responding to the community (in part)

Reading Six Feet Under (Kunstmuseum Bern), this from Thomas Macho's The Return of the Dead after the Modern Age:

"Death does not occur in time but in space... Spatial arrangements reflect the event that is death, an event that negates all social order and therefor the spaces within which the members of a society usually operate... complex rituals and ceremonies, measures designed to defend and protect, are enacted to counter such a risk. All death rituals are first and foremost an attempt to realign the injured social space..."

I like the idea of thinking of loss as spatial rather than temporal, and it seems to speak to Matthew's idea of death as social rupture.

As an utter and total narcissist myself it takes some stretching to get past the (very American indeed) feeling (exactly) that that absence is mine...