DEATH

1.Thanatology is the academic, scientific, study of death among

human beings. It investigates the circumstances surrounding a person's
death, the grief experienced by the deceased's loved ones, and larger
social attitudes towards death such as ritual and memorialization. It is
primarily an interdisciplinary study, frequently undertaken by
professionals in medicine, nursing, psychology, sociology, psychiatry,
cultural history and social work. It also describes bodily changes that
accompany death and the after-death period.
2.The word is derived from the Greek language. In Greek
mythology, Thanatos ("death") is the personification of death. The
English suffix -ology derives from the Greek suffix -logos ("speech").
3.The Greek poet Hesiod established in his Theogony that Thánatos
is a son of Nyx (Night) and Erebos (Darkness) and twin of Hypnos
(Sleep).
4.Thanatology is also studied as a means towards the end of
providing palliative care for dying individuals and their families.
According to the World Health Organization, "palliative care is an
approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families

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facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness," involving
the "treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and
spiritual."
5.Thanatology recognizes that, ultimately, death is inevitable. It
works to develop guidelines to ease the process of dying. Thanatology
also studies the similarities and differences of various cultures around the
world and their manner of dealing with the death of individuals or of their
loved ones.
6.Thanatology does not directly explore the meaning of life and of
death. Medically, this question is irrelevant to those studying it. Some
medical texts refer to inquiries of the meaning of life and death as absurd
and futile. However, the question is very relevant to the psychological
health of those involved in the dying process: individuals, families,
communities, and cultures. Thanatology explores how the question
affects those involved, not the question itself.

7.The last words of the author Rabelais were quite brief: "I go to
seek a great perhaps." This sentence expresses the mystery, if not the fear
and anxiety, with which humans have traditionally viewed death. Dying,
the halting of all life functions, is the great unknown that neither science
nor religion has ever been able to penetrate. Philosophers have only been
able to speculate about it. Because it is both unknown and inevitable,
death has always been an object of fascination and fear. Whether it is
good or bad depends on an individual's perspective. For many, as for
Socrates, it is an open question. His farewell remarks to his friends were:
"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die, and you
to live. Which is better only God knows."
8.In whatever light it is regarded, death has always played a
significant role in the culture of human societies, and it has strongly
influenced the way people live their lives.

Biomedical and Legal Aspects

1.Contrary to appearances, no organism dies all at once - not plants
or animals, including human beings. Major vital organs, such as heart,
lungs, or brain, may fail extremely rapidly in the case of animals;
however, lesser noticed signs of life can continue for some time after an
individual has been pronounced dead., and individual cells continue to
function.
2.Because the heart has long been considered the central organ of
the body, its failure once indicated with certainty an impending death.
Failure of the breathing mechanism was known to bring about cessation
of heartbeat, thereby inducing death. But now there are techniques of
resuscitation, or revival, for both the heart and lungs, and there is also the

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possibility to use life-sustaining machines. The operation of the heart and
lungs may be stopped and their functions taken over by a heart-lung
machine - during heart transplants and other major surgery, for instance.
3.The use of these new medical techniques has raised the
question: When is a person really dead? If only a machine is keeping a
person's vital functions going, is that individual really alive? Such
machines can support an undamaged brain, but once the brain fails no
machine can yet revive and support it. Such complexities have confronted
modern medical scientists with the need to define exactly when the
moment of death occurs. This need is complicated by legal, moral, and
religious issues as well.
4. If the heart and lungs cease to operate, the brain will die for
lack of oxygen. Conversely, if the brain dies, the heart and lungs will
soon fail to function unless they are regulated by a respirator. It only
takes about six or eight minutes for the brain to expire for lack of oxygen.
5. Failure of heart and lungs is fairly easy to determine, but
determining brain death is more difficult. It is done by examining a
combination of life signs. Is there a total lack of response to any kind of
stimulation? Can the person breathe without artificial aid? Is there any
eye movement, swallowing, or coughing? Does an electroencephalogram,
or tracing of brain waves, show any evidence of electrical activity coming
from the brain? Is there any blood flow through the brain? A negative
answer to all of these questions would indicate brain death, but no single
sign is enough to warrant such an assumption.
6.Even if the brain has been determined to be dead, it is possible
to keep the heart and lungs operating by machine. Other bodily functions
will continue. Yet a physician would say that the person is dead. Who has
the right to "pull the plug"? In the absence of the ability of a person to
respond, only family members can authorize turning off the machine.
Sometimes a patient may stipulate that no special measures be taken to
prolong life.
7. Some states have passed statutes recognizing the legality of
living wills. An individual signing such a document asks that life not be
prolonged under specified circumstances. When a person has been
declared dead by a physician, this fact must normally be reported to a
governmental agency charged with keeping records of births and deaths.
Specific laws relating to the presumption of death and the disposition of
property vary widely.

Acceptance of Death and Dying

1.Dying is something everyone endures essentially alone. Nothing,
therefore, so engages the mind and the emotions as does the ending of

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one's life. Except in the case of sudden death, an individual who is ill
centers hope on medical treatment and possible cure.
2. People often go through a series of stages in accepting the
reality of their own mortality. Diagnosis of a terminal illness brings
shock, which soon gives way to denial. This denial may take the form of
searching for any possible cure for the disease. From denial the patient
may go on to anger - at himself, at everyone around him, and even at a
God who seems not to hear his pleas for recovery.
3.Anger eventually gives way either to hope for a temporary
respite or to deep depression over the impending loss of everyone and
everything. This grief over oneself then turns to resignation and
acceptance in the face of the inevitable.
4. How an individual responds depends, of course, on the quality
of one's personal life. For most people it is probably true, as Sir Thomas
Browne said, that "The long habit of living indisposes us for dying." For
those to whom life has been an ordeal, death may come, in Hamlet's
words, as "a consummation devoutly to be wished." In the face of such an
unknown quantity, however, death often becomes a matter of fear:
Aristotle asserted that it "is the most terrible of all things, for it is the
end."
5.On the other hand, people of great religious faith are often able
to face dying with composure: They know it as the final ill of life, but
they also view it as a transition, not a termination.
Funeral Rites and Customs
1.The bodies of the dead have traditionally been disposed of in two
ways: burial or cremation, or burning of the body. Burial has been
customary in most societies since prehistoric time. The ritual burial of the
dead probably stems from an instinctive refusal on the part of people to
accept death as the complete end of an individual's existence. This notion
of the end of existence first appeared in Buddhist thought in India during
the 6th century BC.
2.The belief that humans somehow survive death in some form
occurs in nearly all religions. Prehistoric and ancient funeral rituals and
burial customs testify to the conviction that the person somehow survives;
hence burial with supplies of food, ornaments, and tools. This was true
for Paleolithic people as it was for the Egyptians, who at a much later
date built elaborate tombs and pyramids. Proper preparation of the body
and burial were regarded as necessary if the dead individual was to depart
to the place where he belonged.
3. Some religions have held that the dead must cross some barrier
that separated their new existence from the land of the living. Ancient
Greeks and Romans believed that the dead were ferried across a river, the

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Acheron or the Styx, by a demonic boatman called Charon. To pay his
fee, a coin was placed in the mouth of the body before burial.
4. Preparation of the body for burial has traditionally included
washing the body and dressing it in special garments. The most elaborate
preparation took place in Egypt. The body was embalmed, a procedure of
using preservatives either externally or internally to keep the body intact
for as long as possible. The body was then carefully wrapped in cloth and
buried beyond the reach of the Nile River to preserve the corpse. Other
ancient societies also used embalming, among them prehistoric Indian
tribes of Peru and Ecuador and the aborigines of the Canary Islands. In
Tibet bodies are still often embalmed according to ancient formulas.
5.The modern embalming practice of injecting fluids into the
arteries to preserve the body began in the 18th century in England,
following techniques developed by William Harvey to study the
circulation of blood. Embalming came into wide acceptance in the United
States as a result of the American Civil War, when casualties were very
high and some means had to be used to preserve the bodies to be sent
home for burial.
6. In modern embalming procedures, the blood is drained from the
body and replaced by a solution of formaldehyde in water, called
Formalin. Cavity fluid is removed and replaced with a preservative of
Formalin mixed with alcohols, emulsifiers, and other substances. Such
embalming does not permanently preserve the body; its use is to give the
corpse a lifelike appearance during the time it is viewed by mourners. To
enhance the effect, cosmetics and other substances are customarily used
on visible portions of the body.
7.Cremation has been practiced in Western societies since about
1000 BC, when it was first used by the Greeks. It is also an ancient
practice among the Hindus of India. Such cremations were always
performed in the open, as they are in India today. In modern Western
cremations the body is placed into what amounts to an oven, where
intense heat transforms it into a few pounds of powdery ash. The ash may
be kept in an urn, buried, or scattered in some favored place. Cremation
has been looked upon with disfavor by members of many religious
groups.
8.Bodies have been buried under the earth, on top of the ground
under a mound of earth or rocks, in caves, in large above-ground burial
sites called mausoleums, and in water. Communal burial places, called
cemeteries, mark some of the oldest locations of human settlement.
9.Water burial was a custom in many ancient cultures. Often the
bodies of heroes were cast adrift in boats. In the South Pacific it was
customary to place the body in a canoe and to launch it on the water. In
Western society water burial is commonly used when a person dies at sea.

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 10.Exposure consists in placing the body where it may be eaten by
scavenging birds and animals or weathered to its essential elements. The
procedure has been held by many groups to be the most desirable form of
disposal for spiritual as well as material reasons. The Zoroastrians have
been perhaps the most widely known practitioners of this type of burial,
which developed out of the belief that the corpse is so unclean that to
inter or to cremate it would contaminate the “pure elements” of earth,
fire, and water. Since the 6th century BC it has been their custom to leave
bodies on mountains or hills at a distance from the community. In
Bombay the Parsis (as the Indian descendants of the Persian refugees are
called) maintain “towers of silence,” high circular structures. The dead
are carried to them, and funeral servants place them on stone beds
surrounding a central pit. After the hovering vultures have stripped the
flesh from the bones—usually within a few hours—the bones are
gathered and dropped into the central pit.
11.A number of people who expose the dead use trees and
platforms (tree burial). Among them are the primitive Balinese, the Nāga
tribes of India, the tribes of central Australia, and the Sioux and other
North American Indian groups. Commonly, the Sioux robed the dead in
their best clothing, sewed them into a deerskin or buffalo shroud, and
carried them to a platform about 8 feet (2.5 m) high. Various possessions
and gifts were placed on the scaffold, and the body was allowed to remain
there for a year; at the end of that time it was taken down and given an
earth burial.
12.Among many people, particularly in primitive cultures, a period
of waiting occurs between the first and a second burial that often
coincides with the duration of decomposition. The origin of this practice
is considered to be the different concepts of death held by these peoples.
In modern societies, death is regarded as instantaneous; it is not so in
many nonliterate societies, where it is held to involve a slow change, a
passage from the visible society of the living to the invisible one of the
dead. During the period of decomposition, the corpse is sometimes
treated as if it were alive, provided with food and drink, and surrounded
by company. Some groups, the Indonesians, for example, attached
mystical importance to the disintegration of the body, collecting and
carefully disposing of the liquids produced by decomposition—
sometimes mixing them with rice to ingest them.
13. Ritual cannibalism: Consumption of a person from within the
same community is called endocannibalism; ritual cannibalism of the
recently deceased can be part of the grieving process or be seen as a way
of guiding the souls of the dead into the bodies of living descendants.
Exocannibalism is the consumption of a person from outside the
community, usually as a celebration of victory against a rival tribe. Both

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types of cannibalism can also be fueled by the belief that eating a person's
flesh or internal organs will endow the cannibal with some of the
characteristics of the deceased.
14. Space burial is the launching of samples of cremated remains
into space. Missions may go into orbit around the Earth or to
extraterrestrial bodies such as the Moon, or farther into space. Samples of
cremated remains are not scattered in space so as not to contribute to
space debris. Ashes remain sealed in their small capsules until the
spacecraft burns up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or reach
their extraterrestrial destinations.
15. Lunar burial: Elysium Space, based in San Francisco,
announced this month that it will soon be offering lunar burials for a
starting price of $9,950. Instead of sending your dearly departed six feet
under, now you can send them over 200,000 miles above; The Lunar
Prospector probe impacted the moon's surface, carrying Eugene
Shoemaker's ashes, making this beneficiary of the program, the only man
buried on the moon.
16. Woodland burial, also known as green burial or natural burial,
is an eco-friendly funeral option that is growing in popularity: the body is
buried in a way that causes little damage to the environment, for example
by not having the body embalmed and by using a coffin made of natural
materials, so that the coffin and body can decay naturally.
Woodland burials may not be marked with a headstone; instead,
they will be identified by a tree or flowers and often become
indistinguishable from the woodland. Many natural burial grounds also
have a map, so that the bereaved may visit the site of their loved one.
17. Tree pod burial: There are two different varieties of Capsula
Mundi's burial pods: a small pod that houses cremated ashes and a larger
pod that holds a body in fetal position. Once the remains are inside the
pod, it is planted into the Earth like a seed. Then, a tree, which is chosen
by the deceased before they die, is planted above the pod. The family of
the deceased cares for the tree as a memorial to their loved one, while the
pod safely decomposes with the body in the soil.

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 18. Whole-body donation allows for an individual to donate their
body to science at end-of-life, for medical advancements. This includes
surgical device research and development, advanced disease-based
research and hand-on bio skills training.
It is important to donate to science because there is no substitute
for human tissue when studying the body. Medical professionals and
students benefit from human tissue which allows them to develop and
practice their skills.
Deciding to donate your body to science is a priceless gift to help
advance medical technology, training, and education.

Glossary

Introduction

Scythe [sʌ ɪ ð]

Hourglass [ ˈa ʊə ɡl ɑ ː s ]

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Theogony: the genealogy of a group or system of gods.

Thanatos as a winged and sword-girt youth.

Thanatos was the Greek god of nonviolent deaths. His name literally
translates to “death” in Greek. In some myths, he’s considered to be a
personified spirit of death rather than a god. The touch of Thanatos was
gentle, often compared to the touch of Hypnos, who was the god of sleep.

Hypnos (left) and Thanatos (right) carrying dead Sarpedon, while Hermes
watches.
Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, is an ally of Troy.

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Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and god of merchants, thieves, and
oratory. He is also a psychopomp (from the Greek word ψυχοπομπός,
psychopompós, literally meaning the "guide of souls"), a deity whose
responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls from Earth to the afterlife.

The Keres were female spirits, the daughters of Nyx, the goddess of
night. They were not peaceful creatures, but demons who were drawn to
bloody deaths on battle fields and their presences meant a violent death.

François Rabelais – (between 1483 and 1494 – 9 April 1553) was a

French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and
Greek scholar.

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Socrates, 470–399 bc, Athenian philosopher, whose beliefs are known
only through the writings of his pupils Plato and Xenophon. He taught
that virtue was based on knowledge, which was attained by a dialectical
process that took into account many aspects of a stated hypothesis. He
was indicted for impiety and corruption of youth (399) and was
condemned to death. He refused to flee and died by drinking hemlock.
 Dialectic or dialectics (Greek: διαλεκτική, dialektikḗ; related to
dialogue), also known as the dialectical method, is at base a
discourse between two or more people holding different points of
view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through
reasoned methods of argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate,
but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional
appeal and the modern pejorative sense of rhetoric.

Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the
supernatural is unknown or unknowable. Another definition provided is
the view that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational
grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God
does not exist. Humans cannot know of the existence of anything beyond
the phenomena of their experience.

Biomedical and legal aspects

After death: „individual cells continue to function”

 Myth: Hair and fingernails can continue to grow after death.
Explanation: Hair and fingernails may appear longer after death, but not
because they are still growing. Instead, a persons fingernails and hair may
appear longer because the skin around them has retracted. After death,
dehydration causes the skin and other soft tissues to shrink.

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Death café: At a Death Café people, often strangers, gather to eat cake,
drink tea and discuss death. Our objective is 'to increase awareness of

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death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives'.
A Death Café is a group directed discussion of death with no agenda,
objectives or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or
counselling session. As of today, we have offered 10715 Death Cafés in
70 countries.
https://www.facebook.com/deathcafe

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