The one inescapable fact of life is death. Yet man usually refuses to face it. What La Rochefoucauld said in 1665 is still generally true: “One cannot look fixedly at either the sun or death.” Result: “Concern about death,” says the University of Southern California’s Psychologist Herman Feifel, “has been relegated to the tabooed territory heretofore occupied by diseases like tuberculosis and cancer, and the topic of sex.” To remedy this, 21 experts in religion, arts and sciences have pooled their knowledge in a new book, The Meaning of Death (McGraw-Hill; $6.50), edited by Dr. Feifel
Far from being gloomy, it is a hopeful work designed to promote mental health through a better understanding and acceptance of death’s inevitability. As the Menninger Foundation’s Psychologist Gardner Murphy points out: “The effort to escape the facing of death may constitute a deep source of ill health.”
Outside Skeleton. It is from the child, temporally most remote from death, that the experts got some of their most basic data. Psychologist Maria H. Nagy (now at Manhattan’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center) studied 378 children in Budapest in the late 19303, believes that, with minor differences, her findings can be applied to Western civilization generally.
The child of five and under, she learned, does not recognize death as an irreversible fact; he sees it as a sort of sleep or a gradual or temporary state. The dead resemble the absent, in that the child does not see them. From six to nine years, most children personify death (“Carries off bad children. Catches them and takes them away”). To one child of eight, death was so real that he thought it left footprints. And to many, death is like a Halloween figure, all skeleton, or with its skeleton outside and visible.
Not until age nine or ten (all Dr.Nagy’s ages are general averages) does the child begin to realize that death is the result of a process operating within all living things, and marks an irreversible end to bodily life. Adolescents, reports Clark University’s Robert Kasten-baum, manage to dissociate themselves from ideas of death as from everything else past or future — they live in an “in tense present.” Faith & Fear. Editor Feifel questioned adults on “What does death mean to you?” Answers ranged from stoic accept ance of the inevitable to welcoming the “precondition for the ‘true’ life of man.” Surprisingly, intensity of religious belief is no index to acceptance of death, and the most vociferous exponents of belief in a life beyond death have proved, in Dr. Feifel’s sampling, to be the ones most afraid of death.
Concludes Editor Feifel: “Attitudes concerning [death], and its meaning for the individual, can serve as an important organizing principle in determining how he conducts himself in life . . . The concept of death represents a psychological and social fact of substantial importance . . . The dying words attributed to Goe the, ‘More light,’ are particularly appropriate to the subject of death.”
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