Death and Dying in the Working Class

In the broader field of thanatology, scholars investigate rituals of dying, attitudes toward death, evolving trajectories of life expectancy, and more. Applying a lens of social class means studying similar themes but focusing on the men, women, and children who worked for wages in the United States. Working people were more likely to die from workplace accidents, occupational diseases, or episodes of work-related violence. In most periods of American history, it was more dangerous to be a wage worker than it was to be a soldier. Battlegrounds were not just the shop floor but also the terrain of labor relations. American labor history has been filled with violent encounters between workers asserting their views of economic justice and employers defending their private property rights. These clashes frequently turned deadly. Labor unions and working-class communities extended an ethos of mutualism and solidarity from the union halls and picket lines to memorial services and gravesites. They lauded martyrs to movements for human dignity and erected monuments to honor the fallen. Aspects of ethnicity, race, and gender added layers of meaning that intersected with and refracted through individuals’ economic positions. Workers’ encounters with death and the way they made sense of loss and sacrifice in some ways overlapped with Americans from other social classes in terms of religious custom, ritual practice, and material consumption. Their experiences were not entirely unique but diverged in significant ways.

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Theological and Ethical Responses

Euthanasia and rational suicide were acceptable practices in some quarters in antiquity. These practices all but disappeared as Hippocratic, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs took hold in Europe and the Near East. By the late nineteenth century, however, a political movement to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) began in Europe and the United States. Initially, the path to legalization was filled with obstacles, especially in the United States. In the last few decades, however, several Western nations have legalized euthanasia, and several US jurisdictions have now legalized PAS, giving state sanction to these once forbidden practices. With increasing social and political pressure to accept PAS, Christians need to understand how to think about this issue from an explicitly Christian perspective. Independent of the question of legalization, there are significant theological and ethical questions. This special issue aims to address those concerns, including: how does the practice of PAS or euthanasia impact our attitudes toward death, and what does it mean to “die well?” Should physicians, as healers, be involved in assisting patients who wish to bring about their own death? Are these methods significantly distinguished from other ethically justified practices in end-of-life care that also lead to a person’s death? Can Christians, both as patients and practitioners, justify the use of these methods to relieve suffering in this manner as compatible with the faith? Although these questions are not new to the debate, it is increasingly important that these controversies are addressed as the practice of PAS is popularized.

The COVID-19 pandemic and nurses’ attitudes toward death

Objective: to analyze nurses’ attitudes toward death in a hospital context after the critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic in Portugal. Method: this quantitative, descriptive, exploratory study was conducted in a university hospital and addressed 995 nurses. Revised Death Attitude Profile (DAP-R) was used to collect data, which were analyzed using analytical and inferential statistics. Results: the nurses most frequently agreed with the statements concerning the Neutral/Neutrality Acceptance and Fear. Age, marital status, profession, and unit of work influenced the nurses’ attitudes toward death. During the critical pandemic period, the nurses providing care to patients with COVID-19 presented the following means: Fear (28.89/±8.521) and Avoidance Acceptance (18.35/±7.116), which were higher than the mean obtained in the Escape Acceptance dimension, with significant differences (p=0.004). Conclusion: the nurses held Fear and Avoidance attitudes, revealing the need to qualify and support Nursing workers to cope with the death of those they provide care and manage pandemics and catastrophes.

“Pliks es nācu no mātes klēpja, un pliks es turp atgriezīšos!”: māksla nomirt patērētāju sabiedrībā

Today, we do not talk about death very much; if we do, we talk about mass death in media which is an estranged tragedy and does not appeal to us. On the other hand, the spirit of the time which we live in tries to prevent us from aging mostly by using consumerist philosophy, thus placing death and dying, and, especially, the consciousness of our own death in the grey zone. In this article, we aspire to sketching the main attitudes toward death in consumerist society, using theories of consumerism and also Google Analytics in order to define the lifestyle of the contemporary consumerist. Then, with some examples from the point of view of philosophy of religion and also keeping in mind the theology of Book of Job from the perspective of philosophy of religion, we will try to find an answer to the question – “how does the theology of the Book of Job or the interpretations thereof can help us to form our style of death?” Two main ideas are synthesised in the course of the article: firstly, consumerist lifestyle can be characterised as “desire for the desire”, while in Book of Job, when it is read from the consumerist’s perspective, one can see the repeating of faith, which is also an essential part of the theology of Soren Kierkegaard. Thus, the synthesis of these conclusions can construct consumer’s “death style”, which can be defined as “desire for the everlasting”.

Attitudes toward death and death acceptance among hemato-oncologists: An Israeli sample

Objective Hemato-oncologists are highly exposed to patients’ death and suffering during their daily work. The current exploratory and cross-sectional study examined death acceptance attitudes, in order to explore whether death acceptance attitudes are associated with fear of death. Method A convenience sample of 50 Israeli hemato-oncologists currently working in a clinical setting participated in the study. They completed the Death Attitudes Profile revised questionnaire (DAP-R), which examines levels of fear of death, death avoidance, approach acceptance, neutral acceptance, and escape acceptance. In addition, the hemato-oncologists reported on levels of exposure to patients’ death and suffering. Results A repeated measures MANOVA revealed significantly lower levels of neutral acceptance, compared with approach and escape acceptance. Path analysis for predicting fear of death by the other study variables revealed that death avoidance fully mediated the relationship between approach acceptance and fear of death as well as revealing a negative correlation between neutral acceptance and fear of death (higher neutral acceptance was related to lower fear of death). No associations were found between exposure to death and suffering and attitudes toward death. Significance of results In contrast to previous conceptualizations, the ability to adaptively cope with fear of death differed in accordance with death acceptance attitudes. Whereas neutral acceptance adaptively defended from fear of death, approach acceptance was associated with increased fear of death through death avoidance. As hemato-oncologists are highly exposed to patients’ death and suffering, and are required to make critical medical decisions on daily basis, these findings may have substantial implications for end-of-life care and the process of medical decision-making regarding the choice of treatment goals: cure, quality of life, and life prolongment. Further research is needed to investigate the role of death acceptance attitudes among hemato-oncologists.