ABSTRACT
Life subsumes focal and mini-deaths on an ongoing basis. Being emotionally and interpersonally dead while being physically alive is inherent in concepts like "dead mother" and "dead father", denoting parents who lack or who have abdicated maternal and paternal functions, respectively. Genetic immortality refers to the feeling of transcendence over death that one experiences in becoming a grandparent. It is as if, by middle age, one can conceptualize one's own death and, by the time one reaches old age, even that of one's children, but one cannot conceptualize the death of one's grandchildren. Burial has long been the customary way in Judeo-Christian and Islamic cultures, and cremation in the Hindu culture, though it is becoming more popular in contemporary Western societies. The end point of life arrives and changes feeling, thinking, and dreaming individuals with hopes and aspirations into cold, still, and dead bodies.
