Herbert C. Northcott - Dying and Death in Canada

Fourth Edition

HERBERT C. NORTHCOTT
AND DONNA M. WILSON

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London

University of Toronto Press 2022
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-4875-0926-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-0929-3 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-4875-0927-9 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4875-0928-6 (PDF)

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Dying and death in Canada / Herbert C. Northcott and Donna M. Wilson.

Names: Northcott, Herbert C., 1947 author. | Wilson, Donna M., Ph. D., author.

Description: Fourth edition. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210306599 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210306629 | ISBN 9781487509279 (paper) | ISBN 9781487509262 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487509293 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487509286 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: DeathCanada. | LCSH: DeathSocial aspectsCanada. | LCSH: DeathPsychological aspects. | LCSH: Grief. | LCSH: BereavementPsychological aspects. | LCSH: Loss (Psychology)

Classification: LCC BF789.D4 N67 2022 | DDC 306.90971dc23

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University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

This book is dedicated to my students, both undergraduate and graduate, who have taught me more than I have taught them.

HN

I would like to dedicate this book to friends and family who, through their life and also through their dying and death, have brought special meaning to life. I would also like to recognize my nursing career for having helped me realize that dying and death comprise important opportunities for reflection and growth.

DW

For the 2001 first edition of this book, Wendy Maurier and Michael Stingl reviewed the entire manuscript, Kathryn Wilkins reviewed include personal accounts concerning dying and death provided by individuals who remain anonymous; we are very grateful to them for sharing their stories. Finally, the authors thank Barbara Tessman for her excellent editorial work and Peter Saunders of Garamond Press for his support of this project.

For the 2008 second edition of this book, Jennifer Northcott assisted with the literature search to update . The authors are grateful to Betsy Struthers for her excellent editorial work and to Anne Brackenbury of Broadview Press for her support of the second edition.

For the 2017 third edition of this book, the authors thank anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions, Leanne Rancourt for her outstanding editorial assistance, and Anne Brackenbury at the University of Toronto Press for her continuing support of this book. We thank the production staff at the University of Toronto Press, including Beate Schwirtlich and Ashley Rayner. And finally, we are grateful to the anonymous contributors who shared their personal stories, experiences, and insights.

For this 2021 fourth edition, we are grateful to Carli Hansen at the University of Toronto Press for inviting us to do a fourth edition, and for collecting anonymous reviews of the previous edition and of the manuscript for the fourth edition. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and helpful suggestions and Samantha Rohrig of The Editing Company for her excellent and helpful copyediting. Many others should also be thanked, including the members of the production team. Finally, we thank the anonymous persons who contributed their stories and insights for this new edition of Dying and Death in Canada.

Dying and death were among the last taboos to be explored by twentieth-century social science beginning in the 1960s. This book focuses on Canada and Canadian studies of dying and death. The first edition was published in 2001, the second edition in 2008, and the third edition in 2017. Initially, the first edition of this book was meant to serve as a supplement to larger texts such as Corr and Corr (2013), DeSpelder and Strickland (2011), Kastenbaum (2012), or Leming and Dickinson (2016), all of which were written outside of Canada but often used in Canada. The Canadian literature on dying, death, and end-of-life care has developed considerably over the past two decades, and the fourth edition of this book provides a comprehensive overview focusing on the Canadian context. Although Dying and Death in Canada is written primarily for students who wish to learn about dying and death and for practitioners who work with the dying and the bereaved, it is also relevant for the dying and the bereaved as well as others interested in the topic.

Dying is a process; death is an event. For the dying person, the process of dying culminates in the event of death. For that reason, throughout this book the term dying typically precedes the term death, and discussions of dying typically precede discussions of death. This is in contrast to the more common usage that curiously focuses first on death and adds dying almost as an afterthought.

Dying and death in a society reflect the material and social conditions of that society. For example, dying and death come frequently and early in life in a society where there is widespread poverty, austere living conditions, inadequate nutrition, unclean water, limited sewage and garbage disposal, war or civil unrest, and underdeveloped medical technology and health care delivery systems. In contrast, dying and death typically come late in life in a more developed society like Canada in the twenty-first century. How we live influences how and at what age we die. And the society and culture in which we live influences what we think and do about dying and death.

Dying is both a personal experience and a social role given shape and meaning by social practices and cultural definitions (Lucas 1968). Death itself is both a personal event and an event with social significance. The same is true for the bereaved person who loses a loved one to death. The bereaved grieve or mourn in both personal and social ways, since the meaning assigned to dying and death is both personally and socially constructed.

Dying and Death in Canada is divided into three parts. examines trends and causes of dying and death in Canada in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

investigates the cultural constructions of the meaning of dying and death and the social rituals that attend death and help to give it a collectively shared meaning.