In this Age of Denial ("What, me worry?"), many—billions—continue to embrace various stories either to keep death at a distance to try to relieve its up-close sting. Violent arguments, from street fights to wars, continue to rage about whose story is better.

Amidst the clamor, quietly in the background, we’ve made some small progress in dealing with death. It’s now possible for health-care professionals to make a career centered on palliative care for the dying. And thousands do just that in the hospice movement.

Enormous respect and gratitude is due those people whose daily workplace is the unavoidable end-reality that 99% of human civilization and history in one way or another deny.

Latterly, a small book industry has arisen from these one-on-one encounters with that which the rest of us don’t want to think about. Some call it death lit. I choose to call it rot lit, to get right at the heart of the problem.

Rot lit has several branches:

If you’re having trouble locating death’s contemporary cultural sting, just spend a while browsing the bad writing, faulty logic, egregious sentimentalism, and rampant delusional thinking in that aisle.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross is surely spinning in her grave as she post-mortem contemplates the sorry state to which the death studies which she so nobly and articulately—and almost singlehandedly—began have sunk.

Spleen like this, as you may have guessed, can only come from close encounters of the worst kind. A friend, whose opinions I had before this respected, recently and strongly recommended one of those latter-day death books.

Which I bought. And read.

I’m not about to give the title or the author (a hospice employee of some renown) because I may well wind up in a medical facility where (s)he could retaliate!

The book was a report on conversations and experiences the writer has had with the dying in the hospice where (s)he works. The writing was almost passable (D+/C-), which made it possible for me to continue beyond page 1 (which is where I usually stop in books of this type).

The first couple of chapters were stimulating, provocative, engrossing even as we got to sit bedside with some remarkable people ranging from quite young to quite old as they expired and reported on what they were experiencing.

Before I continue, let me make one thing clear. Any human being who gets through more than four decades and is not completely awed and baffled and humbled by the mystery of whatever the fuck (pardon my French—if you don’t like it I’m afraid there’s likely more to come, so stop reading now) is going on here is in my—humble—opinion a fool (viz. Shakespeare’s remarks along these lines), whose degree of denial is exceeded only by that of those persons who construct vast kindergarten dollhouses of credulity to shield them from the reality of their denial.

In other words I am as skeptical of religiosity as I am of sciencism. Each has its role and its place, but neither throws real light on The Big and—no matter how much we try—Undeniable Mystery.

Back to the book. Here we are, bedside with some interesting dying people. It does truly behoove us to attend those people and to pay close, sincere, thoughtful, and—yes—loving attention to what they report. Since we don’t know jack shit, maybe they in their last minutes have some important clues to impart.

So far, so good. Attend closely, and report. The reports, however biased (see below) are not without their shards of wisdom.

I’m all for that and—as I already said—am full of respect for those hospice workers who do just that. Theirs is surely one of the most important—and difficult—jobs in the world.

But—you knew a big but was coming, right?—the problem comes in two parts.

First, the attendee (the writer of the death book) chooses which dying people (s)he reports on.

Second, the attendee doesn’t report on all the other dying people (s)he has attended to.

This becomes a matter of concern for skeptics like me when, as the book goes on, it develops into:

1) a commercial for good old-fashioned down-home puredy simple Christianity—meaning that ALL the dying reports included in the book confirm that either you accept Jesus as Son of God, Savior, etc. or you’re up shit creek, and

2) a commercial for one of those huge local big-box Christian churches with 20 or 30 thousand members and a budget of millions of dollars weekly.

What we actually are faced with in these books is pro-Christian propaganda of the most insidious kind. I don’t doubt that well-meaning Christians die comforted by visions of Jesus and his assistants, and that’s fine. I have no problem with that. The problem arises when these deathbook writers are also careful to include 1) the redeemed Atheist, 2) the redeemed Agnostic, 3) the redeemed Jew, 4) the redeemed Hindu, etc., all of whom at the last minute are visited by guess-who (hint: his initials are J.C.) and suddenly see the error of their misguided non-Christian ways.

Reading these pieces of illogical propaganda, we are supposed to believe that if you open a hospice in the remotest part of the Amazon jungle, the dying natives, hitherto untouched by civilization, are going to be visited by none other than Jesus.

Sorry, but for me that’s a stretch, right up there with thinking that George W. Bush had the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart.

Just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined death is not worth dying. The latter-day deathbook accounts are universally unexamined: naïve, anthropocentric, terracentric, Christocentric, myopic, narrow-minded.

And what about the other 99% of the dying who are not reported on?

Like it or not, we’re back at the bell curve. As with any other human endeavor so too with dying. A few people way over at the right-hand end of the curve do it really well, a few do it really badly, most of us are left to do it more or less ordinarily.

These writers may report on one or two of those who die badly (i.e., in great pain and without seeing and accepting you-know-who) as a warning to the rest of us to get on with it. But as for the vast majority of deaths? Nada. Niente. Rien. Nichts. The rest is silence.

The non-death-expert reader thus is left with the image that EVERYBODY who winds up in a hospice dies peacefully with Jesus kneeling at the foot of the bed while 10 or 20 angels hover about the room.

Surely ‘tis a death vision as diaphanous and faulty as one of Barbara Cartwright’s love visions.