Introduction

“Death.” What a frightening and horrific five-letter word! It is a word most of us would gladly go through life without ever needing to use or encounter, a word that without much regret should be deleted from any encyclopedia and language. It is a word that embodies everything we fear, a word summarizing all the pain and suffering as well as describes the deepest sense of despair that comes with being born a mortal being and being destined to die. It is also—without any comparison to most other unpleasant experiences—a word and a topic that is mostly found missing in mainstream sociology books. This is quite surprising. Death—for all practical intents and purposes such a most natural, normal, and common occurrence in human life—is mainly conspicuous by its absence from most sociological treaties and research reports. It is not a phenomenon or topic that the majority of sociologists find immediately relevant to their studies of a multitude of other seemingly more important research concerns. This routine neglect of death is far from only a sociological folly—it is also found in many other places in social life.

Death is and remains a conundrum to humans, a great unknown inaccessible to experience—at least when it comes to experiencing one's own death. Death is the perpetual enemy of any human meaning-making. Despite so many attempts to define death in definitive terms or to explain it, it escapes definition and explanation—it is the ultimate void, the emptiness that cannot be described with the experience and language available to us. Death, at the same time, defies our reason, challenges our continuous meaning-making endeavors, frightens us, and invigorates us to live our alltoo- mortal lives. Death challenges our reason, our mental faculties, and our rational minds. To humans, death is mostly an incomprehensible but inescapable part of life— death is anticipation, something that we constantly (often with some disbelief and resignation) await until it finally happens. As Svend Bjerg (1975) has once suggested, we cannot experience and therefore cannot comprehend “death itself” but we do have access to the “thoughts of death” that people—across different times and places—have entertained, expressed and reproduced in writings, paintings, belief systems, and rituals.