[beth]

After hearing tales over the years from numerous older folk about their early experiences of death in their lives, it's really made me think about how we as a society deal with death. These older people spoke of seeing their grandparents and older aunts and uncles dying at home, and then being washed and dressed by the women in the family and laid out at home for family, friends, and neighbors to come pay their respects. The thing that struck me about these people was that most of them were very accepting of death.
These days, death is often a mysterious, hidden event with bodies spirited away from homes and hospitals and many of us seldom get to see a dead body ready for burial in our lives. In fact, my daughter's generation regard the actions of her predecessors as "gruesome", yet really, death is a natural part of life and we are effectively distancing ourselves from it. Even our cemeteries are filled with astroturf and other "prettying-up" devices to sheild us from the reality of death.

We now accept this as normal, just as our ancestors accepted what they did as normal. But what's really normal???