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Why They're Away
The Purpose of Death

Synopsis

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Though many of us do not like to think about it, death is a fact of life with which all of us, at one time or another, will have to come to terms. In the Middle Ages and into the seventeenth century death was such a prominent event in everyone’s lives that people took to practicing what they called the “Art of Dying Well” as a way of life. But for the people of today, with our greatly extended life expectancies, it often takes a public tragedy like that of the widely televised explosion of the Challenger and the loss of seven lives to bring home to us the reality of death and the immediacy with which it can touch our lives.

Why They're Away: The Purpose of Death by Ellert L. Anderson, attempts to view death from another perspective than that of the purely personal – to see it, in effect, from the perspective of the race as a whole. In it, he discusses his own personal loss of his mother; the apparent waste of very young lives; what seem to be “accidental” deaths; violent deaths such as murder, suicide, and mass tragedies and lingering deaths due to disease. In each case, he finds these deaths have not been totally in vain but seem to have a beneficial effect that outweighs the purely personal loss.

For each of us who have sustained some personal loss or who have been merely spectators of other, public, losses, Why They're Away: The Purpose of Death gives us a fresh outlook on death and the meaning it has in our lives. “No death,” the author maintains, “occurs without some purpose being served.”

Author Biography

Ellert L. Anderson

Ellert L. Anderson, or Sparky as he has been known all his life, grew up in the town of Bristow, Nebraska. Later, he attended Iowa State University, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. After a few brief stints elsewhere, Sparky settled down at Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles, where he worked for most of his twenty-five years as a general night superintendent. He also served as vice-president and educational chairman of Hughes Credit Union for ten years and as a president of the Hughes Management Club.

In college, Sparky was elected to membership in the Inkhorn Society, the Guard of St. Patrick, the Engineering Council, Sigma Delta Chi, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and Cardinal Key, and was the editor of The Iowa Engineer. Later he served a few years as biographical editor of the Bridge of Eta Kappa Nu. He has also served as a deacon in both the Presbyterian and Methodist Churches.

Sparky is also a past president of the Los angles alumni chapter of Eta Kappa Nu (honorary electrical engineering society) and of the Los Angles branch of the Iowa State University Alumni Association.

Long interested in the question of death, Sparky has spent the past fifty years researching the related literature and the incidents of death that have crossed his path in the intervening years with the idea of someday writing this book.