ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some ways in which people, today, try to manage the absence of heaven in the presence of death and suffering. For modern people, death is no longer an inevitable destiny. Explaining death through medical science or accident investigation is a way to tell a story about suffering. To use the technical term, it narrativizes loss and suffering. It makes meaning out of the experience by telling a story around it: a medical one, a forensic-empirical one, an engineering or geological story. Authentic stories about suffering do more than embody its universal features. They do something else for the storyteller and the listener or reader as well. A story is not a replica of an event; nor is the images it evokes duplicates of the reality that generated them. The story and the images can in fact change and evolve with each telling, like new valleys opening up on a long walk.
