Conceptualizing death

The hardest thing to conceive about death is the fact that the world goes one afterward. Whether it’s your own death or the death of someone close, death is the end of your personal existential world, or at least a part of it. The sudden end of what it was, forever.

Because our world is our existential experience, it’s hard for us to understand how things can go on afterward. After us, after them, after all that we are or they were has ended and that story is finished. That’s a fact that’s almost impossible to countenance. And yet it happens all the time.

In fact it has to. That time, that place, that moment, that life, that world, must pass to make way for the future. For the new present. The new eternal moment. And only the raw, impossible fact of death makes that movement possible. What would we do if the personal worlds of the people of the past returned or simply stuck around, insisting themselves and their world in perpetuity on the present?

Is death a tragedy? It’s strange word to use. It is so much a part of the nature of the world. The price of every life is a proliferation of death. There is far more of it in the world than there is of life. Death is in many ways the natural default, and life is the rare and temporary abberation. And yet it still strikes us as unnatural, as terrible in even its smallest presence. We tolerate it only because we cannot avoid it forever.

For those who die, death is no great tragedy. Their personal world collapses. There is nowhere left for the tragedy to exist. That world is simply gone, leaving no remnant behind. The body maintains no portion of that existential world.

For those who are left behind, a part of their psychological world is taken. But the past cannot be stolen or lost, it is what is always has been and will be. And the future never existed, so it suffered no loss. When it cones, it is what turns out to have always been and becomes fixed forever as the past as it passes into it. So where then does the loss take place? Only in the present, I suppose, where all things that take place in the eternally dawning moment of our personal existence reside.