> There is a certain cowardice in how we deal with death in the contemporary west.

It's because we have a dearth of true elders right now.

Not in age, but in temperament and learning.

I got interested in story telling during COVID and managed to find a great author (K.M. Weiland) that went in deep on the archetypes of story.

Her hook was essentially: "What happens after the Hero's Journey/happily ever after?" And then she got real deep on her idea of the 6 phases of life. Her work is properly about how to write a plot, but man does it apply more broadly.

The pertinent one here is the 'Crone' stage of life [0]. You're no longer the 'King' of your little fief, you had to give up the power and make way for the next generation. But now what?

The journey of the Crone is essentially learning that Death is a part of Life, that Death is not Evil, Death is a Friend.

K.M. Weiland admits that less and less people ever make it through the stages as you go along.

But, I think right now in the West, we have a lot of boomers that never really progressed past the Hero stage, let alone the Queen or King stages. There should be more Crone and Mage people around, but the boomers were retarded in their development. Just look at RBG, Feinstein and Pelosi (to name but a few), grappling on to power like the Tyrants or Sorceresses (strong shadow archetypes of the Queen and King) and never letting go, to the classical harm of the kingdom/hearth that such stories tell.

Facing Death is hard, very hard. But is something that we all must do. Realizing that Death is not Evil, but a part of life, and one to be welcomed at times, that is something that very few of us can do.

[0] https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/archetypal-chara...

I've always been averse to this sort of Jungian schema (it's a Freudian baggage I have -- Mourning and Melancholia has much value on the present topic!), but more and more I'm seeing how much wisdom was lost in the historic disavowal of myth and archetypal thought. Since having a child, my wife and I have been repeatedly stunned at how incapable our own parents are. I don't mean a mere absence of help with babysitting (although they suck at this, too), I mean they just have no idea how to deal with us or our kid as living beings. They shrink at the first sign of difficulty. They want absolutely no relationship with death. We've had to find new elders elsewhere; they really aren't easy to find but they do exists.