ABSTRACT
A culture consists of the manners in which groups of persons pursue their interests with one another, and with the material environment. Dying and grieving, however, are processes in which we engage. The death system is a snapshot—a picture of the way we understand, feel about, act with relationship to death and grief. In the industrialized world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are few role models in how to die or how to grieve. Death is denied in the industrialized world, not in some logical thought but in the sense that ultimate reality is something that one has to think about only rarely and then get back to the “important things of life” as soon as possible. Grief experiences, as seen in widowhood and at the death of a parent, still show us that death is seen as the ending of a relationship.
