Consider the following comments on death.
A culture that hides its dying in institutions has not conquered death, only outsourced it.
We spend fortunes adding years to life and almost nothing on adding life to those years.
The denial of death is the engine that sells half of what we are told we need.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not.
Epicurus
How a society treats its dying reveals what it truly believes about being alive.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Argue that modern societies have not so much defeated death as exiled it from view, and that this denial distorts how we live and how we care for the dying. Begin by conceding the genuine triumph, that medicine has pushed back disease and turned deaths once common into rarities worth grieving. Then press the harder claim: by moving dying behind hospital walls and treating every death as a failure, we have lost the rituals and honesty that once let people meet the end with meaning. A useful third move distinguishes the medical task of postponing death from the human task of facing it, since the two require different kinds of wisdom. Caution: avoid the romantic suggestion that earlier ages died better, which sentimentalises a past of plagues and early graves, and resist implying that fighting death is itself a moral mistake.