ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea of death denial in light of the mortal dilemmas. Biomedicine contributes to the dilemmas at the end of life by assuming that the scientific foundation for diagnostic and prognostic judgments trumps the commonsense wisdom that patients and families bring to the bedside. Transforming grief into a pathology based on time and symptom criteria is another example of the widening gap between specialist and lay worldviews that has confounded Americans' experience of death and its aftermath. The same scientific pretention to objective truth is also evident in the contest over Native American bones. In earlier times the only semi-professional death experts were the carpenters who fashioned caskets and the clergy who performed funerals. Physicians have contributed to the burgeoning death literature. The Internet has become a fertile ground for experiments and innovations in the management of dying and death.
