Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Puritan diarists in Massachusetts frequently included responses to death in their writings. These responses took three general forms: authors openly expressed their human feelings of loss; they interpreted specific deaths as one means God used to communicate with his people; and they viewed these divine messages as inducements to strive for improvement in their own lives. The ideal end result was the realization that one had to return to daily life in order to fulfill this need for reform. The emphasis was thus switched from the recently deceased to the living.
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