Death as celebration: a modest proposal

In our culture, death is feared and therefore made invisible. We hide the old and dying in hospitals and hospices and senior living facilities. We wait for death. Sometimes we realize that our loved ones have no quality of life but still we wait. The sooner the better, we think. But we still wait.

We should do better than this. We need a cultural ritual that approaches death as the end of something worth celebrating, i.e. an individual life. This could be done by combining elements of the wake and physician-assisted suicide: a celebration that ends in voluntary dying, death, not in misery after prolonged waiting but as the culmination of a celebration of a life.

Fat chance it will ever happen. But something like this would be a hell of a lot more humane than our cultural policy of warehousing the old, waiting for them to die.