Fact Of Death Research Articles

Spirited Away: The Death of Little Eva and the Farewell Performances of “Katie King”

Depictions of deathbed scenes are commonplace within mid-nineteenth-century United States literary culture, particularly sentimental fiction. They serve a variety of ideological and aesthetic functions and have rightly received a good deal of critical attention. One aspect of their significance and broad impact that has not yet been included within revisionist assessments of the aesthetic and political strategies of sentimentalism provides the primary focus here. The stylized representational modes that characterize the dying of many characters in literary texts, magazine illustrations, paintings and other cultural productions were appropriated by nineteenth-century spiritualists to perform farewells between spirits and the living within the many seances that proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1840s onward. The conventional structure of such partings, predicated on the imminent death of at least one of the participants, focused on an exemplary death in which tearful goodbyes and final words were significant features. Yet when spiritualists appropriated the formulae of such scenes it was within a set of practices that explicitly denied the fact of death at all. Since for spiritualists death was a chimera, the adoption of the symbolism of the deathbed scene as a model for how to facilitate different kinds of departure – not always those that took place between the soon to be dead and those they leave behind – took the rhetoric and practices of dying and transformed them into a new form of performance.

Awaiting Faith: Jacques Derrida and the Impossible Encounter with Death

What implications does the fact of death have for religious faith? In his Aporias, Jacques Derrida probes Heidegger's well known analysis, from Being and Time, of human death as constituting the “ownmost possibility” of human being (in Heidegger's terminology, Dasein). Derrida deems Heidegger's account susceptible to a fatal aporia, or logical impasse. Developing Derrida's investigation, this article further invokes Maurice Blanchot and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, linking their work to that of John D. Caputo. It proposes that death, far from confirming us as selves, confirms us as selves-in-loss. Curiously, though, this implies that the religious or “faith” attitude, properly and broadly interpreted as “a saying of ‘yes' to the radically impossible”, is intrinsic to the interpretation of experience as such.

Filósofos ante la muerte. Una reflexión acerca de la vida y de la muerte

El hecho de la muerte nos coloca ante una situación límite. Es, indudablemente, el acontecimiento más importante en nuestra vida. Y, aun cuando ha escrito La Rochefoucauid que "ni el sol ni la muerte pueden mirarse con fijeza", esto no es tan cierto. No es imposible mirar de frente a la muerte, compañera inseparable de la vida.

Requesting donation: the satisfaction of the next-of-kin of potential organ donors

The rate of organ donation is slowing in the UK, increasing pressure on healthcare staff to speak with families about donation. Intensive care staff are not confident that they have the necessary communication skills. They fear they may increase families’ distress1 and are not clear of the most helpful way to approach families.2 The need for suitable training has been recognized.3 There is a need to investigate the potential donor families’ experiences to identify helpful practice when delivering bad news and requesting donation. Retrospective in-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out by a clinical psychologist with bereaved next-of-kin of potential organ donors (n = 29). Twenty Northwest Intensive Care Units were involved. Kin were sequentially identified and interviewed 6 months after their bereavement. The interview was organized in temporal order, from arrival to departure. Key questions focusing on satisfaction with care and communication were repeated. Next-of-kin recalled their experiences and reactions and rated their satisfaction (1 = very dissatisfied, 7 = very satisfied) with unit practices. Protocol one recorded the accounts, responses to prompts and spontaneous comments. Protocol two recorded the ratings of satisfaction with the questions. Whether consenting or refusing to donate, all kin found the request acceptable. Staff's tension when making the request was evident to families. The majority of kin rated themselves satisfied with the meeting to discuss donation (mean 6.3, SD 1.3), and explanations given (mean 6.0, SD 1.4). There was a relationship between satisfaction and the request being made separately from the news of death (P The practices, which are generally considered helpful to families, were not uniformly represented across units. There was evidence of potential unhelpful practice. The results suggest that increased distress is not related to the donation per se, but to whether the families have accepted the fact of death. Study results support the recommendations for training for staff involved in breaking bad news and requesting donation.

The Novel and Public Truth: Saul Bellow's The Dean's December

THE NOVEL AND PUBLIC TRUTH: SAUL BELLOW'S THE DEAN'S DECEMBER Martin Corner Kingston University Can the novel, at the end ofthe twentieth century, still speakpublic truth? This is a question that has haunted Saul Bellow's fiction since Joseph, in Dangling Man, could find no connection between his private experience and the historic realities of war. But it is more than an issue for a single writer. The conscious problem of our culture since Bellow's first fiction appeared in the 1940s has been the survival ofthe individual before the dominating public realities of political and economic power, and this is a problem that Bellow, in his first novel, forcefully identified. For the novel as a literary form, however, the problem has been the inversion of that. For fiction, the secure ground has been private experience; more and more the novel has withdrawn into the particularities of individual consciousness, has surrendered the larger issues to politics, history, and cultural theory. Though Bellow's fiction recognizes the novel's historic investment in individual experience— his own work is centered on a succession of powerful individualities, such as Henderson, Herzog, and Sammler—it has nevertheless always been his aim to characterize the public life of the age, to make some statement of larger truth. The public understanding of contemporary experience is an aspiration that neither Bellow's characters nor their creator have ever abandoned.1 But how can the novel move from the private and subjective to public statement? The Dean's December engages this problem directly, and, I shall argue, embodies an answer. This is a novel which, since its publication in 1982, has often been unfavorably judged as displaying what are claimed to be Bellow's characteristic failings: of characterization , of tone, of the achievement of a proper distance between creation and polemic. Bellow has been accused of writing a solipsistic fiction, dominated by the consciousness of one individual who is presented uncritically and who, in importantrespects, may be Bellow himself . The result, it is argued, is a univocal fictional world, in which other characters, events and places are reduced to the perceptions and meanings of the central consciousness; where, finally, public reality is excluded by the weight of an idiosyncratic individualism which is 114Martin Corner Bellow's own (see, for example, the discussions by Jonathan Wilson and John Updike).2 My contention is that in The Dean's December Bellow shows himself aware of this danger. He tries to plot a route from individual consciousness to public truth, and he does so by freeing both the central character and the novel itself from an inappropriate burden of totalizing explanation, so as to clarify the true resources of the novel for engaging with the public reality of the world. For the novelist the road to public truth necessarily lies through private consciousness, and Bellow's point of departure is Dean Corde, who is attempting the same journey. Like the novel, Corde is trying to move from the enclosure ofprivate awareness to truthful general statement , to the word that his time needs to hear. But how should he measure his success? Bellow has a clear criterion; there is for him one fact of shared experience which tests both the individual' s ability to engage with the common terms of existence and the novel's ability to declare the truth ofthe age, and that is the fact of death. For Bellow death is the central public fact of the age, the hard kernel of twentieth century history . The life of the time is written in loss and death, on a scale and with a pervasiveness that confound both individual consciousness and the resources of fiction.3 It is in these terms that one must give an account of Chicago in the 1970s and of Bucharest under Ceausescu; the bottom line, in both cases, is human dereliction, violence, murder. Bellow's practice insists that we will know when an individual has found a way through to this common reality; there will be an adequation of consciousness to the enormity of the public fact. In the same way it will be possible to recognize fiction that has breached the bounds of individualistic...

SPIRITUAL ASPECTS OF LOSS AT THE TIME OF A PARTNER'S DEATH FROM AIDS

Spiritual phenomena were spontaneously reported in interviews of 68 of 125 recently bereaved HIV-positive and HIV-negative partners of men who died from AIDS. Spiritual schemas involving beliefs, experiences, rituals, social support, and roles were used to help assimilate the fact of death and were appraised as sources of solace and meaning. The relationship between spirituality and coping, mood, and physical health was examined. Those reporting spiritual phenomena showed higher levels of depression and anxiety and lower levels of positive states of mind, used more adaptive coping strategies, and reported more physical health symptoms than those who did not report spiritual phenomena. It doesn't matter, for scientific purposes, it doesn't matter at all whether it's true. It doesn't matter whether I'm projecting the events, it doesn't matter whether I'm projecting my own concerns. It was a process, and it functioned, and it's my experience of Michael. I happen to believe that Michael's spirit was there, and that it spoke to me.- Recently bereaved partner of a man who died of AIDS

Simone Weil on death

Weil argues that the belief in immortality is harmful because it takes away the practical use of death. The practical use of death is to remind us of, and turn us away from, our normal strong orientation towards the future. We must learn to live in the same spirit as Socrates when he was awaiting death in prison and learning to play the lyre. Closely linked with that, a pure love for another will involve no future-oriented concern and so it will be possible to accept the other's death. The death of a loved one simply involves a move from the thought 'This wonderful being does exist' to the thought 'This wonderful being has existed'. Weil shows us that doctrines of life after death are not the only possible 'religious' response to the fact of death.

Awareness and modern dying

This paper takes as its starting-point sociological research which conceptualized modern dying as a status passage. Most deaths in modern Britain result from long-term disease conditions over a period of months or even years and so are likely to be predictable. Given such durations, it may be that a modern role of dying, which is dependent upon awareness of dying, has emerged. Sociological research has largely focused upon people dying from cancer, yet the majority of long-term deaths result from other chronic conditions. The certainty of death may develop slowly over a long period of time: even when the fact of death is certain its timing may remain in doubt. Although such uncertainties apply to all long-term terminal conditions, they are more readily resolved for cancer deaths than for other types of terminal conditions. People dying from such conditions are thus unlikely to be in a position to adopt a dying role.

Awareness and modern dying

This paper takes as its starting-point sociological research which conceptualized modern dying as a status passage. Most deaths in modern Britain result from long-term disease conditions over a period of months or even years and so are likely to be predictable. Given such durations, it may be that a modern role of dying, which is dependent upon awareness of dying, has emerged. Sociological research has largely focused upon people dying from cancer, yet the majority of long-term deaths result from other chronic conditions. The certainty of death may develop slowly over a long period of time: even when the fact of death is certain its timing may remain in doubt. Although such uncertainties apply to all long-term terminal conditions, they are more readily resolved for cancer deaths than for other types of terminal conditions. People dying from such conditions are thus unlikely to be in a position to adopt a dying role.

Euthanasia and HIV Disease: How can Physicians Respond?

By accepting the role of caregiver, the physician can do much to decrease the fear surrounding death. By providing an opportunity for a patient to discuss his ideas and feelings about his own death, physicians can better prepare their patients and themselves for the inevitable. None of us can reverse the dying process. By accepting the fact of death and by reframing our goals to provide care that promotes comfort and dignity, the act of watching our patients die becomes not only bearable but also serene.

The Facts of Death

The Facts of Death

A child's view of death

Did you ever think when a hearse goes by that you may be the next to die. They wrap you up in a big white sheet and then they bury you ten feet deep. The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out. They chew at your gizzard and spit it out. And then you turn a vomit green and the pus rushes out like sour cream. [children's street rhyme] Death is very much a part of the fantasy thoughts of children. It is part of the games they play, the stories they hear, the television programmes and movies they watch. Yet adults are often more comfortable talking to children about sex than they are about death. While the question 'Where did I come from?' is being answered with increasing candour, its natural opposite 'Where am I going?' continues to be avoided. There are times when the subject of death can not be ignored when a pet dies, when a relative is dying, and most tragically when a child is terminally ill. Yet these are the times when the greatest efforts are expended in shielding the child from the facts of death and dying. This article examines several factors that need to be taken into account in assessing children's understanding of death and suggests guidelines for talking to well and ill children about their own death and the deaths of others.

James Wightman Davidson (1915–73)

JIM DAVIDSON DIED IN PORT MORESBY ON SUNDAY, 8 APRIL 1973. HE WAS 57, AND HIS DEATH came suddenly as he drove to a beach to go sailing. A plaque bearing his name attests unobtrusively to the fact of his cremation in Canberra; while the absence of peculiarly hurrying footfalls and a highly characteristic laugh from the corridors of the Institute of Advanced Studies, the loss of a resonant, cogent, irreverent voice from committee meetings, have all been inescapable: we realise that we shall never more hear pomposity punctured, while a bronzed hand ? in token of essential shyness ? beats nervous time with a cigarette; nor shall we mock again an elegantly-besuited Davidson who, returning from conference with hierarchs, seeks sheepishly and in haste to divest himself of jacket and tie. Yet the fact of death and of loss only comes finally home when his friends and colleagues set down on paper their feelings about a man who was more than commonly admired. And how shall one write faithfully about Jim who, as scholar and as friend, meant so much to so many people ? about a man who, as O. H. K. Spate truly says, had 'one of the liveliest minds and most distinctive personalities'1 to be found at the Australian National University? James Wightman Davidson was born in Wellington on 1 October 1915 and educated at Waitaki Boys High School and Victoria University, where he graduated Master of Arts in 1939 for a thesis on Scandinavian settlement in New Zealand. He left to do PhD work

Sad Stories: The Ethics of Epiphany in Munrovian Elegy

What Eileen Dombrowski calls Alice Munro's 'vision of ephemerality' leads to the production of fictions wherein death 'emerges as a narrative device; it evokes conflicting responses in characters; and it challenges them to define its significance.' Munro's texts also encourage such responses in the reader, challenging us to define both the significance and the signification of death. Her narrative style constitutes an elegiac rhetorical ceremony, which, as Frederick Hoffman says of such rhetoric, 'prevent[s] the corporeality of fact from communicating with too intense directness'—it mediates, in elegiac fashion, the fact of death.

On accepting death: A rational approach

Abstract It is one of the stranger deviations of the American society that so overwhelming a number of us can't seem to face the simple fact of death. I suppose i t is quite understandable that we would resist the coming of that final event that apparently closes the book of life to us. After all, the poet has so well said, “DO not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light.”∗ Yet, I believe that, while such an attitude is quite understandable, warring against the dissolution of the body is by no means a rational posture. In fact, it is unworthy of the one animal in creation whose uniqueness and dignity lie in being able to reason sensibly about the true state of affairs in our world. And so I propose a healthier way of looking at death: the way of rational acceptance.

The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy by Peter Koestenbaum

BOOK REVIEWS 487 The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy . By PETER KoESTENBAUM. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press: 1978. Pp. xi + 570. $~~.50. In thirty-nine chapters and eight appendices, the author renders us the whole of a phenomenological philosophy of person and its consequent therapeutic, upon which he has worked since the late sixties. His is a humanistic realist viewpoint, yet quite impressive to the theistic realist, who finds much to ponder in this effort, and then to challenge in a stimulating exchange of visions. Certainly, the very idea of a " clinical philosophy " is intriguing; it is refreshing to find a thinker offering a therapy rooted formally in a philosophical persuasion. Many therapists insist they harbor no underlying philosophy of human nature, much less the metaphysics for a whole worldview. The philosopher quite often sees the contrary situation, and wonders how those who indeed have no coherent theory of what they are doing in fact help anyone. Koestenbaum's approach is vigorous, orderly, and free from the obfuscation often afflicting those who work within the ambit of Continental categories. The text comprises three approaches to the topic. A theory of what it is to be human, existential and phenomenological in its metaphysics and bipolar in personality assessment, forms the first book. Then a discourse on anxiety relating to birth, freedom, and death follows in Book Two. Finally, a somewhat disjointed presentation of pathology, focusing on the "deconstituted consciousness," techniques for pain and need management, and his notion of participatory healing, is offered in the last book. Koestenbaum delivers exactly what he promises, and then some. The study could well serve in several contexts, especially in personality and counseling courses where a personalist viewpoint is formally espoused, with options left for theistic interpretation of basic thematics. This task will not prove difficult since most humanist thinking, and Koestenbaum's is no exception, borrows from religious themes and traditions. The volume is superbly presented, with the best current bibliography of existential phenomenology the reviewer has seen and a full index of themes. The text also abounds in those kinds of charts and graphs of complex notions one seldom finds in philosophy works (generally composed on the supposition that script alone suffices to convey meaning) . His effort to lay out the structure of human consciousness is one of the most noteworthy to date. There will be exception taken to his model, no doubt, but Koestenbaum comes to his project with solid work on Husserl's Paris Lectures already published. " A person is secure, grounded and at home by virtue of his nature, because of his relationship to his consciousness and to the universe," he states at the outset (p. 11). This new discipline, clinical philosophy, will enable th~ 488 BOOK REVIEWS individual therapist-self-counseling is also envisioned-to claim this truth " which is always there but not always perceived." On this account, selfesteem is not to be considered a psychological feeling but rather a philosophical fact. Self-esteem, in short, is to be learned as a truth, not created as a feeling. It is a "metaphysical reality related to the structure of our consciousness and of the external world, which is always the object of that consciousness." This foundation of mutuality will be emotionally experienced when, and only when, it is intellectually clarified. For Koestenbaum's client, it is what one does not know because one has not discovered it, or been taught it by another, that leads to maladjustment. The other option is that the client has chosen one way or another to escape from self-valuation into illusion. The forms illusion takes are of course multiple, but the ultimate illusion is infinitude. Koestenbaum's root cause of human frustration and illness is the rejection of human finiteness. This desire to be infinite, to transcend especially the fact of death, leads into illusion. His move is now apparent: educate the individual in total acceptance of the real world and the real world's termination in death. This then is not to be a therapy of emotional adjustment by a technique of denial or any nominalistic re-categorizing of the unpleasant. Rather, acceptance of human finiteness...

REVIEW OF CLINICAL CRITERIA OF BRAIN DEATH

SummaryA spectrum of descriptive definitions of death has been formulated based on a variety of observations using currently available clinical methods. These definitions vary widely in objectivity and some fail to distinguish the inevitability of death or irreversible coma from the fact of death. A hopeless prognosis may be an adequate criterion for termination of artificial resuscitation, but the bioethical issue involved is one of “passive” euthanasia and not brain death. A hopeless prognosis without a pronouncement of death itself would seem inadequate grounds to remove viable organs for transplantation.When organ donation is contemplated, the declaration of death as a past event must be based on cerebral rather than on cardiovascular criteria. At this point in the history of the art and science of medicine, the highest degree of assurance that the brain is dead may be achieved in the shortest possible time, only by using multiple independently measured variables including clinical criteria, electrophysiologic criteria (the EEG), and assessment of cerebral circulation determined either directly or indirectly. As science and technology improve, the degree of objectivity and facility in obtaining objective criteria will also improve.

Dying, death, and bereavement among the Maya Indians of Mesoamerica: a study in anthropological psychology.

Death, dying, and bereavement are com- plex psychological and biosocial problems of 20th- century Western civilization. Some earlier cultures and societies responded successfully to the phenomena of dying and death and the intense emotions attendant upon them. For us today, possible solutions to these problems exist in rediscovering the effective adjustive methods of the ancients. In light of this, the civiliza- tion of the pre-Columbian Maya of Mesoamerica is discussed, with particular emphasis on the Maya's death-related beliefs and rituals, treatment of the fatally ill, burial practices, and family and social atti- tudes toward death. In the classical Maya civilization, the primary cultural controls over death, dying, and bereavement were myths and rituals that were accepted as truth. These rituals specified how victims and their families were to respond; social pressures ensured the continuation of time-honored ritual practices. Parallels are drawn with the societies of the ancient Hebrews, early Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and Navajos. Death, dying, and bereavement are complex psy- chological and biosocial problems in 20th-century Western civilization, a fact dramatically illustrated by the burgeoning number of books and articles on death and dying (Cohen, 1976). Feifel's (1959) observation almost two decades ago addressed with acute poignancy what might be considered the core of the problem: In the presence of death western culture by and large has tended to run, hide and seek refuge in group norms and actuarial statistics. The individual face of death becomes blurred by embarrassed curiosity and institutionalization. (p. xii) Modern man, in effect, endeavors to hide the dead and the fact of death by various means, means that function to provide psychological distance between the deceased and the survivors. We live in an age in which society attempts to repress and negate the

Death As a Fact of Life.

Beginning with the publication in 1959 of Herman Feifel's The Meaning of Death (containing the proceedings of a similarly named landmark symposium), the medical literature dealing with a medical subspecialty, thanatology, began to proliferate. Those concerned with the morals and ethics of health care for the 1970s and beyond have been made aware of the taboo status accorded to dying, death, and bereavement. A model technique not only for interviewing the dying patient but also for impressing on those in the allied health fields the lessons to be taught by those facing death was developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The dying were teaching the living how to cope. While on the medical scene these studies were being literally forced on professionals, the public was still being overprotected from contact with the facts of death and dying—by hospital rules limiting visiting hours, by physicians who demanded that the nature of a patient's

Freud, Durkheim, and Death among the Sebei

The Sebei, a Nilo-Hamitic people of Uganda, regularly hold in conjunction with their funeral rituals, a kind of moot in which all creditors must establish their claims on the estate. They also determine details regarding inheritance of both property and wives. As a result, the mourners enter these rituals concerned to protect and further their personal and private interests at the very time when such cupidity is most unseemly. Thus structured into the funerary customs is a strong sense of guilt. Sebei funerals focus on the polution of a generalized death rather than on the body or the soul of the deceased. This polution is seen as a response to this guilt, which derive not so much from feelings about the deceased as it does from sentiments among the living, which the fact of death (rather than the dead man) has brought to the fore.