ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we take you through child’s play and introduce you to the significance of our lives in the face of our deaths. We introduce Halloween as a celebration of death and horror as well as a reflection of cultural mores; a subversive act; and an opportunity to cross cultural, religious, identity, and authoritarian boundaries. We move from a discussion of the biological factors of death to the social construction of death, and introduce Terror Management Theory which lays claims on the myriad of ways in which we seek to manage our inherent fear of death. We discuss historical, philosophical, and conceptual approaches to end-of-life communication, including Becker’s “denial of death,” Hyde and McSpiritt’s juxtaposition of death with our desire for perfection, and Davis’s “relationship with death.” We also include concepts about death from philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Heideger, among others, and discuss the ramifications of the fact that humans are the only living creatures who realize they will die someday. Death and dying were once more visible in everyday life (e.g., the Black Plague killed 25% of the population in Europe), but today, we rarely witness death first hand.
