Abstract

Death is universal, yet dying is not. Death is the culmination of life and living, and as finite biological beings – as we shall live, we shall die. Indeed, our ‘lifeworld’ encompasses our sense of mortality as a part of the pre-reflective, taken-for-granted realm where we interact. In our lifeworld, a dynamic and constantly evolving backdrop exists that offers us context for understanding social interactions, communication, and the reproduction of social structures. Some of this lifeworld involves facing the inescapable notion of death. Yet while death will come to all of us, the societal process of dying – namely the deathbed – is a culturally fluid and dynamic ritual system that transforms between places and through time. This chapter addresses the cross-cultural and globally dynamic case examples in this book, suggesting dark events are formed within diverse ontological contexts and, subsequently, layered with social functions to help form our existential lifeworld. Presenting dark events as a response to shifting landscapes of culture, environments, and emotions, this chapter affirms that in a world that appears to spin ever faster with global anxieties and cultural transformations of the deathbed, dark events allow us to make our own lifeworld – in the face of inevitable mortality.