Abstract

Every human being will die. In addition, he or she may witness many deaths over a lifetime. Such experiences may be shared with others in the form of narrative, a fundamental mode of human expression. Narratives link an individual to a community, help construct a self, and facilitate constructing reality. I recruited fifteen subjects using a stratified convenience sample method. Through informal, ethnographic interviews, I collected death memoirs, or narratives of a dying other. By speaking with people about their death memoirs, I broke cultural prohibitions against telling these narratives outside of culturally defined settings of time and audience. Defying the prohibition also gave subjects a sense of catharsis. I used a rich multidisciplinary perspective combining the methods of both the humanities and the social sciences . These narratives fall into four function narrative types: memorial, educational, cathartic , and amorphous. The narratives were analyzed through a process method by looking at their cultural, psychocultural, hermeneutic, and psychosocial elements. A full examination required placing the interviews in both historical and cultural context. I reviewed death memoirs and dying practices from ancient mythological times through American history, focusing on the culture and scholarship of death since the mid twentieth century. Death memoirs often take the form of hero myths and invoke such topics as afterlife, associations, body, children, choosing to die, good death, isolation, light, medicine, mortality, religion, and ritual. The metaphors subjects used to describe death illustrate the difficulty people have in discussing death, but they also reflect the cultural and religious meanings that dying holds. This information allows me to reexamine and critique previous research in the field and to offer a new perspective in researching death and dying. I hope to stimulate public debate and to encourage examinations of mortality, ritual, and interpretive research