My new essay is now available via the Morbid Anatomy Online Journal. The essay explores how and why the personification of Death has been re-imagined in recent decades, and how that reflects deep cultural shifts regarding the concept of mortality:
At a cultural moment when the traditional imagery of the Grim Reaper had largely given up the ghost, the evocative, trippy, yin/yang juxtaposition of the skull and the flower spoke of change to young people weary of the established order and hungry for transformation. Generational rebellion against the “American Way” propaganda of the 1950s mainstream (and at least thirty years of varied economic depression, repression of civil rights and war) had forced open a floodgate.