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The recognition of death as an existential fact not only shapes individual psyches but also impacts the creation of cultural symbols, rituals, and customs. About death, the poet Philips Larkin (1977) said, “Most things may never happen: this one will.” Larkin's ironic and disillusioning pronouncement acts as a blunt rejoinder to the characteristic human dependence on wish-fulfillment and the denial of death. As Sigmund Freud (1915) noted in his paper, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” everyone is convinced that he or she will live forever. Freud (1915) said, “In the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality” (p. 289). His matter-of-fact statement underscores that the certainty of death is a phenomenon that embraces all of life. Each of us is faced at every instance with the possibility and inevitability of our own death and with the death of our loved ones. Our life provides a background to the meanings of death just as the meanings of death serve as a background to those of life. Thus, it is not surprising to observe that the problem of death and loss is confronted and understood by religious, philosophical, and literary conceptions within the context of life.
A haiku by the Japanese poet Basho reads, “Nearing autumn's close/my neighbor, now/what is it that he does?”(Hass, 2012). Indeed, nearing life's closure, which is always with us throughout life, what is it that we do? The philosopher and psychoanalyst Otto Rank argued that such a question is the major motivator of our creative and cultural world. In fact, each of society's images of death reveal the level of independence of its individuals, their personal relatedness, self-reliance, and aliveness. Human experience when lived consciously is thus lived as an expression of ultimate reality, must always creatively then express a paradoxical nature: as we consider our own mortality either through meditation or the experience of illness, the “wilder shore of dying” (Broyard, 1992) not