1 - Introduction

Summary

“Life sucks, I wish I had never been born!” the teenager moans when she comes home after a long day at school. “If we are not there soon, I will die,” the eight-year-old in the back seat states after two hours on the road. “Oh, this chocolate cake is simply to die for!” we overhear in the coffee shop. Three everyday statements, all of them including a reference to death or dying. Still, none of us really expect the kid in the back seat of the car to die or the woman in the coffee shop to give up her life for a piece of chocolate cake (though with chocolate cake you can never really know for sure). The teenager might dread her life some days, but other days she is jumping up and down with excitement and pure joy, wishing the moment would last forever. The examples might be banal, but they illustrate how references to death and dying are part of our everyday conversations, often in contexts that have nothing to do with death. This invites the question: If the context is not about dying, why the reference to death? And if they do not want to die, what are these speakers doing? “If you leave, I will kill myself.” “I cannot take this pain anymore; I wish I could just go to sleep and never wake up again.” The references to death have a different character in these statements. The person in pain, having suffered a severe illness for a long time, would prefer to die rather than to keep living with pain. Death is longed for. She wishes the pain would cease, but if it does not, she wishes for her life to come to an end. The abusive boyfriend uses death as a threat to try to prevent his girlfriend from leaving him.