to learn to focus on dying as a human process, how to include the dying in their dialogues, and how to learn the lessons of their existence. Instead, the dying process now too often features silence or diversion. However, not surprisingly in our service-oriented economy, there are challenges to this medicalized, depersonalizing cultural route toward life's conclusionSOCIALIZATIONS FOR DEATHLike those at the dawn of human species, young children understand neither the inevitability of their own mortality nor its finality. Death fears must be learned. Paralleling the attempts of anthropologists and historians to map the death ethos of Western culture over time, there is a sizable research tradition in psychology and psychiatry on exactly how children's concepts of death unfold developmentally. As social scientists have studied the long-term social and cultural consequences of mass epidemics or total war, psychiatrists attempt to gauge how early firsthand death encounters later affect the motivations, psychoses, and fears of adulthood. And what lessons are learned in childhood about death? Consider the Saturday morning catechism. The lessons begin with the selection of breakfast cereals. Consider the products to the right, featuring flawed but immortal creatures (Frankenstein, a creature created from body parts, and Dracula, who subsists on the blood of the living). While eating their immortality flakes, children may watch their favorite cartoon: "The Roadrunner." The story line never varies: a coyote employs a number of strategies to kill (we assume to eat) the bird, only to have each attempt lethally backfire before he is once again resurrected to resume the hunt. This cartoon is followed by others bearing similar messages of violence, death, and indestructibility.The following is the breakdown of their responses to the question "When you were a child, how was death talked about in your family?" Openly 39% With some senseof discomfort 19...
