shelley he was afraid he might fall one day, hit his head, and die. It wasn’t dying that scared him, he said, but the possibility of dying alone.” —Atul Gawande, Being Mortal. Footnote 9

Arguably, one’s company in death has prudential significance. As I write this, the world is in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the prominent reasons why Covid-19 hospital deaths are widely regarded as tragic is that infected patients often die alone, isolated from their family members due to hospital policies that prohibit or strictly restrict visitation. Footnote 10 Many people have a deep fear of dying alone, and it is quite common for people to want their loved ones to be with them at the end. There may be specific individuals you would especially hope to have at your deathbed and specific people you would especially not want present.

People’s preferences about who surrounds them in their final days or moments might be purely instrumental. Hedonic considerations often lie behind such preferences, and one can instrumentally desire others’ presence in order to repair or nurture relationships. Even so, a preference to have certain people present at one’s death can be grounded in the thought that their very presence makes for a more desirable, or less undesirable, death. This point applies to other kinds of significant life-events. My brother was unable to attend my wedding due to illness. I wanted him to be there, and this was not merely a desire to make us both happier. If asked to choose between having him at my wedding or both of us receiving a pleasure-inducing drug that would have guaranteed a more positive experience, I would have preferred the former. His presence at my wedding would have had value for me apart from any hedonic effects. Similar points apply to death. Just as we can have a special relation to our homes that makes it more desirable to die there, a person can have a special connection with others such that their presence at the end arguably makes for a better death. Footnote 11

2.3 Cause of Death

“I don’t want to die from a stray bullet in the street, I don’t want to die from an accident, from a plane crashing. I want it to be either incredibly peaceful or with a purpose.”

—An urban youth in America. Footnote 12

Most of us are not wholly indifferent to what will bring about our death. While there do not appear to be many causes of death that are popularly regarded as being prudentially good (dying from a noble act of self-sacrifice may be one exception), it is relatively easy to identify causes that are widely thought to make for a worse death. The quote above concerns causes of death that are purposeless and arbitrary. Other examples abound. Imagine dying from an act of betrayal. Or consider cases of people dying as a result of their own risky or imprudent actions, such as heavy smoking, ignoring social distancing recommendations during a pandemic, or attempting to live amongst grizzly bears. Or consider cases where the cause of death is ridiculous or embarrassing. There is the story of a man visiting the Grand Canyon who decided to joke with his family by pretending to fall into the canyon. In his attempt to jump onto a lower ledge, he plummeted to his death. Footnote 13 In the eyes of many, these causes make for a worse death. Granted, some will find them undesirable only for instrumental reasons—they can lead to psychological pain for the one dying, they can taint how one is remembered after one is gone, and so on. But many will retain this conviction even where there is not greater psychological suffering, a diminishment of one’s posthumous reputation, or any other instrumental harm. In a word, they are thought to directly detract from the desirability of one’s death, just as other causes might directly enhance a death’s desirability.

2.4 One’s Manner of Facing Death

“Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” —Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night”. Footnote 14

For many, how one approaches death has prudential significance. One might hope to face death contemplatively, like Socrates or Hamlet. Or with a sense of levity and good humor like Voltaire who, when his bedside lamp flared up, is said to have remarked “What? The flames already?” Or with defiance, like Susan Sontag who fought to stave off death by blood cancer until the bitter end. Footnote 15

As with the other three factors, what constitutes the ideal manner of facing death is a subject of normative disagreement. In a 2000 survey, a majority of subjects (which included terminally ill patients, doctors, nurses, and family members) thought it important to “maintain a sense of humor” at the end of life. Footnote 16 Yet, others—like James Boswell, who was disturbed by Hume’s cheerfulness in the face of death—will see humor on one’s deathbed as inappropriate and lacking the proper gravity. Some will value the defiant struggle against death that was preached by Thomas and practiced by Sontag; others will see such resistance as futile or pathetic. While there is room for normative debate about this good death factor, many people believe that there are better and worse ways to face one’s death.

3 The Good Death and the Leading Theories of the Good Life

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the four types of factors discussed in the previous section can have prudential significance and directly impact how well or poorly the end of life goes for the person living it. In this section, I will restrict my attention to three specific factors: dying at home, having one’s loved ones present in one’s final moments of life, and having an embarrassing cause of death. Suppose that these three factors in particular tend to directly impact a person’s well-being, for better (the first two examples) or worse (the third). Footnote 17 One desideratum for a theory of well-being would then be whether it recognizes these good death factors. Theories of well-being typically purport to identify all of the things that are good or bad for individuals in the most basic and fundamental way and that can explain why anything else is good or bad for them. So, the relevant sort of recognition can take one of two forms: either these good death factors will be regarded as basic components of well-being (or ill-being), or they will bear some essential connection to the basic component(s) recognized by the theory that would account for their non-instrumental value.

My purpose in this section is to offer a preliminary investigation of whether the above three features of deaths have been recognized by the four leading theories of well-being. Two of these theories—hedonism and desire-fulfillment theory—are subjective in the sense that they imply that whether something is directly good or bad for a person depends on the psychological states of that individual. The other two theories (perfectionism, objective list theory) are objective in the sense that they allow for the possibility that something can be good or bad for a person independently of that person’s positive and negative attitudes. Since the good death factors I am considering do not explicitly involve the psychological states of individuals and therefore seem to have a rather objective cast, it is somewhat predictable that subjective theories will not fully accommodate them, even if they can partially do so. More interestingly, I will argue that perfectionism and most objective list theories fall short as well. Lastly, I will suggest that, even in cases where they recognize a good death factor, three of the theories may nonetheless fail to accurately capture the way in which it is prudentially significant.

3.1 Hedonism

Hedonism maintains that what makes something good or bad for us is its effect on the pleasantness or unpleasantness of our experience. Thus, the only things that are basically non-instrumentally good and bad for us are pleasure and pain, broadly construed. Footnote 18

Hedonistic theories do not recognize our three good death factors as being basic components of well-being. None of the factors under consideration pertain directly to the quality of one’s experience. Nor does hedonism fully recognize them in the second way, for pleasure and displeasure are not essentially linked to these good death factors. There are countless cases where these features of death are not attended by an increase or decrease in pleasure or suffering. Dying at home and the presence of loved ones at death pertain most fundamentally to the physical (or perhaps virtual) location of the dying person in relation to a certain place and certain people. Footnote 19 These things can obtain irrespective of the mental states of the dying person. Further, in talking of an embarrassing cause of death, I am not referring to a cause of death that leads a dying person to actually experience the unpleasant state of being embarrassed. What is being referenced is a cause of death that is worthy of embarrassment. An event may be embarrassing relative to a certain party irrespective of whether that party ever actually feels embarrassed. And, indeed, there are plenty of examples of embarrassing deaths where the person in question feels no embarrassment, including (but not limited to) sudden or instantaneous deaths, cases where the embarrassing features of death are unknown to the person dying, and cases where the person is well positioned to experience embarrassment but simply fails to have the fitting response.

Hedonism cannot account for the prudential value of the good death factors in these cases where there is no hedonic difference. Furthermore, if our good death factors have non-instrumental prudential value in these cases, they presumably also have some prudential value that cannot be explained by hedonism in the cases where there is a hedonic difference. Consequently, it appears that hedonism cannot fully accommodate our three good death factors, though it may partially account for their prudential value in some cases.

3.2 Desire-Fulfillment Theory

Desire-fulfillment theories center around the idea that well-being consists in getting what one wants. According to the simplest form of desire-fulfillment theory, a state of affairs is good for you if and only if you desire it and it obtains. Since our actual desires can be distorted by ignorance, false beliefs, and bad reasoning, some have proposed more sophisticated “idealized” desire-fulfillment theories, which focus on the desires that a person would have if they were fully informed and rational. On these theories, if you or your idealized counterpart desire something for its own sake, then it is good for you in and of itself. Footnote 20

The first thing to note is that desire-fulfillment theory is remarkably flexible and can recognize virtually anything—any state of affairs that can possibly be desired—as having prudential significance. Since people commonly do have desires regarding the features of death that we are considering, it is tempting to suppose that desire-fulfillment theory accommodates them. If I desire to die at home or in the company of my family or to avoid some embarrassing end, and that comes to pass, desire-fulfillment theory deems this good for me.

However, desire-fulfillment theories make space for our good death factors in a way that does not do justice to how many people will view their prudential significance. A distinguishing mark of desire-fulfillment theories is that they imply that each individual’s well-being is partly grounded in their psychology. What is good for a person depends crucially on what they desire. Since people’s desires about their own deaths vary, this theory implies that the contours of a good death will also vary from individual to individual. There is much plausibility to the idea that what impacts the goodness or badness of a death will depend, to some extent, upon the particular context and circumstances of the individual, including various psychological facts. For instance, if someone has not forged a positive connection to their home (perhaps it was the site of domestic abuse or other traumatic events), then presumably dying at home is not good for that person. Likewise, it might be that the best manner of facing death will be different for different people and must have a certain fit with their temperament and the overall character of their lives.

Yet, many people will reject the idea that these features of death are good for a person if and only if they or their idealized counterpart desires them and they occur. Imagine a man who dies from accidentally shooting himself with a gun that he himself just loaded. Most people will think the embarrassing nature of his death makes it worse for him, and this apparent badness does not dissipate if it comes to light that this particular man would in no way have minded dying in this pointless and embarrassing way, or for some reason desired that kind of death. If anything, this may suggest a kind of evaluative insensitivity on his part that provides a further reason to think him badly off. This example draws out the fact that desire-fulfillment theory has implications that are counterintuitive for many people. It can only recognize our good death factors in those instances where they happen to be desired by the dying person, actually or under hypothetical idealized conditions.

In sum, if our working assumption is true and our examples of good death factors do have non-instrumental prudential significance, it appears that the two leading subjective theories of well-being cannot fully accommodate this fact. This result does not seem particularly surprising nor will it generate much worry among subjectivists. While it is possible that some will want to argue that their favored theory can fully accommodate these popular good death views, most committed subjectivists will simply reject our working assumption, perhaps supplementing that rejection with a debunking explanation as to why people have these objectivist intuitions. Footnote 21 What is more interesting to investigate is whether proponents of objective theories of well-being, who tend to take objectivist intuitions more seriously, are able to recognize our examples of good death factors. Let us now turn our attention to the most prominent objective theories.

3.3 Perfectionism

Perfectionism about well-being holds that the good life for humans consists in the development and exercise of capacities or excellences that are distinctive of our kind. Footnote 22 Precisely which capacities those are is a matter of some debate. Some perfectionists rely on an account of human nature as a guide, while others do not. The most popularly cited capacities include theoretical rationality, practical rationality, and autonomy. Footnote 23 For our purposes, we can follow Richard Kraut and think in terms of some broad categories of capacities: physical, sensory, affective, social, and cognitive. Footnote 24

How might perfectionism account for our good death factors? It might be thought that desiring or choosing a certain kind of death reflects some excellence of character. To be sure, the desire or choice to die at home or have loved ones present in death may indicate a healthy and fitting sentimental attachment to the places and people of one’s life. The desire to avoid an embarrassing end might also reflect some excellence of character. But our examples of good death factors concern the actual circumstances of one’s death. Desiring or choosing these aspects of a good death is neither necessary nor sufficient for them to actually occur.

Perfectionism may be able to partially account for the prudential significance of dying at home, with loved ones nearby, or from some embarrassing cause. For there will be cases of each kind where that feature of death is bound up with the exercise of one’s capacities. Dying at home might involve reminiscing about one’s personal history with that place or taking stock of one’s life (cognitive capacities) and feeling various emotions that arise (affective capacities). Having loved ones present at death can be good for individuals insofar as it involves the exercise of their affective and social capacities. And sometimes the cause of a death is embarrassing because it stems from a person’s failure to exercise their capacities well. In the Grand Canyon case mentioned above, it is possible that the man who fell to his death in an attempt at humor exhibited practical irrationality and clumsiness.

Even so, there are instances where these good death conditions cannot be explained in perfectionist terms. Dying at home and having loved ones present may seem to make for a better death even in cases where the dying person is unconscious, or is conscious but unable to meaningfully engage because they are heavily medicated or in severe pain. Likewise, dying for some embarrassing reason might seem to make a death worse even in cases where the person exercised their capacities to the fullest. Consider another embarrassing cliff death. In September 2010, the owner of the company that makes Segway motorized scooters died by accidentally going off a cliff…on a Segway. Footnote 25 For the sake of argument, suppose that he was fully justified in believing that the path was safe and that he was operating the vehicle with expert skill. I suspect most would agree that even if he did exercise his capacities perfectly well to the very end, the cause of his death is quite embarrassing and made for a worse death than if he had simply fallen off a cliff while taking a walk. An embarrassing cause of death need not stem from a failure to exercise one’s capacities well or any lack of excellence in the person who dies. Hence, as traditionally understood, perfectionism seems unable to account for these cases where a good death factor obtains apart from any success or failure in exercising one’s capacities. Footnote 26 And if it cannot account for the prudential significance of the factors in these cases, it presumably also fails to fully account for it in cases that do involve the excellent or poor exercise of perfectionism-relevant capacities.

3.4 Objective List Theory

We turn finally to objective list theories, where one might most expect to find some recognition of the distinctive goods and evils of death we have been considering. Objective list theories are objective and pluralistic. These features create a hospitable environment for our good death factors. Pluralism allows for multiple factors that directly impact well-being, and the objective dimension allows for factors that have some independence from the attitudes of the person who dies.

Objective list theories are sometimes portrayed as explanatory theories , which purport to identify the things or properties that are basically good or bad for us and explain why anything else is good or bad for us, and sometimes as enumerative theories , which list various things that are good or bad for us without any commitment about whether they provide the deepest explanation of prudential value. Footnote 27 This difference is neatly illustrated in essays by Guy Fletcher ( 2013 ) and Christopher Rice ( 2013 ). These philosophers present very similar overlapping objective list theories, but Fletcher regards his list as enumerative while Rice presents his as explanatory. If an objective list theory is (merely) enumerative, it may be compatible with a range of explanatory theories (including hedonism, desire-fulfillment theory, perfectionism, or an explanatory objective list theory). In contrast, an explanatory objective list theory is a rival to all other explanatory theories. For that reason, our interest is in explanatory objective list theories.

With this interpretive groundwork in place, it may be asked: do our three examples of good death factors find a place on objective list theories? What I wish to establish in this section is that, although an objective list theory could in principle recognize these good death factors, by and large the objective list theories discussed in the philosophical literature have not recognized them. To ground this discussion, consider a representative sample of objective lists proposed over the past four decades:

Finnis ( 1980 ): life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, friendship, practical reasonableness, religion

Parfit ( 1984 ): (positive) moral goodness, rational activity, the development of one’s abilities, having children and being a good parent, knowledge, and the awareness of true beauty; (negative) being betrayed, manipulated, slandered, deceived, being deprived of liberty or dignity, enjoying either sadistic pleasure, or aesthetic pleasure in what is in fact ugly

Griffin ( 1986 ): accomplishment, the components of human existence, understanding, enjoyment, deep personal relations

Kagan ( 1998 ): accomplishment, creativity, health, knowledge, friendship, freedom, fame, respect

Murphy ( 2001 ): life, knowledge, aesthetic experience, excellence in play and work, excellence in agency, inner peace, friendship and community, religion, happiness

Kazez ( 2007 ): happiness, autonomy, self-expression, morality, progress, knowledge, close relationships

Zagzebski ( 2008 ): long life, health and freedom from suffering, comfort and the variety of human enjoyments, friendship and loving relationships, using our talents in satisfying work

Fletcher ( 2013 ): achievement, friendship, happiness, pleasure, self-respect, virtue

Rice ( 2013 ): achievement, meaningful knowledge, loving relationships, pleasure, autonomy Footnote 28

The first thing to notice is that our three examples—dying at home, having loved ones present in death, an embarrassing cause of death—do not appear on any of the nine lists. Indeed, there is no mention of anything explicitly death-related. Thus, our three good death factors have not been acknowledged as things that are basically good or bad for a person. This rules out one way in which the lists might have accommodated our examples.

The other way they might do so is by recognizing other things that are essentially linked to our three examples and explain why they have non-instrumental prudential significance. Let us examine whether the above lists recognize the good death factors in this way. (Since I have already discussed hedonism at length, I will not discuss happiness or related hedonic notions—pleasure, suffering, etc. Objective list theories that include these goods will generally recognize our good death factors at least to the extent that hedonism does. Footnote 29 ).

Our first example of a putative good death factor is dying at home. The fact that one bears a special relationship to one’s home—which could be based on a certain fit, shared history, or its role in one’s identity—may explain the prudential significance of this factor. While most of the above objective lists speak to relationships, they appear to be gesturing toward reciprocal relationships with other sentient beings (“friendship,” “loving relationships,” “deep personal relations”). There is no indication that special relationships with places or objects might serve to enhance the desirability of a person’s life or death. It might be thought that dying at home is a form of self-expression (which appears on Jean Kazez’s list), though that seems wrong since the phrase suggests a kind of activity. Perhaps it is self-expression to choose to die at home, or to struggle against obstacles to ensure that that happens. But, setting aside cases of suicide and active voluntary euthanasia, dying at home itself doesn’t seem to be appropriately regarded as an act of self-expression. Even so, one may regard it as making for a better death even when the person plays no active role in bringing it about.

The second example is having loved ones present at your deathbed. At first glance, it may seem obvious that friendship and loving relationships adequately account for this good death factor. But, on reflection, it is not so obvious. When “friendship” or “deep personal relations” appear on an objective list, what prudentially significant property or properties are being indicated? Presumably, the idea is that what is ultimately good for us is having loving personal relationships (acquiring them, maintaining them), and perhaps also developing and deepening them. Having loved ones at your deathbed could serve to maintain, develop, or deepen your relationship with them, but it need not. Footnote 30 Nor must the absence of a loved one at the end of one’s life have an adverse effect on the relationship. If your spouse or child is physically unable to reach you due to weather conditions or transportation restrictions, this need not diminish the quality of your relationship in any way. Nonetheless, it remains a natural thought that being in the company of loved ones makes for a better death.

Turning now to an embarrassing cause of death, it might be thought that respect or self-respect addresses this issue. But a loss of self-respect or the respect of others is not an essential feature of an embarrassing death. Presumably, the man who died at the Grand Canyon did not have the time or mental clarity to lose self-respect as he fell. In any case, embarrassing deaths can be instantaneous. And some embarrassing deaths never become known to other people and therefore do not weaken others’ respect for the person who died. A much more plausible candidate is an item that appears on Derek Parfit’s list of prudential bads: being deprived of dignity. Arguably, this helps to explain why an embarrassing cause of death is bad for the one who dies. It constitutes a loss or diminishment of one’s dignity, whether or not the one who dies or others are aware of this fact.

In summary, none of the nine objective list theories we have considered seem to be successful in capturing all three good death factors. Those theories that include happiness or some related notion might be able to partially account for some instances of our good death factors, in the way that hedonism can. Only one of the lists (Parfit’s) appears suitable to more fully capture just one of our good death examples (an embarrassing cause).

3.5 Death’s Axiological Significance

My investigation thus far suggests that, if our three examples are indeed good death factors, then hedonism, perfectionism, desire-fulfillment theory, and most of the proposed objective list theories undergenerate inasmuch as they cannot fully recognize the prudential value of all three good death factors, even if they might account for some instances. What I now wish to suggest is that hedonism, perfectionism, and objective list theories may also have the further shortcoming of “misgenerating” with respect to the good death factors. A theory can be said to misgenerate when it correctly identifies that a given thing is prudentially significant, though it does not accurately capture how it is prudentially significant. For instance, it might misidentify what it is about something that makes it good or bad for us, or it might misidentify the degree to which it is good or bad. I will now suggest that three of the leading theories may misgenerate in the second way.

Many people seem to attribute greater axiological weight to goods and bads that occur at the end of a life. For instance, imagine a person experiencing a migraine headache at some otherwise uneventful point in the middle of their life, and then imagine them experiencing it at the very end of their life. For many, the latter seems worse, and presumably what explains this is the proximity of the suffering to one’s death. Even if the amount of suffering (and opportunity cost) would be the same, it seems worse that one’s life should end on that note. Likewise for happiness. The experience of joy, contentment, and other pleasant emotions seems better to have at the end than at some less significant earlier point in our lives. And similar points can be made about exercising one’s capacities and facing embarrassment and a loss of dignity.

If goods and ills that occur at the end of a life do indeed carry greater prudential weight, it is not obvious that hedonism, perfectionism, or the typical brand of objective list theory have a principled way of accounting for this fact. Nothing internal to hedonism seems to explain why pleasures and pains at life’s end would carry greater weight than otherwise equivalent pleasures and pain occurring earlier in life. Nor is it clear that perfectionism can make sense of the idea that the very same type and level of capacity-exercising has different prudential weights at different points in life. Finally, while an objective list theory might in principle include some goods or bads that could account for this difference in axiological significance, the nine objective lists given above seem to contain no such items. Consequently, it appears that most of the leading theories have trouble accommodating one aspect of commonly held views about the good death. Footnote 31

I have now surveyed the most popular and widely discussed theories of well-being to see whether they recognize some paradigmatic good death factors. My preliminary investigation suggests that, if my working assumption is true, each of the theories undergenerates by failing to fully account for the goodness or badness of all three good death factors. Moreover, hedonism, perfectionism, and the popular sort of objective list theory seem to misgenerate insofar as they cannot account for the greater axiological significance commonly associated with goods and bads at the end of life. All of this lends support to the following conditional conclusion: if our three examples are indeed good death factors, the leading theories of well-being are inadequate insofar as they do not fully recognize them. Granted, this investigation has only been preliminary. I have left many stones unturned, so it is quite possible that proponents of the leading theories will find inventive ways to honor these commonsense convictions about the good death. Still, the present investigation should at least suffice to shift the burden of proof to those who are inclined to think that the leading theories can fully accommodate these popular views of the good death.

4 Moving Forward

My preliminary investigation suggests that the dominant theories of the good life cannot accommodate some commonly held views about what impacts the goodness or badness of a death. Whether this is a problem for these theories depends on whether the putative good death factors under consideration do indeed have non-instrumental prudential value. Recall that my conclusion is conditional: if these things directly impact the goodness or badness of a death, then the leading theories of the good life do not provide a plausible picture of the good death. I have only entertained the antecedent as a working assumption and grant that there are a host of interesting ways one might try to explain away these intuitions about the good death. However, even if this working assumption is false and these factors do not have non-instrumental prudential significance, it nonetheless seems odd and problematic that widely held views about the good death should find no representation among the leading philosophical accounts of the good life. Since many people have views about what constitutes a better or worse death that involve the four types of factors presented in Section 2 , we should strive to have some theories that can make sense of them.

My aim in this section is to offer two partial explanations of why the good death has been neglected in discussions of well-being and to make two corresponding recommendations for future work in this area. The first pertains to methodology. The second concerns a kind of well-being theory that might accommodate these good death factors.

4.1 A Shortcoming of the Current Methodology

One partial explanation for the neglect of the good death has to do with methodology. Well-being theorists tend to take as their starting point such broad, all-encompassing questions as “What does human well-being consist in?” or “What makes a life go well for the one who is living it?” The most widely debated theories of well-being are broad answers to these broad questions. Such simple, broad questions encourage us to take a wide-angle view of the topic and may foster the expectation that there is a simple, broad answer to be discovered. They nudge us away from an approach that takes a close look at particular dimensions of our lives. Our exploration of the good death shows that a narrower in-depth focus on a certain portion of human life can reveal greater complexity and richness in the realm of prudential value. It helps us see and appreciate what is easily missed from a bird’s eye view of human well-being.

This is not to say that the good death provides the only avenue for learning this lesson. The philosopher Anthony Skelton ( 2014 ) has argued that the leading theories of well-being are not well-suited to address the well-being of children. Skelton’s critique of the extant well-being literature has affinities with the present critique. The main difference is that Skelton is focusing on the beginning of life rather than the end of it. Still, both projects arguably reveal oversights in the well-being literature that are attributable to a methodology that focuses on human well-being in general.

There is nothing wrong with taking an interest in ambitiously broad questions about well-being. Yet, if narrowing our focus to some restricted dimension of well-being (such as the prudential value of death, or the well-being of people with autism Footnote 32 ) yields new insights about the good life and reveals shortcomings of the most popular theories, we should be wary about theorizing only at the most general level. Ideally, philosophical work will draw not only upon our reflections and intuitions about what is good for human beings in general or what makes for a good life in general, but will also examine well-being in narrower dimensions of human life. This could constitute a kind of reflective equilibrium methodology for the philosophy of well-being.

4.2 The Need for a Different Kind of Objective List Theory

Another part of the explanation for why well-being theorists have not recognized the four good death factors may be an overly restrictive understanding of objective list theories. To date, the sorts of objective list theories that have been proposed tend to acknowledge only a relatively short list of prudential values: achievement, friendship, happiness, loving relationships, knowledge, and so on. While these lists may hit upon the prudential goods and ills that matter the most in our lives, they might neglect a wide range of goods and bads that matter to a lesser extent. Footnote 33 I assume that many of the good death factors we have considered qualify as minor goods and bads. Dying at home, having an embarrassing death, and facing one’s death with good humor are the not the sort of things that are likely to make the difference between a good life and a bad life. They are not typically regarded as having anything close to the prudential importance of such things as life-long loving relationships, major achievements, long-term life-satisfaction and happiness, and so on. Still, even if these good death factors are not sufficient to “make or break” a person’s overall well-being, arguably they do have some significance and should sometimes figure in people’s prudential deliberation, particularly as they approach the end of their lives.

To capture the subtleties of people’s views about the good death (and, in all likelihood, many other aspects of our lives), we may require a different kind of objective list theory—one that incorporates both major and minor goods and bads of life and thereby constitutes a more radical form of pluralism. This may be an unwelcome development to philosophers who are eager to arrive at complete and digestible answers to our normative inquiries and, perhaps because of this, are drawn to simple, elegant theories. Completeness in a theory of well-being might be attainable if prudential value can be boiled down to a single property or some small set of properties. However, it is possible that the prudential landscape is far more complicated and nuanced than any monistic or modestly pluralistic theory is able to capture. To repeat a popular misquoting of Einstein, “Our theories should be as simple as possible—but no simpler.” Footnote 34 If there are minor prudential goods and bads, there is a real possibility that a complete and plausible theory of the good life will always remain beyond our reach. This would not mean that theorizing about well-being is futile or that we can never arrive at worthwhile knowledge. Proponents of this new brand of objective list theory might reasonably hope to increase their knowledge of the major goods and bads of life and perhaps also their understanding of some of life’s minor ones. But they should expect their understanding of the good life to always remain a work in progress. Footnote 35

5 Conclusion

Philosophical discussions of the good life have been relatively silent on the topic of the good death, and it appears that the leading theories of the good life cannot do justice to certain widely held views about the good death. This is explained, at least in part, by a methodology that focuses on providing broad answers to broad questions and does not attend to narrower domains of life, and by an overly restrictive understanding of objective list theories. This suggests two recommendations for future work in the philosophy of well-being. First, the dominant methodology needs to be counterbalanced by attention to narrower domains of human life and experience. Second, there is the need to explore and develop more nuanced and complex objective list theories that make room for minor goods and bads—including, though certainly not limited to, all of the features that make for a better or worse death.

See, for instance, Davis and Slater ( 1989 ), Miller ( 1995 ), Neumann ( 2017 ), Smith and Periyakoil ( 2018 ).

For an introduction to this literature, see Heathwood ( 2010 ), Bradley ( 2015 ), and Fletcher ( 2016a , 2016b ).

Notable exceptions include Kagan ( 2012 ), which touches on certain good-death themes, and Dorsey ( 2017 ), which defends the view that deaths can have some non-instrumental value insofar as they are unified by long-term projects. This topic has also received attention from bioethicists, though this work tends to be less theoretical and concerned mainly with death in medical settings. Lastly, the topic of the good death is partially addressed in the “evil of death” literature, which largely centers around the Epicurean puzzle of whether and when death could be bad for us. However, it is customary in that literature to distinguish between the process of dying, the event of death, and the state of being dead and to focus attention on the second or third. See, for instance, Bradley ( 2009 ), 179. This has the effect of screening off many pre-death states of affairs that tend to be the focal point of discussions of the good death. Consequently, while the evil of death literature certainly has relevance to the present topic insofar as it addresses one incredibly important facet of how well or poorly our deaths go for us, it hardly addresses death in the more full-bodied biographical sense that will concern us here.

As many philosophers of death have emphasized, hedonists can also recognize that death has comparative value or disvalue insofar as it renders one hedonically better or worse off than one otherwise would have been.

Some may prefer to conceive of death as the event of permanently transitioning to an afterlife.

We might wonder whether their prudential significance is rooted in their contribution to narrative unity [cf. MacIntyre 1984 ; Velleman 1991 ; Brännmark 2003 ; Dorsey 2017 ]. For a useful introduction to the literature on narrative and well-being, as well as her own intriguing proposal about how narrative can affect well-being, see Rosati ( 2013 ).

Anderson ( 1996 ), 27–28.

See, for instance, Steinhauser et al. ( 2000 ); Higginson and Sen-Gupta ( 2000 ); and Gawande ( 2014 ), 59, 66–67, 136–139, 165, 192.

Gawande ( 2014 ), 82.

Wakam et al. ( 2020 ), Schairer ( 2020 ), Burke ( 2020 ).

We should not leap to the generalization that any significant life-event is enhanced by the presence of loved ones. Most people don’t want family and friends present when they lose their virginity.

Anderson ( 1996 ), 75.

https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-xpm-2012-mar-19-la-trb-death-grand-canyon-20120315-story.html

Thomas ( 2003 ), 239.

Enright ( 1983 ), 330; Rieff ( 2008 ).

Steinhauser et al. ( 2000 ).

In the interest of space, I am only discussing three specific instances of good death factors. However, all four types of good death factors are represented insofar as some instances of an embarrassing cause of death will pertain to both the cause of death and one’s manner of facing death. For instance, a person’s embarrassingly flippant attitude about the risk of death might play an important role in bringing about their death.

Different varieties of hedonism diverge in how they understand the nature of pleasure or happiness and its negative counterpart and in how much weight is given to different kinds of positive and negative mental states, but these distinctions should make no difference to the present discussion.

Modern technology can allow a person to virtually “occupy” their home from another location or to have loved ones “present” virtually. Whether this kind of presence is of equal prudential value is a matter for substantive debate.

For simplicity, I will speak mostly in terms of the simple desire-fulfillment theory, though the discussion can be easily adapted for idealized theories. Also, there has been some debate about how best to formulate desire-fulfillment theories. Suppose that a subject S desires some state of affairs x. Let y be the state of affairs of S’s desiring x. On one approach, what is good for S is the conjunction of x and y. On another approach, what is good for S (given y) is x. This distinction is discussed in Dorsey ( 2013 ). I am adopting the latter formulation since it holds more promise for accommodating the good death factors.

As one reviewer pointed out, if subjectivists already find ways to reject objectivist intuitions about knowledge, achievement, and friendship, they will probably have no problem doing the same with intuitions about these (more minor) death-related goods and bads. For some examples of debunking explanations from the hedonism literature, see Crisp ( 2006 ), 119–20, and Feldman ( 2004 ), 42, 110–11.

Bradford ( 2016 ).

Ibid., 129.

Kraut ( 2007 ), 145, 161. Perfectionism is widely thought to have trouble accounting for the badness of pain, though Kraut believes pleasure and pain (in certain objects) can be accommodated by perfectionism (see Sections 33, 39, 43). If so, perfectionism will have some overlap with hedonism.

Brooke ( 2010 ).

There might be innovative variations on traditional perfectionism that go some way toward capturing these views. Gwen Bradford ( 2020 ) has recently proposed a “tripartite perfectionism,” on which well-being is a function not only of one’s exercise of capacities through some activity, but also of whether that activity yields its proper output or a negative output. For example, striving to achieve a goal will have some prudential value insofar as one is exercising one’s practical rationality, and there will be further value or disvalue depending on whether that striving culminates in achievement or failure. This sort of view might have the resources to explain some of our good death factors. Since most of us have an on-going goal of sharing our lives with loved ones, and of maintaining our dignity and avoiding embarrassment, perhaps the goodness of having loved ones at death and the badness of an embarrassing death could be explained in terms of positive and negative outputs. However, perfectionism, as traditionally understood, makes no prudential distinction between cases where an activity culminates in its proper output and those where it does not.

Woodard ( 2013 ); Fletcher ( 2013 ). However, see Lin ( 2017 ), who argues that all of the major well-being theories are both explanatory and enumerative.

For present purposes, I will interpret the above lists as explanatory, even where this conflicts with an author’s intent. Also, it is worth highlighting that, with the notable exception of Derek Parfit’s list, the above lists only speak to the goods of life and say nothing about what things are bad for us. Objective list theorists, like many other well-being theorists, have tended to neglect considerations of ill-being, the negative dimension of well-being. See Kagan ( 2015 ).

One rarely sees “desire-fulfillment” or “exercising one’s capacities” appear on an objective list. But if they did, that theory could go as far as desire-fulfillment theory and perfectionism in recognizing the good death factors.

This resembles a conclusion reached in connection to perfectionism.

Desire-fulfillment theory, in contrast, has a very natural way of capturing death’s axiological significance. Insofar as many people have a stronger desire to be at home, have loved ones present, and avoid embarrassment in their final hours than at other times, desire-fulfillment theory can easily capture why these things would be prudentially better or worse for those people. It therefore does not seem vulnerable to the particular misgeneration problem facing the other theories. Granted, it might be thought that desire-fulfillment theory misgenerates in a different way: it fails to adequately explain why good death factors are good or bad for a person since it implies (counterintuitively) that this is so because the individual desires to have or avoid them. This is a familiar general objection to desire-fulfillment theories.

Rodogno et al. ( 2016 ).

This deficiency of objective list theories is explored in Rice ( 2017 ).

What he actually said: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” Einstein ( 1934 ), 165.

Granted, even if this sort of objective list theory would mark an improvement over the status quo, there is a reasonable worry that objective list theories embody a problematic atomistic approach to well-being, which treats a good life as a life comprised of parts that are valuable irrespective of their place in a life. It is quite possible that the prudential significance of a life’s end might be more salient if we evaluated lives holistically. For a promising defense of a holistic approach to well-being, see Brännmark ( 2001 , 2003 ).

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Acknowledgments

For their insightful feedback on this paper or one of its ancestors, I am grateful to Sven Nyholm, Anne Baril, Gwen Bradford, Dan Callahan, Julia Driver, Guy Fletcher, Chris Heathwood, Shelly Kagan, Eden Lin, Duncan Purves, Wayne Sumner, three anonymous reviewers of this journal, and audiences at the 12th Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop and Network (SPAWN), Bentley University, the Center for Values and Social Policy at University of Colorado-Boulder, Southern Methodist University, University of South Carolina, University of California-Davis, and Coe College.

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2 The Meaning of Death

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“The meaning of death” is often associated with a world other than the one in which we live, a spirit-world or at least a realm that transcends the limitations of nature. What does death refer to? Is death simply the end of life, or does it also have other meaning? The meaning of death is philosophically interesting if we contrast it with the concept of dying. This chapter explores the meaning of death, human existence as a “being-to-overcome-death,” and the meaningful place of death in our being. It looks at Martin Heidegger’s conception of authenticity and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of Heidegger’s ideas on death, the concept of anxiety employed by both philosophers in their attempts to show how man should cope with death, and Arthur Schopenhauer’s views on death.

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The Meaning of Death

Laszlo makay , george marosan jr. and david vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it..

Unsurprisingly, people are obsessed with the meaning of their lives. Many also think that death is the antithesis of meaning – the single greatest obstacle to a meaningful life. However, what if this is a misunderstanding? Moreover, if we discovered the meaning of death (if any exists), would it cast light on the meaning of life?

All of us have heard things like “Everyone dies, so life is meaningless.” Or taking this logic to a higher level, someone may say: “The unavoidable destruction of the universe – via heat death, the big crunch, or the big rip, you name it – makes the existence of the entire human race meaningless.” These simple reasonings seem correct. Our own deepest fears only serve to help them appear realistic.

Things have meaning because they are meaningful to somebody. Once that person dies then nothing matters to them any more, so surely the things in their life that had meaning no longer do? Hasty conclusions are usually misleading, and in this case, the conclusions are incorrect. Some meanings or their bearers can survive our own individual deaths – such as our own children or our contribution to society. Many external goals and achievements may continue to exist after our death. And in some special cases – for example, sacrificing oneself for a noble cause – death may even be necessary to fully realise a meaningful individual life.

What about the meaninglessness of humanity on a cosmic scale? It doesn’t hurt to know that science tells us that the longer the forecasting period, the less reliable the prediction. Any prognosis in the range of billions of years is uncertain at best. If we do not know what comprises 95% of the universe, we cannot be confident of our predictions about it. We cannot even be certain that the universe will ever be destroyed. Consequently, it would be a long shot to find our existence meaningless just because of some uncertain end-of-the-cosmos scenarios set untold billions of years in the future.

Life and Death Issues

If we want to be correct about the meaning of life in the face of death, we should first understand some basics about death.

‘Life’ has different definitions depending on the perspective and approach. Someone may say that the basic criteria for life are the utilization of free energy, reproduction, and the capacity for metabolism; but there is no single correct definition. Philosophy, biology, even astronomy, have divergent descriptions.

The situation with death is similar. Until recently, people who did not breathe were considered dead. This criterion was so unreliable that being buried alive occurred so often that fear of it was common enough to get its own name: taphophobia . The methods to establish death slowly became more trustworthy: a lack of pulse or heartbeat, then observing the non-functioning of the brain.

While biology and the medical sciences have their various definitions of life and death, we should dig even deeper, to account for the viewpoint of physics. After all, biology is essentially based on chemistry, and chemistry is based on physics. At the most fundamental level of physics, we find the law of conservation of energy and matter. This law does not allow annihilation in the literal sense, only the transformation of matter and energy. Matter/energy cannot be destroyed and it cannot disappear; it can only change.

If there is no fundamental physics-level manifestation of ‘death’, how should we interpret the concept? According to biology, physics, and systems theory together, death is a so-called ‘emergent phenomenon’ within the systems of life or the biosphere. For instance, death can be narrowly interpreted as the end of vital signs of an organism, so there would be no death without biological life. Consequently, death is something that needs life first.

The relationship is unidirectional, since death cannot happen without life – but life can exist without death. Yes: according to physics, death is not a necessity. At a fundamental physical level, all living organisms could rejuvenate their bodies by using free energy in their environment; and there is no fundamental physical cause preventing organisms doing this indefinitely. Many proliferating unicellular organisms (such as the HeLa immortal cell line) do not die because of ‘old age’; death only occurs due to environmental influences or accidents. The unicellular organisms living today are the same line as those that started fission billions of years ago, continuously dividing and surviving. Immortality, or more precisely, negligible senescence – a lack of symptoms of aging in organisms – may even exist in case of multicellular organisms such as hydras, which do not grow old. Many quite complex organisms such as trees live for thousands of years. Of course, in the long term, the likelihood of death for the individuals of even these species rises to 100%, due to accidents, disasters, illness, or predators. However, that can take a comparatively long time, and does not explain the usual death due to old age for individuals of most species. We could even say that there is something strange with common inevitable death through old age. For example, species have different typical lifespans. The normal timing of the ‘unavoidable’ death from old age of the mayfly, mouse, elephant, and tree varies species-by-species in an extremely wide range, from days to thousands of years. Therefore, death from old age is not the result of being alive in general, but due to species-specific factors. In other words, natural death is a function of their biological structure, their behavior, and their environment. Dying after a mating ritual enables reproduction; or the further life of the individual helps to support offspring.

This shows the efficiency of the life-cycles of organisms. Death starts to show evolutionarily benefits. A genetically-programmed, species-specific, timely death frees up natural resources. In every species, offspring, requiring living space and resources, represent the capacity for mutations, and so enable evolutionary adaptation. It would be hugely restrictive to the offspring if all the ancestors remained alive: it would cause them to run out of resources and space in the short term, thereby obstructing adaptation in the long term. Thus on the larger scale, death serves life rather than ruins it. The evolutionary advantages of the eventual programmed death of organisms has usually proved to be greater than the non-dying seen in their unaging counterparts, so evolution has favored congenital mortality in most cases. That is exactly what we can see in nature: there are far more mortal organisms in multicellular species than immortal ones.

So death does not happen out of physical, chemical, or biochemical necessity, but because of its useful effects. Death does not simply depend on life (since only the living can die); rather, life – more precisely, evolutionary processes – gave birth to death for its own ‘purposes’, with the genesis of the first complex organisms, about seven hundred million years ago or so. Nevertheless, we as individuals consider death a catastrophe because of our personal involvement, fear, and loss. We can see death coming, but we cannot see its useful effects after our demise.

Life and Death Reconsidered

So what is death’s meaning? The meaning is its contribution to the success, survival, adaptation, and development of life. The fact that life is present almost everywhere on our planet in such a great diversity today is only made possible by death. By the same token, death has also contributed to the emergence of humanity.

Furthermore, immortality would not itself absolve life of apparent meaninglessness. In fact, a lack of death would make life unbearable in the long run, as well as unsustainable. Immortality would likely lead to an overcrowded Earth with societies full of inequalities and social tensions in a collapsing ecosystem. Powerful leaders and wealthy individuals would strive to maintain and increase their power and wealth; fewer new minds being born would bring about less innovation; and immortality’s impact on our already overstretched natural resources and environment would be catastrophic.

Does the meaning of death lead to the meaning of life, too? We have seen that death is not an obstacle to a meaningful life. Besides, it has its own meaning, by contributing to life. Therefore, life is meaningful too, is it not?

Unfortunately, death having a purpose does not automatically give meaning to life. And if life turns out to be meaningless, then death, even if it were evolutionarily valuable , would also be meaningless. We have simply removed some common misconceptions regarding death and its effect on the meaning of life. Therefore, we have somewhat reduced the likelihood of negative answers to whether life has a meaning. But giving a positive answer to the ancient question, if possible at all, requires further research.

© Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr., David Vatai 2020

Laszlo Makay obtained his MSc. in Finance and Management at the Budapest University of Economics. George Marosan Jr obtained a PhD in Philosophy in 1978. He has been a university professor since 1992. David Vatai obtained his MSc in English in 2016 and a minor in Philosophy in 2012 at the University of Szeged.

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How death shapes life

As global COVID toll hits 5 million, Harvard philosopher ponders the intimate, universal experience of knowing the end will come but not knowing when

Colleen Walsh

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Does the understanding that our final breath could come tomorrow affect the way we choose to live? And how do we make sense of a life cut short by a random accident, or a collective existence in which the loss of 5 million lives to a pandemic often seems eclipsed by other headlines? For answers, the Gazette turned to Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Susanna Siegel

GAZETTE: How do we get through the day with death all around us?

SIEGEL: This question arises because we can be made to feel uneasy, distracted, or derailed by death in any form: mass death, or the prospect of our own; deaths of people unknown to us that we only hear or read about; or deaths of people who tear the fabric of our lives when they go. Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss. This fact has profound consequences for every facet of life: politics and governance, interpersonal relationships, and all forms of human consciousness.

When things go well, death stays in the background, and from there, covertly, it shapes our awareness of everything else. Even when we get through the day with ease, the prospect of death is still in some way all around us.

GAZETTE:   Can philosophy help illuminate how death impacts consciousness?

SIEGEL: The philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger each discuss death, in their own ways, as a horizon that implicitly shapes our consciousness. It’s what gives future times the pressure they exert on us. A horizon is the kind of thing that is normally in the background — something that limits, partly defines, and sets the stage for what you focus on. These two philosophers help us see the ways that death occupies the background of consciousness — and that the background is where it belongs.

“Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss,” says Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

These philosophical insights are vivid in Rainer Marie Rilke’s short and stunning poem “Der Tod” (“Death”). As Burton Pike translates it from German, the poem begins: “There stands death, a bluish concoction/in a cup without a saucer.” This opening gets me every time. Death is standing. It’s standing in the way liquid stands still in a container. Sometimes cooking instructions tell you to boil a mixture and then let it stand, while you complete another part of the recipe. That’s the way death is in the poem: standing, waiting for you to get farther along with whatever you are doing. It will be there while you’re working, it will be there when you’re done, and in some way, it is a background part of those other tasks.

A few lines later, it’s suggested in the poem that someone long ago, “at a distant breakfast,” saw a dusty, cracked cup — that cup with the bluish concoction standing in it — and this person read the word “hope” written in faded letters on the side of mug. Hope is a future-directed feeling, and in the poem, the word is written on a surface that contains death underneath. As it stands, death shapes the horizon of life.

GAZETTE: What are the ethical consequences of these philosophical views?

SIEGEL: We’re familiar with the ways that making the prospect of death salient can unnerve, paralyze, or derail a person. An extreme example is shown by people with Cotard syndrome , who report feeling that they have already died. It is considered a “monothematic” delusion, because this odd reaction is circumscribed by the sufferers’ other beliefs. They freely acknowledge how strange it is to be both dead and yet still there to report on it. They are typically deeply depressed, burdened with a feeling that all possibilities of action have simply been shut down, closed off, made unavailable. Robbed of a feeling of futurity, seemingly without affordances for action, it feels natural to people in this state to describe it as the state of being already dead.

Cotard syndrome is an extreme case that illustrates how bringing death into the foreground of consciousness can feel utterly disempowering. This observation has political consequences, which are evident in a culture that treats any kind of lethal violence as something we have to expect and plan for. A glaring example would be gun violence, with its lockdown drills for children, its steady stream of the same types of events, over and over — as if these deaths could only be met with a shrug and a sigh, because they are simply part of the cost of other people exercising their freedom.

It isn’t just depressing to bring death into the foreground of consciousness by creating an atmosphere of violence — it’s also dangerous. Any political arrangement that lets masses of people die thematizes death, by making lethal violence perceptible, frequent, salient, talked-about, and tolerated. Raising death to salience in this way can create and then leverage feelings of existential precarity, which in turn emotionally equip people on a mass, nationwide scale to tolerate violence as a tool to gain political power. It’s now a regular occurrence to ram into protestors with vehicles, intimidate voters and poll workers, and prepare to attack government buildings and the people inside. This atmosphere disparages life, and then promises violence as defense against such cheapening, and a means of control.

GAZETTE: When we read about an accidental death in the newspaper, it can be truly unnerving, even though the victim is a stranger. And we’ve been hearing about a steady stream of deaths from COVID-19 for almost two years, to the point where the death count is just part of the daily news. Why is the process of thinking about these losses important?

SIEGEL: It might not seem directly related to politics, but when you react to a life cut short by thinking, “If this terrible thing could happen to them, then it could happen to me,” that reaction is a basic form of civic regard. It’s fragile, and highly sensitive to how deaths are reported and rendered in public. The passing moment of concern may seem insignificant, but it gets supplanted by something much worse when deaths are rendered in ways likely to prompt such questions as “What did they do to get in trouble?” or such suspicions as “They probably had it coming,” or such callous resignations as “They were going to die anyway.” We have seen some of those reactions during the pandemic. They are refusals to recognize the terribleness of death.

Deaths can seem even more haunting when they’re not recognized as a real loss, which is why it’s so important how deaths are depicted by governments and in mass communication. The genre of the obituary is there to present deaths as a loss to the public. The movement for Black lives brought into focus for everyone what many people knew and felt all along, which was that when deaths are not rendered as losses to the public, then they are depicted in a way that erodes civic regard.

When anyone dies from COVID, our political representatives should acknowledge it in a way that does justice to the gravity of that death. Recognizing COVID deaths as a public emergency belongs to the kind of governance that aims to keep the blue concoction where it belongs.

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Defining a Good Death (Successful Dying): Literature Review and a Call for Research and Public Dialogue

Associated data.

There is little agreement about what constitutes good death or successful dying. The authors conducted a literature search for published, English-language, peer-reviewed reports of qualitative and quantitative studies that provided a definition of a good death. Stakeholders in these articles included patients, prebereaved and bereaved family members, and healthcare providers (HCPs). Definitions found were categorized into core themes and subthemes, and the frequency of each theme was determined by stakeholder (patients, family, HCPs) perspectives. Thirty-six studies met eligibility criteria, with 50% of patient perspective articles including individuals over age 60 years. We identified 11 core themes of good death: preferences for a specific dying process, pain-free status, religiosity/spiritualty, emotional well-being, life completion, treatment preferences, dignity, family, quality of life, relationship with HCP, and other. The top three themes across all stakeholder groups were preferences for dying process (94% of reports), pain-free status (81%), and emotional well-being (64%). However, some discrepancies among the respondent groups were noted in the core themes: Family perspectives included life completion (80%), quality of life (70%), dignity (70%), and presence of family (70%) more frequently than did patient perspectives regarding those items (35%–55% each). In contrast, religiosity/spirituality was reported somewhat more often in patient perspectives (65%) than in family perspectives (50%). Taking into account the limitations of the literature, further research is needed on the impact of divergent perspectives on end-of-life care. Dialogues among the stakeholders for each individual must occur to ensure a good death from the most critical viewpoint—the patient’s.

INTRODUCTION

“The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” —Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie 1

Considerable lay literature describes positive approaches to dying. For example, in “Tuesdays with Morrie” 1 Mitch Albom visits with his former Sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, who provides lessons on acceptance, communication, and love in the midst of his own dying process. Similarly, Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” 2 describes experiences in a Nazi concentration camp that led to finding meaning during times of suffering and death. Also, in “The Last Lecture,” 3 Randy Pausch discusses, after being diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, how to truly live and embrace every moment because “time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think.” Finally, in his commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs, 4 after a recent diagnosis of cancer, called death “very likely the single best invention of life” and described focusing on what was most important and meaningful to him as he confronted death. These literary examples illustrate various constructs of a good death or “dying well.” 5

Within the healthcare community and, more specifically, in hospice and palliative care, there has been some discussion of the concept of a good death. 6 , 7 This concept arose from the hospice movement and has been described as a multifaceted and individualized experience. 8 According to an Institute of Medicine report published 19 years ago, a good death is one that is “free from avoidable distress and suffering for patient, family, and caregivers, in general accord with the patient’s and family’s wishes, and reasonably consistent with clinical, cultural, and ethical standards.” 9 This concept has received some critique in several disciplines, including medicine, psychology, theology, sociology, and anthropology. 6 In particular, concern has been raised that there is no such thing as an external criterion of a good death and that it is more dependent on the perspectives of the dying individual. 10

In this article we use the terms “good death” or “successful dying.” Is successful dying an extension of successful aging? Research on successful aging has grown considerably in recent years; 11 however, there is little agreement as to what specifically constitutes a good death or successful dying despite many reviews examining the concept of a good death from sociological and philosophical viewpoints 12 – 18 as well as research examining the quality of death and dying, which is defined as “the degree to which a person’s preferences for dying and the moment of death agree with observations of how the person actually died, as reported by others.” 19 – 23 However, far fewer studies have specifically defined, rather than conceptualized, what a good death is according to patients, family members, and healthcare providers (HCPs). The goal of this article is to review the literature that examined the definitions of a good death from the perspectives of such patients, their family members, and HCPs.

By examining the perspectives regarding a good death contrasted across different stakeholders, our aim is to identify potential unmet needs of patients and to suggest an approach to achieve a multifaceted and individualized experience for patients approaching death. Because a dearth of literature examines this important topic, our review is limited by the quantity and quality of studies available to evaluate. To our knowledge, no review to date has examined and compiled definitions of good death as defined explicitly by patients, family members, and HCPs or examined the differences among these stakeholders’ viewpoints. This is an area of considerable public health significance and impact on the patients, their families, and the overall healthcare system. The present article is also intended to serve as a call to action to highlight the need for more patient-focused research and open public dialogues on successful dying.

Data Sources

We searched PubMed and PsycINFO databases from inception through November 2015 using the following terms: (definition of) AND (good OR successful OR peaceful) AND (Death OR Dying); (good) OR (successful OR peaceful) AND (“Death and Dying”); (“Terminal Care”[Mesh] AND “Quality of Life”[Mesh] AND “Attitude to Death”[Mesh]); (“Terminal Care”[Mesh]) AND “Attitude to Death”[Mesh] AND (define OR definition); good death and dignity; good death and end of life preferences; good death and quality of death and dying.

Selection of Articles

We restricted our search to include articles that met the following criteria: published in English in peer-reviewed journals and provided quantitative or qualitative data that specifically defined or used a measure of good death as the main aim or outcome of the study. We eliminated all duplicate articles from these searches. Additionally, we reviewed the reference lists of all articles that were relevant as well as recent review papers that examined a good death. 15 , 24 , 25 There were no instances of overlapping samples.

Two authors (EAM and JVG) independently searched PubMed and PsycINFO databases for appropriate articles according to the key words mentioned above. Individual articles were independently coded for themes and subthemes by the two authors. If there was a disagreement between the two, a third author (DVJ) was consulted to help reach a consensus. Specific information about each article was stored in an Excel database.

Most initial search results (3,434) were excluded because of irrelevance to the subject matter in the title or abstract (e.g., “good cell death,” “good bone death,” “animal death,” etc.), which resulted in 392 articles for further review. After a more detailed examination, we narrowed these articles down to 36 relevant to the present review ( Fig. 1 ). Articles were excluded if they were focused solely on euthanasia or assisted suicide or on specific methods of enhancing quality of care at the end of life, unless one of the specific aims of the study was to define good death or successful dying.

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flow diagram of the review process.

References from review papers of a good death were examined in detail to see if they met our inclusion criteria. Twenty-seven articles contained qualitative methods, 5 articles used quantitative methods, and 4 articles contained mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative). Of the quantitative and mixed-methods studies (N = 9), 3 articles used standardized measures of a good death, including the Preferences about Death and Dying questionnaire, 26 The Concept of a Good Death scale, 27 and The Good Death Inventory. 28 The other six studies had developed their own quantitative measures (e.g., attitudinal measures of a good death); 29 a 12-item questionnaire based on 12 principles of a good death according to the Future of Health Care of Older People report; 30 , 31 a 57-item questionnaire based on a previous qualitative study; 32 44 items of attributes important at the end of life developed from focus groups and in-depth interviews with patients, family members, and HCPs; 33 and a 72-item survey on perceptions of end-of-life care. 34

Coding of Articles

Two authors (EAM and JVG) independently read all 36 articles. We used the method of coding consensus, co-occurrence, and comparison outlined by Williams et al. 35 and rooted in grounded theory to generate common themes of a good death. Four consensus meetings were held between two coders (EAM and JVG) to create the final coding scheme after resolving any disagreements. We began with 38 themes, which were narrowed to 11 themes in a consensus meeting involving three authors (EAM, JVG, and DVJ). Two authors (EAM and JVG) then independently coded each definition supplied in the 36 articles, which were then mapped onto the 11 core themes. If an item did not fit, it was placed in the “Other” core theme. Inter-rater reliability was calculated for the independent raters by use of the kappa statistic. The inter-rater reliability for the coders was kappa = 0.896 (p < 0.0.000; standard error: 0.023), which was a satisfactory level of agreement. 36 Discrepancies were further discussed by two authors (EAM and JVG), with a third author (DVJ) consulted, when needed, to reach a final consensus on each definition.

The sources of each definition were separated into three groups: (1) patients’ perspectives (N = 20), (2) prebereaved and bereaved family members’ perspectives (N = 10), and (3) HCPs’ perspectives (N = 18). Patient populations consisted of those with advanced cancer, chronic illnesses, HIV/AIDS, as well as the general population. Family members’ perspectives were prebereavement (N = 1) or postbereavement (N = 9). HCPs included physicians, nurses, social workers, and spiritual counselors. HCP perspectives could not be further broken down into specific subgroups (e.g., physicians versus nurses) because these subgroups were usually combined in the studies reviewed. Of the 36 reviewed articles, 29 were coded into one category and 7 were coded into more than one group, 2 articles coded into two groups, and 5 articles were coded into all three.

We did not conduct a formal meta-analysis in light of differences among the studies in terms of depth of information and methods used to assess stakeholders’ (especially patients’) demographics, medical diagnoses, treatment status, cognitive assessment, and so on. By definition, meta-analysis comprises statistical methods for contrasting and combining results from different studies in the hope of identifying patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context of multiple studies (p. 652). 37 This type of analysis was not possible for our data for the reasons mentioned above. Additionally, weighting was not done because qualitative and quantitative studies were combined. However, because all studies provided stakeholder frequency of responses that endorsed specific themes of a good death, we were able to aggregate frequencies across studies to calculate the mean percentages for different domains of what is perceived to be part of a good death. As such, we calculated the means and standard deviations or percentages, as appropriate, and reported the rate of endorsement of each of the 11 codes within each of the sources (e.g., patients, family members, and HCPs).

In total, 36 articles met our search criteria. These studies were published between 1996 and 2015. Total sample sizes across all studies reviewed ranged from 3 to 2,548 (mean: 184.4; standard deviation: 440.8). As one may expect, qualitative studies had much smaller sample sizes than quantitative investigations. Table 1 summarizes demographics of the patients included in individual studies. The age range of patients spanned 14–93 years (mean: 89.7; standard deviation: 16.6), with 50% of patient perspective articles including individuals over age 60 years. Age was somewhat skewed because several articles only reported a range rather than the mean age. There was a relatively even distribution between men and women across all studies. The studies reviewed had been conducted in the United States (N = 13), United Kingdom (7), Japan (3), Netherlands (3), Thailand (2), Iran (1), Israel (1), Canada (1), Nova Scotia (1), Saudi Arabia (1), South Korea (1), and Sweden (1), Turkey (1).

Demographic Characteristics of Patients in the 36 Articles Reviewed for Successful Dying

Themes and Subthemes of Successful Death Definitions

Eleven themes were identified, and each consisted of 2 to 4 subthemes, which are presented in Table 2 . The most frequently appearing theme for a good death across all groups was “preferences for the dying process,” which was reported in 94% of the articles in the sample. These preferences for the dying process included the following subthemes: the death scene (how, who, where, and when), dying during sleep, and preparation for death (e.g., advanced directives, funeral arrangements). “Pain-free status” was the second most frequent core theme of good death in the sample (81%) followed by “emotional well-being” (64%). Examples from patients included the following statements: “Painless. I mean pain is my biggest fear, you know. I don’t want to die in pain,” “a good death would be having the things that you wanted to have taken care of before you die done so you can be at peace with it.” 42 Additionally, some statements included that thinking about death and dying made individuals feel “afraid and depressed.” 50

Core Themes and Subthemes of a Good Death and/or Successful Dying

Four themes—life completion, treatment preferences, dignity, and family—were endorsed by more than 50% of all three stakeholder groups ( Table 3 ). The theme of life completion contained subthemes of saying goodbye, feeling that life was well lived, and acceptance of impending death. Treatment preferences included subthemes related to not prolonging life, a belief that all available treatments were used, a sense of control over treatment choices, and euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide. The theme of dignity consisted of being respected as an individual and maintaining independence, whereas the theme of family included family support, family accepting of death, the family is prepared for the death, and not being a burden to family.

Number of Articles (N = 36) that Included Specific Core Themes

Note: Values in parentheses are percent of the stakeholders endorsing themes.

Prebereaved and bereaved family members rated eight of the core themes at 70% and higher, the most frequent themes being preferences for dying process (100%), pain-free status (90%), and life completion (80%). Relationship with HCPs was found to be the least important specific theme among all three stakeholders.

Among HCPs, preference for dying process (94%) was the most frequently endorsed core theme of a good death, followed by pain-free status (83%), dignity (67%), and emotional well-being (67%). HCPs had the lowest endorsement for three core themes: life completion (56%), relationship with HCPs (39%), and quality of life (22%). Examples from HCPs included statements such as “having a patient pass quietly so not to disturb other patients,” “having the death occur at a time when there was adequate staff,” and “not having used excessive or futile treatments.” 53 , 54 Some statements included regret for administered treatment or a concern that the medical staff was unable to provide appropriate care.

Differences in frequencies of themes among the stakeholder groups were greatest for quality of life, which was rated more frequently in family perspective articles (70%) than in patient and HCP perspective articles (35% and 22%, respectively) ( Table 3 ). Similarly, prebereaved and bereaved family members identified the importance of family and maintaining dignity at a rate (70%) somewhat higher than that in the patient perspective articles (55% each). In contrast, religiosity/spirituality was endorsed somewhat more in patient perspective articles (65%) than in family perspective articles (50%). Supplementary Table S1 lists core themes endorsed by each stakeholder group in individual articles.

In this review we identified a number of themes important to a good death that both converge and diverge across stakeholders. To our knowledge, this review is the first systematic attempt to review the empirical literature on both the definition of a good death or successful dying according to patients, family members, and HCPs and differences across these stakeholder perspectives. Our review identified a general consensus among patients, family members, and HCPs in regard to pain-free status and specific preferences for the dying process; however, there were some notable discrepancies, for example, family members rated quality of life as more important than patient and HCP articles.

This review has several limitations. The first challenge is the variability among the articles reviewed in reporting data such as respondent characteristics. There were no common measures of a “good death” used in different investigations, which limited our capacity to aggregate results for conducting a meta-analysis or meta-regression. There was also an imbalance in sample sizes across qualitative and quantitative studies. We restricted our search to English-language and peer-reviewed articles, which might have limited the scope of our review. Also, some differences in perspectives of different stakeholders discussed below are rather small in magnitude, compounded by the limited amount of published literature in this emerging area of empirical research; consequently, we were underpowered to make statistical comparisons across study groups.

Empirical research on what comprises a good death began only a couple of decades ago, and several aspects of the methodology used in previously published studies were suboptimal. Most articles reviewed did not report information regarding specific demographics of patients, including age, culture/ethnicity, diagnoses, study inclusion/exclusion criteria, and recruitment procedures. Additionally, there was no mention of the length of time between the interview or survey and the patients’ death, which might have an important impact on specific wishes, desires, and needs as one nears the end of life as well as perceptions of what constitutes a good death, which could change over time and as the process is experienced. In regards to the investigations of family members, most studies included postbereavement family members, and therefore perspectives of prebereavement family members were not well represented. Finally, HCPs were often grouped together in the reports, and it is not known what percentage of HCPs were physicians, nurses, social workers, spiritual counselors, and so on. Furthermore, there was little information on how many, if any, of these HCPs had directly cared for dying patients or received training in such care.

Despite these limitations, we were able to identify some consistency among the three stakeholder groups in their perceptions of what constituted a good death. In more than 85% of the articles reviewed, having patient-focused preferences for the dying process and being pain-free were key components of achieving a good death according to patients, prebereaved and bereaved family members, and HCPs. Physicians, nurses, and other HCPs viewed optimal pain control and keeping the patient comfortable as a requirement for a good death. 17 , 29 , 33 , 51 This is also consistent with the overall philosophy of hospice and palliative care, which focuses on decreasing pain and suffering while improving quality of life for both patients and family members. 55

Although family members’ perspectives seemed to be more in tune with the patients’ needs and desires for end-of-life care than HCPs’, there were also some differences between family members and patients in what themes they believed to be important for a good death. For example, quality of life was rated as an important component of a good death twice as often by family members (70%) as by patients (35%). Most family perspective articles were conducted with bereaved family members who were often asked to recall the death of a loved one. Although we cannot make assumptions regarding the inferences of these findings, it could be argued that family members and patients define quality of life differently. The quality of life literature is large and beyond the scope of this review; however, it is worth further investigating how patients, family members, and HCPs define quality of life near the end of life to help understand and define this construct more precisely.

Additionally, “dignity” was reported to be an important component of a good death in 70% of family articles compared with 55% of the articles that included patient perspectives. Although the difference is not large, the finding is counterintuitive to previous research, which has argued that patients greatly value maintaining dignity during the late phase of their life. 56 , 57 However, definitions of dignity vary, and the concept of dignity may have been absorbed into other themes from the stakeholders’ perspectives. Over the last 17 years, The Oregon Death with Dignity Act has consistently publicized that the three most important concerns reported among patients near the end of their lives include a loss of autonomy (91%), a decrease in the ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable (86%), and a loss of dignity (71%). 58 Furthermore, in a study conducted in 2002 by Chochinov et al., 56 palliative care patients reported that “not being treated with respect or understanding” (87%) and “feeling a burden to others” (87%) significantly impacted their sense of dignity. Therefore, our findings do not necessarily mean that dignity is less important for dying patients but that perhaps patients have a difficult time expressing the need for or concept of dignity to others.

The role of religiosity/spirituality was also somewhat discrepant between patients and other groups. Nearly two-thirds of patients (65%) in the articles reviewed expressed a desire to have religious or spiritual practices fulfilled as a theme of a good death; in contrast, only 50% of family members rated this theme as important. It should be added that hospice care teams are typically supposed to be composed of physicians, nurses, home health aides, social workers, as well as clergy or spiritual counselors. 59 However, in our current sample not all the patients were receiving hospice services, which might have contributed to a lack of recognition of the importance of religiosity/spirituality, because many organizations and hospitals do not have clergy members or spiritual counselors available on site, especially for diverse groups of patients.

Finally, although some literature exists on pain and physical symptoms, there is a dearth of research examining the psychological aspects of a good death, particularly from a patient perspective. 12 Our review indicates that patients view emotional well-being as a critical component of a successful death, as do family members and HCPs. Although it is important that we attend to the patient’s physical symptoms and pain control, it is crucial that the healthcare system expand the care beyond treating these symptoms and more closely address psychological, social, and religiosity/spirituality themes in end-of-life care for both patients and families. Patients view the end of life as encompassing not only the physical components of death but also psychosocial and spiritual concerns. 33 Both the American Psychological Association and the European Association for Palliative Care have identified a need for mental health professionals to address and measure psychological concerns at the end of life. 60 , 61 Further research regarding the psychological components of a good death is needed, especially in developing effective screening measures and appropriate interventions for dying patients. 12

Future Directions

This review suggests an obvious need for more research to examine the concept of a good death from patients’ perspectives to deliver quality care that is individualized to meet each patient’s needs 8 , 62 as well as the needs of their families. The discrepancies among patient, family member, and HCP perspectives on successful dying in this review indicate a critical need for a dialogue about death among all stakeholders involved in the care of each individual patient. It is important that we not only understand but also further investigate how addressing the themes identified in this review, both convergent and discrepant among stakeholders, may influence patient-related outcomes.

Well-designed studies are also necessary to qualitatively and quantitatively examine the concept of successful dying according to patients themselves, because this would have the potential to influence HCP care practices and to help family members meet the needs of their dying loved ones. Qualitative research could lead to the development of measurement tools for successful dying that allow for real-time modifications in care and examine how specific diseases and interventions intersect values and beliefs that are most important to patients nearing the end of their lives. Future studies would also benefit from mixed qualitative–quantitative method designs that compare people at the end of life with others who have chronic but earlier stage diseases (e.g., heart or lung disease). Additionally, it would be important to include different age cohorts (young, middle-aged, and older adults) to determine whether age impacts the themes that constitute a good death. Investigations of large numbers of demographically, medically, and psychosocially well-characterized patients from diverse ethnic and cultural groups, using standardized and validated instruments for successful dying, and seeking perspectives of these patients along with their prebereaved and bereaved family members and HCPs are recommended to inform the best practices in caring for dying patients and their families. Finally, future studies should use a clearly delineated sampling strategy that would then allow generalization to a larger population of patients, family members, and HCPs.

Finally, an important goal of this review is to issue a call for action to the professional and lay community to accelerate its open dialogue regarding death and dying, as the United States has a largely “death-phobic” culture. 63 Although individuals in many states in the country are formally asked and encouraged to consider advanced directives and organ donations, should we, as clinicians, also not ask our older patients to stipulate their preferences for the dying process? If, as a society, we begin to address the question of how people want to die and what they actually need and want at the end of their lives, perhaps we can enable more people to obtain a good death, reaching their full potential, with dignity and whole-person well-being. As stated eloquently by Gawande, 7 “…our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

Supplementary Material

Acknowledgments.

Funding for this research came, in part, from the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at UC San Diego, American Cancer Society: MRSG-13-233-01 PCSM, and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center.

APPENDIX: SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at doi:10.1016/j.jagp.2016.01.135.

The Aged Mother

By matsuo basho.

Long, long ago there lived at the foot of the mountain a poor farmer and his aged, widowed mother. They owned a bit of land which supplied them with food, and they were humble, peaceful, and happy.

Shining was governed by a despotic leader who though a warrior, had a great and cowardly shrinking from anything suggestive of failing health and strength. This caused him to send out a cruel proclamation. The entire province was given strict orders to immediately put to death all aged people. Those were barbarous days, and the custom of abandoning old people to die was not uncommon. The poor farmer loved his aged mother with tender reverence, and the order filled his heart with sorrow. But no one ever thought twice about obeying the mandate of the governor, so with many deep and hopeless sighs, the youth prepared for what at that time was considered the kindest mode of death.

Just at sundown, when his day’s work was ended, he took a quantity of unwhitened rice which was the principal food for the poor, and he cooked, dried it, and tied it in a square cloth, which he swung in a bundle around his neck along with a gourd filled with cool, sweet water. Then he lifted his helpless old mother to his back and started on his painful journey up the mountain. The road was long and steep; the narrow road was crossed and re-crossed by many paths made by the hunters and woodcutters. In some place, they lost and confues, but he gave no heed. One path or another, it mattered not. On he went, climbing blindly upward -- ever upward towards the high bare summit of what is known as Obatsuyama, the mountain of the “abandoning of the aged.”

The eyes of the old mother were not so dim but that they noted the reckless hastening from one path to another, and her loving heart grew anxious. Her son did not know the mountain’s many paths and his return might be one of danger, so she stretched forth her hand and snapping the twigs from brushes as they passed, she quietly dropped a handful every few steps of the way so that as they climbed, the narrow path behind them was dotted at frequent intervals with tiny piles of twigs. At last the summit was reached. Weary and heart sick, the youth gently released his burden and silently prepared a place of comfort as his last duty to the loved one. Gathering fallen pine needles, he made a soft cushion and tenderly lifted his old mother onto it. Hew rapped her padded coat more closely about the stooping shoulders and with tearful eyes and an aching heart he said farewell.

The trembling mother’s voice was full of unselfish love as she gave her last injunction. “Let not thine eyes be blinded, my son.” She said. “The mountain road is full of dangers. LOOK carefully and follow the path which holds the piles of twigs. They will guide you to the familiar path farther down.” The son’s surprised eyes looked back over the path, then at the poor old, shriveled hands all scratched and soiled by their work of love. His heart broke within and bowing to the ground, he cried aloud: “oh, Honorable mother, your kindness breaks my heart! I will not leave you. Together we will follow the path of twigs, and together we will die!”

Once more he shouldered his burden (how light it seemed now) and hastened down the path, through the shadows and the moonlight, to the little hut in the valley. Beneath the kitchen floor was a walled closet for food, which was covered and hidden from view. There the son hid his mother, supplying her with everything she needed, continually watching and fearing she would be discovered. Time passed, and he was beginning to feel safe when again the governor sent forth heralds bearing an unreasonable order, seemingly as a boast of his power. His demand was that his subjects should present him with a rope of ashes.

The entire province trembled with dread. The order must be obeyed yet who in all Shining could make a rope of ashes? One night, in great distress, the son whispered the news to his hidden mother. “Wait!” she said. “I will think. I will think” On the second day she told him what to do. “Make rope of twisted straw,” she said. “Then stretch it upon a row of flat stones and burn it on a windless night.” He called the people together and did as she said and when the blaze died down, there upon the stones, with every twist and fiber showing perfectly, lay a rope of ashes.

The governor was pleased at the wit of the youth and praised greatly, but he demanded to know where he had obtained his wisdom. “Alas! Alas!” cried the farmer, “the truth must be told!” and with deep bows he related his story. The governor listened and then meditated in silence. Finally he lifted his head. “Shining needs more than strength of youth,” he said gravely. “Ah, that I should have forgotten the well-known saying, “with the crown of snow, there cometh wisdom!” That very hour the cruel law was abolished, and custom drifted into as far a past that only legends remain.

Note Well: some of the arcane words that were used in the original English translation were replaced with their modern-day equivalents.

This story is featured in our collection of Short Short Stories to read when you have five minutes to spare and Short Stories for Middle School II

Return to the Matsuo Basho library

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1664 Short Story

The Aged Mother is an English Haiku , Japanese Literature short story by Japanese writer Matsuo Basho . It was first published in 1664.

The Aged Mother by Matsuo Basho

Long, long ago there lived at the foot of the mountain a poor farmer and his aged, widowed mother. They owned a bit of land which supplied them with food, and they were humble, peaceful, and happy.

Shining was governed by a despotic leader who though a warrior, had a great and cowardly shrinking from anything suggestive of failing health and strength. This caused him to send out a cruel proclamation. The entire province was given strict orders to immediately put to death all aged people. Those were barbarous days, and the custom of abandoning old people to die was not uncommon. The poor farmer loved his aged mother with tender reverence, and the order filled his heart with sorrow. But no one ever thought twice about obeying the mandate of the governor, so with many deep and hopeless sighs, the youth prepared for what at that time was considered the kindest mode of death.

Just at sundown, when his day’s work was ended, he took a quantity of unwhitened rice which was the principal food for the poor, and he cooked, dried it, and tied it in a square cloth, which he swung in a bundle around his neck along with a gourd filled with cool, sweet water. Then he lifted his helpless old mother to his back and started on his painful journey up the mountain. The road was long and steep; the narrow road was crossed and re-crossed by many paths made by the hunters and woodcutters. In some place, they lost and confues, but he gave no heed. One path or another, it mattered not. On he went, climbing blindly upward — ever upward towards the high bare summit of what is known as Obatsuyama, the mountain of the “abandoning of the aged.”

The eyes of the old mother were not so dim but that they noted the reckless hastening from one path to another, and her loving heart grew anxious. Her son did not know the mountain’s many paths and his return might be one of danger, so she stretched forth her hand and snapping the twigs from brushes as they passed, she quietly dropped a handful every few steps of the way so that as they climbed, the narrow path behind them was dotted at frequent intervals with tiny piles of twigs. At last the summit was reached. Weary and heart sick, the youth gently released his burden and silently prepared a place of comfort as his last duty to the loved one. Gathering fallen pine needles, he made a soft cushion and tenderly lifted his old mother onto it. Hew rapped her padded coat more closely about the stooping shoulders and with tearful eyes and an aching heart he said farewell.

The trembling mother’s voice was full of unselfish love as she gave her last injunction. “Let not thine eyes be blinded, my son.” She said. “The mountain road is full of dangers. LOOK carefully and follow the path which holds the piles of twigs. They will guide you to the familiar path farther down.” The son’s surprised eyes looked back over the path, then at the poor old, shriveled hands all scratched and soiled by their work of love. His heart broke within and bowing to the ground, he cried aloud: “oh, Honorable mother, your kindness breaks my heart! I will not leave you. Together we will follow the path of twigs, and together we will die!”

Once more he shouldered his burden (how light it seemed now) and hastened down the path, through the shadows and the moonlight, to the little hut in the valley. Beneath the kitchen floor was a walled closet for food, which was covered and hidden from view. There the son hid his mother, supplying her with everything she needed, continually watching and fearing she would be discovered. Time passed, and he was beginning to feel safe when again the governor sent forth heralds bearing an unreasonable order, seemingly as a boast of his power. His demand was that his subjects should present him with a rope of ashes.

The entire province trembled with dread. The order must be obeyed yet who in all Shining could make a rope of ashes? One night, in great distress, the son whispered the news to his hidden mother. “Wait!” she said. “I will think. I will think” On the second day she told him what to do. “Make rope of twisted straw,” she said. “Then stretch it upon a row of flat stones and burn it on a windless night.” He called the people together and did as she said and when the blaze died down, there upon the stones, with every twist and fiber showing perfectly, lay a rope of ashes.

The governor was pleased at the wit of the youth and praised greatly, but he demanded to know where he had obtained his wisdom. “Alas! Alas!” cried the farmer, “the truth must be told!” and with deep bows he related his story. The governor listened and then meditated in silence. Finally he lifted his head. “Shining needs more than strength of youth,” he said gravely. “Ah, that I should have forgotten the well-known saying, “with the crown of snow, there cometh wisdom!” That very hour the cruel law was abolished, and custom drifted into as far a past that only legends remain.

Matsuo Basho

Matsuo Basho (1644–1694) was a Japanese haiku poet of the Edo period. Revered as the master of haiku, his poems, such as “The Old Pond” and “Narrow Road to the Interior,” captured the essence of nature and the fleeting beauty of life in minimalist verses.

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The meaning of death in Kenkō Yoshida's Tsurezuregusa [Essays in idleness]

This article discusses the meaning of death in Kenkō Yoshida's Tsurezuregusa [Essays in idleness], completed around 1330 at the end of the Kamakura Period (1185–1333). Kenkō, who was a Buddhist monk and hermit, naturally construed the concept of death in terms of the impermanence of the world. Taking Lakoffian conceptual metaphor theory, in which death is understood as an abstract category, as a jumping-off point, I contrast the Buddhist conception of death with different conceptualizations of metaphor and metonymy by contemporary scholars to locate the notion of “death” in the medieval linguistic context. I claim that while death in Essays in idleness is more frequently considered non-literal, it is not interpretable metaphorically. This hints at an alternative, namely, that Kenkō's concept of death is created metonymically. Impermanence as a literary aesthetic thus crystallizes in the form of death as a syntagmatic metonym.

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The manner, means, and mode of the eight most common kinds of death

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            There are several kinds of death. These kinds of death occur in different manners, means, and modes. The cause of death is the injury inflicted on an individual or a disease that brings about a physiological disruption of the body resulting in death (Geberth, 2015). There are several manners of death, namely; natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, and undetermined deaths (Feifel, 2017). These manners of death may happen for various reasons. Identifying the manner of death, by all means, provides answers to families that need to understand the cause of their loved one’s death. The manners of death are determined by the mechanism of death (Feifel, 2017). That is the specific physiological condition that led to the loss of life. For example, cardiogenic shock.

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The modes of death are the system that generally initiates the death process. The three major modes of death are; coma, syncope, and asphyxia (Feifel, 2017). Coma is the loss of the consciousness that may be partial or complete depending on the individual’s central nervous system.  The comma can be caused by many factors that interfere with brain functionality (Feifel, 2017). Asphyxia is caused when a person’s respiration process is interfered leading to death through suffocation. Lastly, syncope is the sudden cessation of the heart’s function and failure of blood circulation leading to death (Feifel, 2017). The sudden dysfunctionality of the heart cause the sudden death in very few minutes.

The means and causes of death is the specific disease or injury that affects the body organs leading to end of an individual’s life (Geberth, 2015). There are many means in which may be the cause of death. For example, suicide can be a means of death and also a manner of death. But, causes of death are specific to the diseases and injuries that result in death (Feifel, 2017). This includes; diseases like pneumonia, chronic conditions, infections, stroke, among other physiological conditions that lead to death. The causes and means of death can be either be accidental, natural, suicidal, homicidal, or natural.

A homicide detective is supposed to be familiar with the manner, means, and mode of death as a responsibility to bring justice to each death case (Geberth, 2015). Families tend to get peace of mind when they are sure of the means or manner in which their relatives died (Feifel, 2017). Without such information, many questions will be raised. Homicide detectives take the responsibility of determining the nature of the death of a victim and reporting to the families. The detective investigates and collects evidence that will be necessary for the case.

The nature, extent and the characteristics of the wounds inflicted by gunshots.

Gunshot wounds are as a result of a bullet penetrating into the body of an individual. The extent of these wounds depends solely on the force behind the bullets, the range, and the nature of the bullets (Rhee, Moore, Joseph, Tang, Pandit, & Vercruysse, 2016). The amount of damage depends on the location of the injury and the velocity of the bullet. Seared wounds when bleeding are sometimes stopped by burning it shut. Although it is tough to endure the pain of the process, but it works out to stop the bleeding. This process can be useful only when it is the only step remaining for survival to avoid loss of too much blood (Rhee et al., 2016).

A reentry gunshot wound is a wound caused when a bullet passes in and out of one body segment continuing its way into another body part, causing a second entrance (Rhee et al., 2016). The reentry point has a typical type of appearance that at some points, tend to be confusing. Reentry wounds are smaller and have some kind of discoloration around them (Rhee et al., 2016). The reentry wounds are in internal body segments; therefore, these types of wounds are very painful. Although the extent and the force of reentry determine the damage of the body organ, in most cases, reentry wounds are intense and cause damage to critical body parts (Geberth, 2015).

Ricochets occur when there is a deflection of a bullet from an object and becoming embedded on the same object (Rhee et al., 2016). Ricochets vary with the bullet type, the shape of the bullets, velocity, the angle of incidence, and the material target. The extent of the damage caused on ricochets is determined by the surface the bullet deflected off before striking the body of an individual. Ricocheted bullets have a reduced force for internal tissue penetration. In addition, internal ricochet may occur when a bullet hits a hard body tissue (Rhee et al., 2016). The wounds caused by a ricocheted bullet may lack the ricocheted bullets in it.

The bullet track is the path or trajectory of a bullet from a gun to its final point of attack. The bullet’s tracks is divided into; the internal part of the trajectory, the external part of the trajectory, and the terminal trajectory (Rhee et al., 2016). The journey of a bullet may cause several damages to the body of a human. Depending upon the trajectory of the bullet, the wounds caused always has an entry point. The exit point of the bullet is bigger in than the entry point of the bullet. The velocity of the bullet is what determines the extent on the depth of the wound or whether it exits or left inside the body.

Stippling is a type of gunshot wound that is caused when unburned powder and debris punctuate abrasions on an individual (Rhee et al., 2016). These marks are caused by a close gunshot range. The burning gunpowder causes the discoloration of the skin. These wounds show an abrasion ring that is caused when the hot gases from the weapon get in contact with the flesh of a victim. The gas leaves a circular ring around the wound caused by the bullet. Exit wounds have no traces of gunshot residue around the outside wound. However, the entrance wound has the marks of the gunpowder around the wound.

Comparison and characteristics of some of the Modes of death

A cutting wound may be either homicidal, accidental or suicidal. Cutting wounds maybe cause external bleeding leading to death or the cause damage of critical organs in the body, causing death (Aschauer, Zotter-Tufaro, Duca, Kammerlander, Dalos, Mascherbauer, & Bonderman, 2017). The cutting wounds can be done on any part of the body. One example of cutting wounds inflicted to a victim is the cutthroats. The damage extend caused through cutting wound may be based on the part, angle, and depth of the cut. Cutting wounds from homicidal cuts are inflicted from the front and specific to a very sensitive body part. They are also exposed through surrounding injuries, which might be parallel, multiple, and deep. Suicidal cutting wounds are similar to homicidal cuts (Aschauer et al., 2017). The cuts are deep and are inflicted on targeted body parts.

A stubbing wound is one common mode of death. The stubs, in most cases, are a result of homicidal (Aschauer et al., 2017). The length of injury caused by a stab wound on the surface is less than the depth of penetration into the body. The common weapons used to inflict these injuries include knives and sharp objects such as needles. The stab wounds show notching or change in direction that might have been caused by a change in the direction of a weapon such as a knife. The stab wounds also have clean cut edges, and one or both ends pointed (Aschauer et al., 2017). The cross-section of the weapon can be determined by the size and depth of the stab wound. There also might be abrasions present on the wound.

Death by Asphyxia is caused by the mechanical interference of the respiratory process, making it hard for an individual to due to lack of enough oxygen (Aschauer et al., 2017). Death by Asphyxia is divided into three, namely; mechanical, positional, and restraint asphyxia. Mechanical asphyxia includes smothering, chocking, throttling strangulation. Positional asphyxia occurs when there is interference of respiration by the position of an individual’s body resulting in death from suffocation. Restrain asphyxia happens when through mugging and arm lock. It involves compressing the victim’s neck against the forearm. In this case, there is no external or internal mark of injuries that are left (Aschauer et al., 2017). Death by asphyxia, in most cases, is homicidal and suicidal. When the respiratory process is interfered with, and there is a lack of oxygen in the body, then most of the body organs will cease to function, leading to death.

Death by arson is the act of deliberately setting a fire that causes loss of life and property (Aschauer et al., 2017). In this type of death, victims, in some cases, get burned beyond recognition, therefore, requiring the extra DNA tests to recognize the body. Death by arson involves the burning of the body by fire, causing serious damages that lead to the destruction of internal and external organs resulting in the death of an individual. The injuries inflicted to the victim by arson attacks may be from an attempt to conceal a crime or purposely to destroy any evidence in the crime scene (Aschauer et al., 2017). The criminal act requires a high level of intelligence to investigate the cause and manner of death.

Aschauer, S., Zotter-Tufaro, C., Duca, F., Kammerlander, A., Dalos, D., Mascherbauer, J., & Bonderman, D. (2017). Modes of death in patients with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction.  International journal of cardiology ,  228 , 422-426.

Feifel, H. (2017). Death. In  Taboo topics  (pp. 8-21). Routledge.

Geberth, V. (2015). Practical homicide investigation: Tactics, procedures, and forensic techniques (5th ed.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN: 978-1482235074. Read Chapter 12.

Rhee, P. M., Moore, E. E., Joseph, B., Tang, A., Pandit, V., & Vercruysse, G. (2016). Gunshot wounds: A review of ballistics, bullets, weapons, and myths.  Journal of trauma and acute care surgery ,  80 (6), 853-867.

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The Aged Mother By Matsuo Basho

Long, long ago there lived at the foot of the mountain a poor farmer and his aged, widowed mother. They owned a bit of land which supplied them with food, and they were humble, peaceful, and happy.

Shining was governed by a despotic leader who though a warrior, had a great and cowardly shrinking from anything suggestive of failing health and strength. This caused him to send out a cruel proclamation. The entire province was given strict orders to immediately put to death all aged people. Those were barbarous days, and the custom of abandoning old people to die was not uncommon. The poor farmer loved his aged mother with tender reverence, and the order filled his heart with sorrow. But no one ever thought twice about obeying the mandate of the governor, so with many deep and hopeless sighs, the youth prepared for what at that time was considered the kindest mode of death.

Just at sundown, when his day’s work was ended, he took a quantity of unwhitened rice which was the principal food for the poor, and he cooked, dried it, and tied it in a square cloth, which he swung in a bundle around his neck along with a gourd filled with cool, sweet water. Then he lifted his helpless old mother to his back and started on his painful journey up the mountain. The road was long and steep; the narrow road was crossed and re-crossed by many paths made by the hunters and woodcutters. In some places, he was lost and confused, but he gave no heed. One path or another, it mattered not. On he went, climbing blindly upward — ever upward towards the high bare summit of what is known as Obatsuyama, the mountain of the “abandoning of the aged.”

The eyes of the old mother were not so dim, and they noted the reckless hastening from one path to another, and her loving heart grew anxious. Her son did not know the mountain’s many paths and his return might be one of danger, so she stretched forth her hand and snapping the twigs from brushes as they passed, she quietly dropped a handful every few steps of the way so that as they climbed, the narrow path behind them was dotted at frequent intervals with tiny piles of twigs. At last the summit was reached. Weary and heart sick, the youth gently released his burden and silently prepared a place of comfort as his last duty to the loved one. Gathering fallen pine needles, he made a soft cushion and tenderly lifted his old mother onto it. He wrapped her padded coat more closely about the stooping shoulders and with tearful eyes and an aching heart he said farewell.

The trembling mother’s voice was full of unselfish love as she gave her last injunction. “Let not thine eyes be blinded, my son.” She said. “The mountain road is full of dangers. LOOK carefully and follow the path which holds the piles of twigs. They will guide you to the familiar path farther down”. The son’s surprised eyes looked back over the path, then at the poor old, shriveled hands all scratched and soiled by their work of love. His heart broke within and bowing to the ground, he cried aloud: “Oh, Honorable mother, your kindness breaks my heart! I will not leave you. Together we will follow the path of twigs, and together we will die!”

Once more he shouldered his burden (how light it seemed now) and hastened down the path, through the shadows and the moonlight, to the little hut in the valley. Beneath the kitchen floor was a walled closet for food, which was covered and hidden from view. There the son hid his mother, supplying her with everything she needed, continually watching and fearing she would be discovered. Time passed, and he was beginning to feel safe when again the governor sent forth heralds bearing an unreasonable order, seemingly as a boast of his power. His demand was that his subjects should present him with a rope of ashes.

The entire province trembled with dread. The order must be obeyed yet who in all Shining could make a rope of ashes? One night, in great distress, the son whispered the news to his hidden mother. “Wait!” she said. “I will think. I will think” On the second day she told him what to do. “Make rope of twisted straw,” she said. “Then stretch it upon a row of flat stones and burn it on a windless night.” He called the people together and did as she said and when the blaze died down, there upon the stones, with every twist and fiber showing perfectly, lay a rope of ashes.

The governor was pleased at the wit of the youth and praised greatly, but he demanded to know where he had obtained his wisdom. “Alas! Alas!” cried the farmer, “the truth must be told!” and with deep bows he related his story. The governor listened and then meditated in silence. Finally he lifted his head. “Shining needs more than strength of youth,” he said gravely. “Ah, that I should have forgotten the well-known saying, “with the crown of snow, there cometh wisdom!” That very hour the cruel law was abolished.

Source: The Aged Mother By Matsuo Basho By Matsuo Basho, Educational fair use