DEATH RITUAL
Philippe Aries 1
1 Western Attitudes Toward Death
Death in the hospital is no longer the occasion of ritual ceremony, over which the dying person presides amidst his assembled relatives and friends. Death is a technical phenomenon obtained by a cessation determined in a more or less avowed way by a decision of the doctor and the hospital team. Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person has already lost consciousness. Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.
From the end of the eighteenth century [there has been] a sentimental landslide . . . causing the initiative to pass from the dying man himself to his family . . . Today the initiative has passed from the family, as much an outside person, to the hospital team. They are the masters of death—of the moment as well as the circumstances of death.
