Death and the human life cycle

Abstract

As my personal example has illustrated, death is perhaps the most difficult of life’s events to cope with, yet one that we prepare for least. We’ve to come to grips with the fact that loss and grief are a natural part of life. Unfortunately, rationality and emotionality do not go hand in hand with death. Instead, the denial of death is a more common pattern of human behavior and remains a force throughout the human life cycle. Fortunately, the forces of suppression, repression, and other mind-numbing practices help to reduce our preoccupation with death and facilitate our ability to function. Whatever we do, however, a lingering feeling of sadness remains. This feeling has been described by the Japanese as the experience of mono no aware, the “pathos of things.”