ABSTRACT
The modern experience is typically one in which public and private life exist in separate spheres (Berger et al. 1974):
In modern death the public dominates the private. The personal feelings of the patient, and indeed of medical and nursing staff, are ignored as the patient is made into an object, a case, a site of disease. Death takes place not at home but in hospital, where private experience is suppressed by institutional routines. After death, the routines of factory and office give little space to the bereaved to express how they feel or to take time off.
