In response to “Last one to die, make sure you hit the lights” by Linze Griebenow, I don’t know where our columnist has been all of her life, but such practices of death preparation are and always have been in place and are operating today at full force. You cannot even call attention to these hospice scenarios without invoking that nagging and persistent presence of the pious.

One problem with human culture, in my opinion, is that it attempts to make entirely too many preparations for death beginning from entirely too young an age.

Freud claims in his Future of an Illusion that religion was born in the infancy of humankind’s intellect to serve three main purposes: to personify nature so that it can be appeased and thus so controlled, to atone for the atrocities of culture, and to deny death with the illusion that it will be overcome with an afterlife. To call the denial of death a culturally specific phenomenon in America is to wildly misrepresent reality and to shrink from the bigger picture.

Senior painting major Ryan Paszek