urbanization, rapid advances in medicine, and by an increasingly temporal outlook. Americans are less and less willing to involve them- selves in death and dying. People are allowed to die in institutions and to be buried under unadorned, uninscribed tombstones. There is often no sense of community loss. Our secular society no longer believes in the certainty of afterlife, so natural death and physical decomposition have become too horrible to contemplate or discuss.
Jackson sees hints in recent...