The June Psychology Today includes a conversation with a man deemed "the terminator," Simon Critchley, who co-runs the International Necronautical Society, "an avant-garde network seeking to make death as popular as sex."

In other words, get the national dialogue about death and grief more into the open, one of our goals here at EndNotes. So of course, we're instant fans of Simon Critchley.

He's a philosopher and writer and moderates a philosophy series for the New York Times.

The interview was fascinating.

Here are two excerpts:

"Our culture denies death in a massive, systematic way. We don't know how to deal with it. We don't have rituals around it. We don't know what to do, what to say. We used to. People used to take their hats off when they saw a hearse."

"My earliest memory of death is my greatgrandmother's, in Liverpool. There was an open-top funeral. You had to kiss the corpse...The function was to acquaint one with death. You don't forget kissing the cold flesh of a corpse."

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