Modern hospital death is a new kind of dying because people lost control over their own deaths. Instead of foreseeing the end and giving orders and advice among family, the dying are kept ignorant of their condition, surrounded by machines and professionals in sterile rooms out of public sight.
A society that expects to defeat disease treats death as a failure that should have vanished along with illness, yet it persists. Striving to avoid death, such a society hides it. Dying is drained of the shared meaning it once had as a social project and becomes a hollow, empty affair.
Each era picks from the symbols on offer the ones that best express its underlying collective feelings, and ignores the rest. An official idea can exist for centuries without popular uptake, as the notion of a waiting place for souls did. Older images, like death as peaceful sleep, outlast authorities' efforts to replace them.
Where death is constant and expected, people meet it calmly: they feel sad and say so, but without terror. The dying foresaw their end, and the community gathered at the bedside, paid its respects, and moved on. Real dread of death is a late arrival, not a fixed part of human nature.
How people picture death tracks whom they feel they belong to. As life centred on the community, then on the self, then on the family, the feared loss shifted from one's own end to the death of a loved one. In time death came to be imagined as a pause before reunion in the hereafter.