I’m familiar with death, my father died when I was 15, I held me mother’s hand as she died, one brother has died. What strikes me is this preoccupation to categorize death as an “event”, a differentiated episode that is processed in it’s own container. At age 68 I am in palliative care. No, it’s not the normal definition. I ride my bicycle 12-100 miles a day, active house builder, lift weights 3 times a week at gym, read a lot, have the ideal weight, active rancher, blood pressure 118/70 with a resting heart rate of 56. Lots of friends, active life in all aspects, mentally sharp and involved constantly learning new things everyday. And, all of life is both a life process and a process of dying and at 68 I get reminders (arthritis, worn joints, reduced stamina, physical changes such as it being easier to strain a muscle) everyday that I am far along in this process. There is nothing about the “5 stages” that I don’t go through everyday (they are like the basic color palette, many colors get generated from mixing). Our culture, in particular it seems to me, is preoccupied with the illusion of youth and denial of mortality. I can beat most 16 year olds in a game of driveway 1:1 basketball and I am confident I often have a better and more active sex life than the neighborhood teenagers, and, I (like everyone else, including the teenagers) am in the living AND dying process. It’s more noticeable at 68 but if a diagnosis of a particular pathology with a time-bounded prognosis were announced today it would not be a completely novel state to me — I’m already in a version of that place right now as I am typing this. It might be helpful for our culture to get out of denial of the life-death cycle and embrace a psychology of gratitude and full life that I’m joyously in the moment while being aware that (if we are honest) the 5 stages and their byproducts are normal as a lifelong maturation psychological processes.