This weekend, 300 experts will meet at a Toronto hotel to discuss the brighter side of death. Determined to put a positive spin on humanity's most fearsome process, the 5th Biennial International Meaning Conference is calling the event "Living well and dying well: New frontiers of positive psychology, therapy and physical care."

Offering various upbeat ways to prepare for the inevitability of one's demise -- and the demise of others -- the three-day summit features such quality-of-death issues as "grieving as a meaning-making process," rediscovering the power of awe and comparing the bereavement process of various cultures. More whimsically, there is also a workshop called "Clearing the vessel through which healing flows: Learn to say 'WHEE!' when dealing with death and bereavement," in which participants learn to embrace the experience of a loved one who has paid them a surprise, postmortem visit.

"Death is me and death is you, and we need to come to terms with the inevitable," said Paul Wong, conference convener and a psychology professor at Tyndale University College and Seminary. "With an ageing population, the dead and the dying should be a top issue, but most Canadians are in denial, so it is still taboo."

That 71-year-old Dr. Wong has been suffering from an aggressive form of prostate cancer since November gives the event even more poignancy. "My doctor-friend told me that I'll never have the same level of energy. I'm a pathetic sight, but I'm still limping along," he said. "Putting together this conference has been a trying experience, but it's also been extremely gratifying."

Even though the majority of Canadians and Americans believe in the afterlife, the topic of what precedes it is a perennial seat-squirmer. At the same time, the field of death studies has advanced a long way since 1969 when controversial psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross outlined five stages of grief in her landmark book On Death and Dying. Rather than treating death and grief as a passive event, proponents of what is called "positive psychology" look at them as an opportunity.

Popularized by renowned psychologist Martin Seligman, the movement explores what makes a life worth living.

"Most people are afraid of dying, but they are more afraid of dying without having lived," Dr. Wong said.

As a pioneer of death studies in the early 1980s, he encountered opposition to his early findings, which disclosed that many of the elderly he interviewed were prepared to die and actually welcomed it.

"One student who worked with me on the thesis had her proposal rejected by a very influential member of the university," he recalled. "Eventually our research on death acceptance turned out to be a ground-breaking work. We're experiencing the same resistance now."

Experts nowadays have largely displaced Dr. Kubler-Ross's five-stages paradigm. The process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance is by no means universal, they say. Everyone has a different way of confronting death or bereavement. Some actively search out new meaning, others endure with stiff-upper-lip passivity.

"Grieving is more than just a series of lock-step emotions," said Dr. Robert Neimeyer, a psychotherapist at Tennessee's University of Memphis. Psychologists in his field, he said, are more interested in active coping methods such as how mourners seek community support, regulate their emotions and shift attention from the pain to living out everyday lives.

The monolithic idea that one has to let go of one's grief and move on is not productive, he explained, adding that professionals are trying to get their patients to appreciate grief as a "tragic opportunity" that enables them to rewrite the narratives of their lives.

"We tend to look at grief in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but we can also look at it in terms of post-traumatic personal growth," said Dr. Neimeyer, who is also the editor of the journal Death Studies.

This glass-half-full view of grief also extends to the value of the Internet, which experts say has evolved into a powerful therapeutic tool, especially where extraordinary death -- or what in technical terms is called "non-normative loss," is concerned.

When parents have lost a child or someone falls victim to violence, people around the mourners tend to withdraw, experts observe.

An online community of participants who have a shared experience, on the other hand, can commiserate in a more empathetic environment where survivors tell stories about their loved ones with less self-censoring.

"They tell stories of loss that they wouldn't necessarily tell others," Dr. Neimeyer said. "Otherwise they recite a carefully edited story to protect their listeners."

A pivotal German study found that virtual grief therapy can be as effective as the face to face kind. "It may just be what the doctor ordered," he added.