The subject of one's death embraces concepts and emotions that are beyond words: it is the ultimate individual experience, lightened in its import only very slightly by the knowledge that it is an inevitable experience for everyone. Artists try to "survive" the terminal experience via their works; the religious attempt to "transcend" death with beliefs in afterlives; philosophers "console" themselves; Everyman drinks heavily of alcohol and sings melancholy dirges.
Medicine, relative world peace and an improved standard of living environments have given us the opportunity to live longer than our forefathers. The lifespan of the average person in Western society is double that of two hundred years ago; a seven decade anticipation, barring accident, war and "acts of God" (the "force majeure" caveat clause in all modern contracts). That improvement in the quality of life should make us happy. It does not. No longer do we fear the sudden breeze-chill-death of pneumonia that killed millions more people in 1919 than the Great War had in the preceding four years. Now science has given us the ability to linger, fading slowly, dying in tiny, dehumanizing steps. We are discomfited by our mortality in general; we are terrified by the way we die in specific.
The cruel irony: where once the weak and infirm had little hope of surviving more than a short while, modern doctors extend days into weeks, weeks into months, months, sometimes, into years - fulfilling their vocation under the guidance of the 2,500 year-old, semi-mystical Hippocratic Oath (Outerbridge & Hersh, 1991, pp. 22-24). For the strong of will, for those whose consciousness is not decimated by the pain or ravages of the infirmity, these scientific breakthroughs are the lease on life withheld from their like for centuries. Surely the brilliant theorist Steven Hawking benefits from the tubes and tests that keep him sitting in a motorized environment, where other techno...