“Quick and painless” may seem like the obvious answer, but are we thinking about it the wrong way? A growing community of people from a diverse set of backgrounds are embracing death as a part of life – they are hosting death salons, building their own coffins, preparing the bodies of loved ones for burial or cremation.
This isn’t a new idea: for millennia, philosophers have argued that accepting your mortality is the path to happiness. Dean Olsher talks with experts on death who draw from history, philosophy, paleontology, literature, poetry and personal experience, about how to make sense of death on the individual and evolutionary time scale. And a theme emerges: death defines life. It's what gives life meaning.
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