  Bookmark and Share  It was 1971, and death was changing shape.
For centuries it had been feared, reviled, or simply swept under
the rug. But now it was being celebrated.  Lieutenant William
Calley was on trial for murdering 102 Vietnamese civilians in
cold blood at My Lai, and the fan letters were pouring in—10,000
of them by February. Legislators from Jimmy Carter to George
Wallace condemned Calley’s conviction, and more than 200,000
copies of “The Battle Hymn of William Calley” were sold. At the
same time, Charles Manson’s trial was prompting adoring
testimony from his lovers and acolytes; “Charlie was a father
who knew that it is good to make love, and makes love with love,
but not with evil and guilt,” gushed Squeaky Fromme.  In a study
of near-death experiences in Omega magazine, Dr. Russell Noyes
Jr. reported that they were a lot like the mystical states of
consciousness brought on by LSD and recommended that scientists
should study people on drugs if they wanted to know more about
what it was like to