Imagining the Future of Death

Death is a core aspect of the sustainability of our societies. With our ageing populations and increasingly chronic pathologies, end-of-life is a major issue for contemporary and future societies, in terms of care, medical and economic costs and meaning. Yet public policy and healthcare systems have yet to succeed in restoring value and meaning to death and end-of-life, which are seen as failures or obstacles dealt with reluctantly. Faced with the powerlessness of scenarios based on the cost/benefit balance, imagination offers an alternative method for, on the one hand, envisaging the evolution of contemporary death systems if nothing changes, and, on the other, considering possible alternatives that could restore meaning and value to death and end-of-life by transforming systems from within. Three applications of an imagination heuristic are developed herein: the first uses the scenario model, no longer to estimate costs and benefits, but rather to project extrapolations that provide a better understanding of current issues; the second analyses the art of conversation as an imaginary exploration of suffering and its ability to restore meaning to the final period of life; the third studies non-medicinal interventions in art as a concrete form of imagination. These three experiments with imagination identify ways in which subjectivities and organisations can be transformed to establish a caring culture as opposed to a culture of risk.