Dialogue

This chapter brings together the four enabling frames and reviews their relative strengths in the light of points of conflict and agreement. Points of conflict include whether life continues after death, whether death is intrinsic to the structures of life, and whether my-death represents something beyond itself. Points of agreement include improvements in the ability to think and speak about my-death, improvements in quality of life, and the positive contribution of markers of finitude to my-death awareness. This chapter’s discussion also highlights how engagement with my-death can enhance a sense of vibrancy and meaning in life.

Essential Structures

This chapter provides the first example of an enabling frame and draws on Martin Heidegger’s seminal work on personal mortality in his writings on the concepts of Being, time and finitude. The discussion focuses particularly on his interpretation of personal mortality, or being-toward-death, as an integral part of what structures individual existence. As such, talk about existence after death becomes nonsensical because death is tightly bound to what it means to be alive. The discussion also introduces Heidegger’s understanding of finitude and its relationship to my-death. His concept of finitude will be developed in a different way in the next chapter.

A Constant Companion

This chapter starts by asking “If we struggle to speak and think about my-death, how is it possible to engage with it in an ongoing fashion?” It explores the advantages of switching from individualized conceptions of self-identity to relational or social conceptions. In doing so, the focus shifts from individual attributes to the importance of relationships. In applying this to death, the prospect of my-death shifts from being viewed as an aspect or an attribute of being alive to being viewed as an ongoing relationship, a constant presence, that persists from birth and throughout life. The discussion finishes by pointing out that, in the face of ongoing fear of death, for a relationship to form, some way of conceptualizing death through what is referred to as an “enabling frame” is needed before a relationship with my-death becomes achievable.

Aversion and Evasion

This chapter summarizes the literature on personal fears of death and examines the various common ways in which thinking about death is avoided. Fear of death has been a recurring theme in novels, plays, and poems, as well as in social and psychological research. Responses to this fear can vary from ongoing anxiety, to active evasion, and sometimes to adopting a sense of strategic immortality. This chapter teases out the various forms of fear associated with death, including fear of dying, fear of other-death, and fear of annihilation. It focuses particularly on a common engagement with a sense of immortality, then looks at moments when this pretense of immortality is challenged.

Conclusion

This chapter briefly summarizes the intent of the book as to seek out ways to engage on an ongoing basis with my-death and what it means for daily life. It finishes the book by thanking the four companions in the form of one final farewell conversation.

Passionate Suffusion

This chapter provides the second example of an enabling frame that focuses on a different and more intimate embrace with my-death as it manifests itself in everyday markers of finitude. Finitude has emerged as a catch-all concept referring to the many ways in which individual existence is bounded and constrained by its position in time and place, by its embodiment, and by being constrained by character and perspective. This frame shares the view of the previous frame, which approaches death as intrinsic to life, but it shifts this to a far more emotional and intuitive form of connection. It explores the different ways in everyday life that we encounter the many aspects of our finitude and how this provides the basis for staying connected with my-death.

Limits of Intelligibility

This chapter examines reasons for why my-death is so difficult to think or talk about and also explores how we find our own death such an uneasy and, at times, disturbing topic. The discussion starts by exploring the idea of my-death as total annihilation but moves on to questioning even this formulation because conceptions of annihilation still draw on concepts of continuation that provide a backdrop for what is being annihilated. In its fullest sense, once my-death is separated from understandings derived from other-death, there is very little that can be thought or talked about.

My-Death

This chapter begins by exploring the various ways that we use features of other people’s death to make sense of my-death. This includes beliefs in various forms of life after death, projecting our experience into the minds of those who are dying, and constructing a sense of living on in some form of afterlife. It then shifts to looking critically at the appropriateness of transposing other-death onto my-death and concludes that these two aspects are very different. The chapter then moves to considering other ways of looking at my-death which do not rely on other-death and focuses specifically on understandings of my-death as total annihilation.

Self-Generative Process

This chapter introduces the final and philosophically more complex enabling frame based on a shift away from looking at all experience, including experience of my-death, as representational. The three earlier enabling frames each assumed a something existing separate from death that underpins its reality, whether that be an underlying structure, a primal impulse, or a divinity. Instead, death can be seen as not requiring anything beyond itself because, through its interconnections with everything else and its performance in everyday living, it becomes sufficient in itself. Finitude again becomes the contact point for connecting with my-death on a daily basis.

Point-of-Transition

This chapter provides a third example of an enabling frame based on an intense belief in dying as a transition to some form of afterlife. An intense mystical experience can provide the catalyst for a profound realization that death is not the end of life but a transition into another form of being. Confidence in this belief reduces a person’s fear of death, and regular contact with markers of finitude further strengthens this understanding and reinforces a sense of connection to death as a gateway to the afterlife. This, then, leads on to a discussion of philosophical positions, both pro and anti, regarding life after death and its relationship to what is happening when a person has a near-death experience.