Attempting to Think About Death

Preliminary thoughts on death:

How can one begin to think of death? (If one is alive, one is not dead; so then how can one articulate that which one has not encountered? Further, from what I understand, has any person come from death and uttered their experience.) What should one’s attitude be when facing death?

Death is the ultimate boundary situation: death marks the end, the negation, the abolition of existence. Where death is (as if it could be located!) there an existence has ended (Heidegger: the human is “being-towards-death”). In this way there are little deaths (the death of the amorous, the sexual climax, etc.)  and absolute death (one’s annihilation). If death is non-existence, then should death be understood as superimposed on life or life superimposed on death? Given the poles that life is caught between, birth and death, is it not that life is superimposed on death (non-existence)? Absolute death occurs to all, but further death is intertwined with existence (little death: the amorous death–the beloved is abolished by a negating act and the lover’s forgetting. Is not forgetting (sublimating to non-existence) exactly what we attempt to enact after the other’s death?)

Death is “bad” for those surrounding the dead–for those that are still in the situation of existence. Although one dies, death is nonetheless for the Other. I might be the one who dies, but my death, although of me, is not for me. Take the symbolic amorous death: the beloved is denounced as such. In this the way the beloved becomes “dead”: to the lover–that is, the Other ceases to be the beloved: the continued perception of the Other as beloved has ceased, cast into the void of un-memory, of forgetting. The beloved now “dead” to me (forgotten), only continues to exist as a painful memory for me if I conjure the beloved back as beloved. In the same way, it can be said that when I die, it is I who die, but it is the Other who experiences my death–as the lover experiences the “death” of the beloved. Experience doesn’t exist unless it is interpreting the given world–how can I experience death when it is precisely the moment when the world ceases to be given to me? (Is not this death: the eternal moment when we cease to interpret the world?)