Death and Bereavement

Abstract

It is sometimes difficult to realize, until road accident or cardiac catastrophe reminds us, how fragile and uncertain is one’s grip on life. A century ago death was an everyday part of life. Society was more stable then, when the average life expectancy was in the forties and infant mortality high. And the powerlessness of the physician made litigation unthinkable. Today in an affluent, centrally heated, rootless society the trivial dominates and the inevitable seems strangely out of place, creating problems not only for the patient and the family, but also for the health professionals. Yet the interactions between these three are so mutually influential and continuous that dealing with them separately must be more a matter of convenience than fact. They all make up one sociologic predicament.