"...in a world that lacks an ethics of death, as ours does..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/books/review/deadlines.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20130705&pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Deadlines

By MEGHAN O’ROURKE

Reading today’s secular literature of death one ultimately realizes that the medical language is a scrim: on the one hand, it’s purely descriptive, a way of “recording” the strange time of the hospital. But on the other hand, its foreignness is connotative. It subconsciously serves to express the author’s fundamental alienation from the fact that this is happening to his body, his wishful hope that this remain unreal even as he experiences it as total, an immersion in what Hitchens describes as living in “another country.” The dissonance here is that dying is not really like entering “another country.” As Sontag observed accurately, it is our country from birth: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” But in a world that lacks an ethics of death, as ours does, we live estranged from this deeper knowledge. Perhaps because we must.