성숙한 죽음문화의 모색 - 소극적 안락사의 3가지 대안

Suggestions for Mature Death-Culture: Three Alternatives of Passive-Euthanasia

  Understanding death in the right way is very important. Depending on how well one understands death and in what way one defines death, the discussion on death can lead to denying it or tabooing the issue altogether. Nowadays, the definition of death relies on clinical determination of men"s medical condition in such terms as brain death or heart death. Death should not be defined entirely in terms of the collapsing of the body. The founder of Thanatology (the study of death and dying), Qubler-Ross, states that the human has a soul and that defining death means going beyond the realm of the physical and the material to the realm of the soul, the mind, and life itself. In this context, death doesn"t exist for two reasons. First, such medical pronouncement as brain death or heart death has functioned so far as the definition of death, thus, there has only been the discourse on the criteria for medical decisions, but not on death itself. Secondly, the death as we know only marks the physical death since the soul begins its journey, separating from the body. In a society where there is only the discourse on the medical criteria for physical death, but not the significance of death itself, people tend to think of physical death as the end of it all. As a result, one witnesses the increase of suicides and increasing number of unhappy death. Therefore for the formation of death-culture I offer three suggestions. First Death-Education, second Living Will or Advance-Directive, third Hospice.