Status Updates From The Year of Magical Thinking

Mrs. Post... wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view. Philippe Ariès noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden."