The main review in my digital garden also contains links to related content and notes and highlights from the book I took while reading.
What is the Book is About?
Like the prolonged helplessness of its young, like bisexual reproduction, the inevitable fact of death provides one of the great parameters of the human condition. It can neither be “believed” nor “magicked” nor “scienced” away.
That is basically the justification of Thanatology, the subject of this book. The writer covered a lot of her contemporary ground— briefly, but with some interesting insights.
The first of these insights, expounded well in Part I, is about the change of modes and methods of death and dying in modern, technologically advanced Western societies, and how it led us to a prolonged dying phase.
This change leads to changes regarding how a dying person (and people related) can choose (and the limitations on such choices by socio-economic conditions) to die, or live for the remaining of the days.
In Part III, she gave an overview of the then-contemporary movement to help people to die happily.
My Takeaway
The writing is very much descriptive in nature. She tried her best to cast an impartial gaze on the situation. The subject, however, is a cross-school one. This adds some complexity.
Her exploration of modern craft of dying in Part I & Part II were sharp and to the point. It's a must-read, along with The Denial of Death by Earnest Becker, to understand the modern ideas about the death.
However, her portrayal of the happy death movement in the Part III shows the dismal state of affairs on that front. No modern person in their right mind can take Kübler-Ross's “Research” seriously:
Befitting a movement largely composed of presumably secular upper-middle-class professionals, the immortality claim rests not on revelation but on “research.” That is, Kübler-Ross and others know there is an afterlife not as a consequence of any direct communication with a deity but because of “evidence,” such as the following accounts, provided by the recovered “clinically dead.”
This is a deal-breaker for me. Of course, Lofland is mostly a chronicler here, and she had her doubts too.
If I follow the advice of one such movement, I'll have a very unhappy death for sure. Instead, I would like to assume a dying role for me which is based on knowledge and emotional understanding of what it means to be dead.