In the first 38 pages of Glass Bones, I laid out the central problem: human beings are animals who became conscious enough to understand that we will die. I examined how the awareness of death organizes much of human thought, behavior, culture, and creativity, rather than being a mere occasional fear.
Chapter 3 follows that question backward. If death awareness creates the problem, when did the problem begin? The Beginning of Denial looks at the emergence of human self-awareness and asks what happened when our ancestors became capable of imagining themselves across time and, eventually, imagining their absence from it.
This is where denial begins to take shape, not necessarily as a conscious refusal to think about death, but as a psychological adaptation to knowing something no animal seems equipped to live with easily.