The traditional and the technological way to die

The process of dying is that which takes a living organism from a state of life to one of death. This process can be adequately described as part of the process and transformation of organic material. But the act of dying for a human being, just as a human being's process of life, is not something merely biological; it also has an element essential in humans: a social aspect. When a human being meets death, various people are involved: the person who dies who is said to leave, who goes somewhere, and those who remain, who perhaps have to help this first person at a moment when that person might require collaboration. Both the person who dies and those who remain must come to terms, must assimilate, the act of dying. All participants in the process of death have to come to grasp with the reality that by this event one of them abandons his/her place in their social relation network. Associated with this radical abandonment, one comes face to face with a tradition which relates this parting with the ideas of a soul, God and immortality. One also faces how to socially organize the process of death, the direct meeting of man with death, which we call the way of dying, as part of this final event in one's life.