Image: Alfred Rethel – Death as Victor (1849).
The inevitability of death and the ramifications of aging are not always comfortable concepts for adults to contemplate, especially in the western world, where youthful beauty and vitality remain valuable commodities in arts and entertainment.
Anthropologist Ernest Becker believes that our fear of death is universal, arguing in The Denial of Death that ‘the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man’.
