Death baffles us. It’s a curious quirk of American culture, that so much attention is lavished upon the beginning of life, and so little on the end. Instead, there is a whole set of ideas and mentalities and the industries that have sprung forth from these ideologies, conscious or not, on the concealment of aging, the denial of decay. There is a number of broadly accepted practices that exist solely on our fear and avoidance of the most natural counterpart of life: death. F