recent history, a frightening phenomenon. As Berger (2004) notes, throughout most of Western and Christian history, death was regarded as an accepted, familiar event generally occurring at home which was observed and experienced by family members of all ages.
In general, family members or the spouse of a dying individual were the individuals who tended to the needs of the dying person and then to the corpse. In most cases, they built the coffin, may have dug the grave, and buried the body themselves with the participation of a priest or minister. However, as new medical technologies became available, more and more Westerners tended to die alone in hospitals rather than at home among their family. Berger (2004, p. 680) states that "the disposition of the deceased passed into the hands of professionals who sanitized and euphemized death in an effort to disguise its reality. They embalmed and made up the corpse to give it a normal and 'healthy' look.... They supervised the burial and formalized the grieving."
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