Emerging Understanding of Death

If the United States is a death-denying society, it is nevertheless apparent
that in the latter part of the twentieth century some people became willing
to look at death more clearly; this is demonstrated in the behavioral and social
sciences. In research, books, articles, and in many other ways, interest in
death, dying, and closely related topics multiplied enormously.

In 1944 Erich Lindemann did a systematic study of the grief reactions of
individuals who had lost a close relative; many of his subjects were relatives
of those who died in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston that
killed almost five hundred people. Lindemann was particularly interested in
studying the differences between what he called “normal” grief and the “abnormal”
reactions he saw in some of the survivors. He concluded from his
study that acute grief is a definite syndrome (a combination of behaviors or
symptoms which together may be signs of illness or pathology) with psychological
and somatic symptomatology. In his description of normal grief, he
said: “Common to all is the following syndrome�"sensations of somatic distress
occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour, a feeling of
tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing,
an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense
subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.” Lindemann then
pointed out the pathologies of grief, many of which are the intensification,
elongation, or absence of the symptoms of normal grief.

Lindemann was a pioneer in the attempt to bring death into the arena of
science, and since his time there have been thousands of studies, the creation of several organizations (such as the Association for Death Education
and Counseling) and journals (such as Omega), and the publication of dozens
of books (including textbooks) in the area of death and dying.
As an example of how science grows by building on the work of others, it
was later found that Lindemann had not contacted his bereaved subjects
soon enough to observe a stage of grief which seems to be almost universal: a
period of shock, numbness, and denial in which the bereaved person acts as
if nothing had happened for a few hours or even days�"sometimes even longer
in abnormal grief.