ABSTRACT
Death has become much less visible also because increasingly it is the elderly who are doing the dying. As death became less and less acceptable, the living demanded that it be domesticated, its harsh reality muted and beautified. Americans no longer live their lives with the well-defined relationship to and interest in the dead world or with the acceptance of death as a natural part of life which characterized that period. Accepting one’s own death is a difficult matter even under the best of circumstances, and the present American perspective on the dead world most probably increases that difficulty. The dead world has been largely lost because an increasingly temporal and secular-minded living world has actively chosen to abandon even the topic itself. The process of restricting the time and space given over to the dead would progress to the point where any expression of grief over loss became something to be avoided.
