Is it Death Denial or Death Defiance?

by PJ MoonA phrase in Dr. Dieter ’s recent Pallimed piece, "Facing the Abyss: Planning for Death, " usefully resurfaced a notion I ’ve had for 12 years now. It started when a professor I was working under remarked how the " death denial thesis " may not really be valid anymore in geriatric/end of life publications and discourse.Combing through the literature, my professor ’s hunch rang true, but only faintly so. To be clear, it wasn’t that issues of human mortality were given special spotlight by journal editors and varying authors, but rather the matter was generally portrayed in ways that did not neatly fit the category of denial, cloaking, or marginalization. Instead of the so-called death denial thesis being eliminated, I perceived another thematic rhetoric rising. Given the commerce of innovation in medicine and cognate arenas, emerging tools have enabled us to ‘manage’ death, hence rendering death-denial less marketable. I call this the death-management thesis. Let me clarify the usage of the term ‘management’ in this context. Here, it does not mean an approach to our inevitable end where it is bravely confronted with solemn sincerity, strategy and resolve. No. Rather, death-management denotes a semi-deceptive scheme of managing-from-the-top what it sees as a nagging, irritating and pesky problem of existential impermanence, namely death. Colloquially, I’m using death-management as a reference to how we clamor to gain control over our end so ...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: death denial death management moon Source Type: blogs