ABSTRACT
More than any other aspects of human experience, death and dying inspire the imagination, ingenuity, and intelligence of individuals who must cope with and make sense of these fundamental realities across time and around the world. Science and religion, sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in conflict, are critical resources in the inevitable encounter with mortality. They provide the tools, symbolic as well as practical, to face death either in the form of a fresh human corpse or of a suffering individual who is still alive but on the verge of passing on.
