“The Terror of Death,” the second chapter in Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death (1973), opens with Sigmund Freud’s question “Would it not be better to give death the place in actuality and in our thoughts which properly belongs to it, and to yield a little more prominence to that unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed?” Both Freud’s quote and Becker’s book argue for a revision of our cultural beliefs about the end of life. While Freud asks us to “reform and give truth its due,” Becker adds that the fear of death is one “from