ABSTRACT
For younger people, it would not be unreasonable to anticipate a future of perhaps sixty or seventy more years of an interesting, rewarding life yet to come. Aside from the often-recognized maxim that young people think that they are immortal—they don’t often conceptualize their deaths very well if at all—it is entirely true that young adults for the most part have a bank of high-quality future years that they can depend upon. Young people may think of death as missing out on so many things, but older people might look at death as something else entirely, perhaps even a release from suffering. For the young person contemplating death, the loss may seem to be infinite. For the older individual, perhaps death may be seen as a release. Older people typically score higher than younger people on various measures of religiosity. The meaning of death for old and young has changed because death itself changed over the course of 20th century.
