Thinking about death from an observer’s perspec­tive is one thing. Thinking about one’s own death, like Ricardo is doing, is quite another. The reactions people have to their own impending death, long thought to be the purview of religion and philoso­phy, were not researched until well into the 20th century. 504 CHAPTER 13 Many authors […]

If you have ever looked carefully at a newspaper, you know that everyone who dies has a brief summary of his or her life published in an obituary. Obituaries serve several purposes, including telling the world the important aspects of one’s life and listing one’s surviving family members. If you have ever read an obituary, […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • How do feelings about death change over adulthood? • How do people deal with their own death? • What is death anxiety, and how do people show and cope with it? R icardo recently learned that he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease. He knows the disease is […]

On February 25, 1990, 26-year-old Terri Schiavo collapsed in her home from a possible potassium imbalance caused by an eating disorder, temporarily stopping her heart and cutting off oxygen to her brain. On March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died after her feeding tube had been removed 13 days earlier. On these two points everyone connected […]

A growing debate in Western society concerns the financial, personal, and moral costs of keeping peo­ple alive on life-support machines. For example, many people argue that treating secondary diseases in terminally ill older adults or keeping them alive on life support makes little sense. They argue that such treatment is extremely expensive, that these people […]

An ambulance screeches to a halt, and emergency personnel rush a woman into the emergency room. As a result of an accident at a swimming pool, she has no pulse and no respiration. Working rapidly, the trauma team reestablishes a heartbeat through electric shock. A respirator is connected. An EEG and other tests reveal extensive […]

Sociocultural approaches help us understand the different ways in which people conceptualize and comprehend death. But they do not address a very fundamental question: How do we determine that someone has died? The medical and legal commu­nities have grappled with this question for centuries and continue to do so today. Let’s see what the current […]

What comes to mind when you hear the word death? A driver killed in a traffic accident? A tran­sition to an eternal reward? Flags at half-staff? A cemetery? A car battery that doesn’t work anymore? Each of these possibilities represents a way in which death can be considered in Western culture, which has its own […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • How is death defined? • What legal and medical criteria are used to determine when death occurs? • What are the ethical dilemmas surrounding euthanasia? • What issues surround the costs of life-sustaining interventions? E rnesto and Paulina had been married 48 years when Ernesto developed terminal pancreatic cancer. Ernesto was suffering […]

13.1 DEFINITIONS AND ETHICAL ISSUES Sociocultural Definitions of Death • Legal and Medical Definitions • Ethical Issues • Current Controversies: The Terri Schiavo Case • The Price of Life-Sustaining Care 13.2 THINKING ABOUT DEATH: PERSONAL ASPECTS Discovering Development: How Do You Describe a Life? • A Life Course Approach to Dying • Dealing with One’s […]