Death in 21st Century Canada

Question 1

Define Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief

Answer 1

1) Denial (refusal to accept the reality of the certain situation)
2) Anger (a passionate emotional response as a result of how unfair it feels, it can directed at proximate individuals)
3) Bargaining (bargaining with a higher power)
4) Depression
5) Acceptance
- In Kubler ross’ book she postulated that the person dying is going through these stages, but it is most commonly associated with relatives.The assumption is that this is a linear process (one at a time and in order)

Question 2

What is Bonanno’s theory of grief?

Answer 2

• Through his research he found that Grief does not seem to follow any particular pattern of stages, the only ones he could find were three general approaches.
• Chronic grief (more or less as acute 2 years later)
• Recovery pattern (after around a year individual gradually begins to recover but begins the same way as chronic grief)
• They seem healthy and they mostly are, but they still say loss is forever
• Resilience (as time passes, they manage to adapt to the loss- struggle initially, but their pain begins to subside because they know they need to put the pain aside to meet the demands of their life. Does not mean they do not care/grief.)

Question 3

What is Lifton and Olson’s “symbolic immortality,”

Answer 3

• One of the major drivers of human activity is the fear of death (death salience)
• They use Bracketing
  1) Biological Immortality –> AKA biosocial immortality (by having children there is something of you that continues on in the world, thus a symbolic form of immortality)
  2) Creative immortality (one can achieve immortality through ones works, your name and contribution to culture will live on)
  3) Theological immortality (based on specific religious teachings and practices one believes one will live on in some form after death, this varies depending on what religion one practices)
  4) Natural immortality (the idea that we are all part of a natural cycle, individuals are born and they die and their bodies return to the earth, when you die you are reincorporated into the natural world)
  5) Experiential immortality (there are certain experiences like meditation, psychotropic drugs that radically redefine how death is reinterpreted.)

Question 4

What is Bill C-14?

Answer 4

• Associated with the right to die movement
• Allows for physician-assisted suicide in Canada. Under this law, physicians or practitioners can provide a substance that will bring death or give the substance to the patient.
• Passed in 2016
• Some conditions: need to Canadian health care insurance (in order to avoid foreigners coming to Canada for the purpose of dying), need to be 18 years of age, give informed consent, and not experience any pressure

Question 5

What is disenfranchised grief

Answer 5

Good and bad death –> disenfranchised grief (there are certain kinds of grief that we accept and certain kinds that we don’t. For example, the instance of someone that is suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, there aren’t social aids put in place for the grieving process that takes place while the person is still alive. There is no way to express this grief, unless someone else had been through it as well, this is disenfranchised grief.)

Question 6

What is the “phase of negated death”

Answer 6

• the perception of continued life of the deceased in the eyes of the family (dead in the medical/physical sense but not yet acknowledged to be dead)
• The Japanese believe in two deaths, once at the hospital and once at the cremation.
• Several events occur before the funeral ceremony: the announcement of death, the transportation of the deceased, the consultation, the bathing ceremony, and the wake.

Question 7

What is muen

Answer 7

• to not have a karmic connection to the living but also you don’t have living people connected to you i.e., no ancestral rituals being performed on your behalf
• en: with bonds
• one of the central dynamics of his book focuses on muen, describes a karmic bond, a fear of being forgotten and no longer being bound to anyone karmically. Graves get recycled.

Question 8

Discuss 20th- and 21st-century changes in Canadian approaches to (and understandings of) death

Answer 8

-the right to die movement (Bill C-14)

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Question 9

Discuss the most common causes of death in

the 21st century

Answer 9

• Largest cause of death in Canada right now = Cancer (elderly are most afflicted, the reason it might be the leading cause of death is because people are living long enough to experience it)

Question 10

Discuss the similarities and differences between funerary practice in contemporary Canada and Japan (case study)

Answer 10

• Japanese and Canadian funerary practice seem to have a similar structure (Time of death, Bathing, Wake, Funeral)
• But, the Japanese engage with the dead. They literally do not acknowledge that a person is dead until the cremation. They believe the deceased person is present at the funeral.

Question 11

Discuss the critiques of Kübler-Ross’ theory

Answer 11

• It presumes a unified character to grief (every human goes through the grieving process in the same way) but there’s a danger that it can be read prescriptively (no longer a description of what people might go through but instead a description of what you should go through)
• The notion that I can get through this via this roadmap that has been prescribed to me, this is similar to every religion
• It presumed to be normative and sequential