Stephanie Faul is director of public relations for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. A long-time writer and editor, she has been a frequent contributor to on-line and old-line media.
Locus is a series about words about places and how language, culture and society have created and used these words down through the ages.
Where do people go when they die? This oldest of human questions has been answered in many ways and remains the greatest mystery of human existence. Anyone who has seen a death recognizes that something has gone from the body, that the corpse is not the person it once contained. It is as though something, some individual force, has moved out and gone elsewhere, leaving a recognizable but obviously incomplete shell behind.
