Death is the best teacher of civil disobedience. Fritz Roth. Throughout our lives, we strive for self-determination and autonomy. Yet, as mourners, we allow our dead to be taken from us. We have learned to delegate and rely on experts. And it is only when we are personally confronted with the loss of a loved one or when we are struck by a life-threatening illness that we painfully realize that the old rituals no longer fit. We, as individuals and as a society, are called upon to develop a new culture of dying and mourning. Do we want to shape our lives (until the end) or merely manage them? What happens to the value of individuality when we give it away at the crucial moment? Mourning should be understood, like any crisis, not as a bothersome obstacle, but as a long journey of change.