Death in the Future

A discussion of death in the future can include topics relating to predictions about demographic [Page 319]shifts in mortality, transitioning grieving, and burial practices. While all these issues are important, changes in the social characteristics and reactions to death revolve around more fundamental questions about the ontological nature of death. Examining the cultural understanding of death can help reveal the way death will look in the future. It is suggested here that as medical technology advances, biological death will wane in significance while sociocultural considerations will become increasingly important.

In contrast to the past, when war and acute injury and disease were leading causes of death, the present epoch is characterized by chronic illness deaths. That is, death today is linked not so much to singular moments but to the cumulative effects of ongoing health behaviors. As biomedicine continues to detect, intervene, and manage chronic illness, more people will continue to live longer. But death in this era of unprecedented life expectancy may at times be prolonging life of significantly diminished quality. In the future, health care advances perhaps will deliver a more successful aging process, with less prolonged morbidity. Death also may be seen as less tragic when individuals are given a chance at a full biography with relatively full functional ability.

Biomedical and social-behavioral fields differ in focus, but the epidemiological trinity of agent, host, and environment can accommodate interdisciplinary perspectives. Instead of viewing this triad strictly in terms of physical components, broader social definitions, including behavior and lifestyle, various social systems, and social psychological components of the environment will be necessary additions to future inquiry as society continues to struggle and adjust in the era of chronic illness. With extended periods of end-of-life dysfunction, this will include identifying typical physical health dangers to living independently, as well as social factors such as bereavement, isolation, prolonged grieving, caregiving, and widowhood. These critical social-behavioral factors signify potential displacement from social roles and extensive dependence on others prior to death.

Additionally, the variety of social practices surrounding death are not static features of human history but change in relation to structural conditions. For example, increasing scarcity of space, particularly in urban centers, gives impetus for growing rates of cremation. As cremated remains require significantly less space than do bodies, cremation should continue to grow in popularity in relative proportion to increasing expense of scarce burial space. In general, death's effects on similar social practices likely will continue to respond to constraining material conditions of society.

But the most central consideration about death in the future concerns the definition and meaning of death itself. Like its surrounding practices and institutions, cultural meanings of death vary across time and context. Religion and medicine have different visions of death and these intersect with human history, the former being clearly dominant until comparatively recent successes gave medical science unprecedented significance. Moreover, religion and medicine hold a contentious relationship, as scientific advances challenge religious prescriptions; this is exemplified in the case of euthanasia. Finally, the social meaning of death changes as medicine continually adjusts its death criteria. The sections that follow describe how advances in medicine will establish new understandings of death and alter what it means to be human.

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