The Loneliness of the Dying Norbert Elias

"There are various ways of dealing with the fact that all lives, including those of the people we love, have an end. The end of human life, which we call death, can be mythologized through the idea of an afterlife in Hades or Valhalla, in Hell or Paradise. This is the oldest and commonest form of the human endeavour to come to terms with the finiteness of life. We can attempt to avoid the thought of death by pushing it as far from ourselves as possible - by hiding and repressing the unwelcome idea - or by holding an unshakable belief in our own personal immortality — 'others die, I do not'.

There is a strong tendency towards this in the advanced societies of our day. Finally, we can look death in the face as a fact of our own existence; we can adjust our lives, and particularly our behaviour towards other people, to the limited span of every life."