AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Some discussion of how death is mostly hidden away for us moderns, whereas in traditional societies it was omnipresent, a daily fact.
A very American sort of thing, our seamless suburban aesthetics is meant to hide away such unpleasantness. Maybe that tendency is not that specifically American, we just perfected it.
Some talk about how the dead are not really dead, how you can maintain a relationship with them, eg in the case of scholars of long-dead musicians etc. I kind of feel that way about Marvin Minsky; I often find myself arguing with the imago of him that haunts my brain like the ghosts he would refuse to believe in (he does not approve of all this WS paranormal nonsense, to say the least). The post Firing up the Emotion Machine was prompted by his death and addressed the nature of death and of what lives on quite explicitly.
Death as one of the two worst cards you can get (the other being The Tower).