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5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

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It is never easy to contemplate the end-of-life, whether its own our experience or that of a loved one.

This has made a recent swath of beautiful essays a surprise. In different publications over the past few weeks,  I've stumbled upon writers who were  contemplating final days. These are, no doubt, hard stories to read. I had to take breaks as I read about Paul Kalanithi's experience facing metastatic lung cancer while parenting a toddler, and was devastated as I followed Liz Lopatto's contemplations on how to give her ailing cat the best death possible. But I also learned so much from reading these essays, too, about what it means to have a good death versus a difficult end from those forced to grapple with the issue. These are four stories that have stood out to me recently, alongside one essay from a few years ago that sticks with me today.

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

As recently as last month, popular author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was in great health, even swimming a mile every day. Then, everything changed: the 81-year-old was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. In a beautiful op-ed , published in late February in the New York Times, he describes his state of mind and how he'll face his final moments. What I liked about this essay is how Sacks describes how his world view shifts as he sees his time on earth getting shorter, and how he thinks about the value of his time.

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

Kalanthi began noticing symptoms — "weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough" — during his sixth year of residency as a neurologist at Stanford. A CT scan revealed metastatic lung cancer. Kalanthi writes about his daughter, Cady and how he "probably won't live long enough for her to have a memory of me." Much of his essay focuses on an interesting discussion of time, how it's become a double-edged sword. Each day, he sees his daughter grow older, a joy. But every day is also one that brings him closer to his likely death from cancer.

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Becklund's essay was published posthumonously after her death on February 8 of this year. One of the unique issues she grapples with is how to discuss her terminal diagnosis with others and the challenge of not becoming defined by a disease. "Who would ever sign another book contract with a dying woman?" she writes. "Or remember Laurie Becklund, valedictorian, Fulbright scholar, former Times staff writer who exposed the Salvadoran death squads and helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots? More important, and more honest, who would ever again look at me just as Laurie?"

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Dorothy Parker was Lopatto's cat, a stray adopted from a local vet. And Dorothy Parker, known mostly as Dottie, died peacefully when she passed away earlier this month. Lopatto's essay is, in part, about what she learned about end-of-life care for humans from her cat. But perhaps more than that, it's also about the limitations of how much her experience caring for a pet can transfer to caring for another person.

Yes, Lopatto's essay is about a cat rather than a human being. No, it does not make it any easier to read. She describes in searing detail about the experience of caring for another being at the end of life. "Dottie used to weigh almost 20 pounds; she now weighs six," Lopatto writes. "My vet is right about Dottie being close to death, that it’s probably a matter of weeks rather than months."

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

"Letting Go" is a beautiful, difficult true story of death. You know from the very first sentence — "Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die" — that it is going to be tragic. This story has long been one of my favorite pieces of health care journalism because it grapples so starkly with the difficult realities of end-of-life care.

In the story, Monopoli is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a surprise for a non-smoking young woman. It's a devastating death sentence: doctors know that lung cancer that advanced is terminal. Gawande knew this too — Monpoli was his patient. But actually discussing this fact with a young patient with a newborn baby seemed impossible.

"Having any sort of discussion where you begin to say, 'look you probably only have a few months to live. How do we make the best of that time without giving up on the options that you have?' That was a conversation I wasn't ready to have," Gawande recounts of the case in a new Frontline documentary .

What's tragic about Monopoli's case was, of course, her death at an early age, in her 30s. But the tragedy that Gawande hones in on — the type of tragedy we talk about much less — is how terribly Monopoli's last days played out.

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• Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections: 

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it. 

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them. 

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

Categories:

• Coping With Grief

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Contemplating Mortality: Powerful Essays on Death and Inspiring Perspectives

The prospect of death may be unsettling, but it also holds a deep fascination for many of us. If you're curious to explore the many facets of mortality, from the scientific to the spiritual, our article is the perfect place to start. With expert guidance and a wealth of inspiration, we'll help you write an essay that engages and enlightens readers on one of life's most enduring mysteries!

Death is a universal human experience that we all must face at some point in our lives. While it can be difficult to contemplate mortality, reflecting on death and loss can offer inspiring perspectives on the nature of life and the importance of living in the present moment. In this collection of powerful essays about death, we explore profound writings that delve into the human experience of coping with death, grief, acceptance, and philosophical reflections on mortality.

Through these essays, readers can gain insight into different perspectives on death and how we can cope with it. From personal accounts of loss to philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, these essays offer a diverse range of perspectives that will inspire and challenge readers to contemplate their mortality.

The Inevitable: Coping with Mortality and Grief

Mortality is a reality that we all have to face, and it is something that we cannot avoid. While we may all wish to live forever, the truth is that we will all eventually pass away. In this article, we will explore different aspects of coping with mortality and grief, including understanding the grieving process, dealing with the fear of death, finding meaning in life, and seeking support.

Understanding the Grieving Process

Grief is a natural and normal response to loss. It is a process that we all go through when we lose someone or something important to us. The grieving process can be different for each person and can take different amounts of time. Some common stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It is important to remember that there is no right or wrong way to grieve and that it is a personal process.

Denial is often the first stage of grief. It is a natural response to shock and disbelief. During this stage, we may refuse to believe that our loved one has passed away or that we are facing our mortality.

Anger is a common stage of grief. It can manifest as feelings of frustration, resentment, and even rage. It is important to allow yourself to feel angry and to express your emotions healthily.

Bargaining is often the stage of grief where we try to make deals with a higher power or the universe in an attempt to avoid our grief or loss. We may make promises or ask for help in exchange for something else.

Depression is a natural response to loss. It is important to allow yourself to feel sad and to seek support from others.

Acceptance is often the final stage of grief. It is when we come to terms with our loss and begin to move forward with our lives.

Dealing with the Fear of Death

The fear of death is a natural response to the realization of our mortality. It is important to acknowledge and accept our fear of death but also to not let it control our lives. Here are some ways to deal with the fear of death:

Accepting Mortality

Accepting our mortality is an important step in dealing with the fear of death. We must understand that death is a natural part of life and that it is something that we cannot avoid.

Finding Meaning in Life

Finding meaning in life can help us cope with the fear of death. It is important to pursue activities and goals that are meaningful and fulfilling to us.

Seeking Support

Seeking support from friends, family, or a therapist can help us cope with the fear of death. Talking about our fears and feelings can help us process them and move forward.

Finding meaning in life is important in coping with mortality and grief. It can help us find purpose and fulfillment, even in difficult times. Here are some ways to find meaning in life:

Pursuing Passions

Pursuing our passions and interests can help us find meaning and purpose in life. It is important to do things that we enjoy and that give us a sense of accomplishment.

Helping Others

Helping others can give us a sense of purpose and fulfillment. It can also help us feel connected to others and make a positive impact on the world.

Making Connections

Making connections with others is important in finding meaning in life. It is important to build relationships and connections with people who share our values and interests.

Seeking support is crucial when coping with mortality and grief. Here are some ways to seek support:

Talking to Friends and Family

Talking to friends and family members can provide us with a sense of comfort and support. It is important to express our feelings and emotions to those we trust.

Joining a Support Group

Joining a support group can help us connect with others who are going through similar experiences. It can provide us with a safe space to share our feelings and find support.

Seeking Professional Help

Seeking help from a therapist or counselor can help cope with grief and mortality. A mental health professional can provide us with the tools and support we need to process our emotions and move forward.

Coping with mortality and grief is a natural part of life. It is important to understand that grief is a personal process that may take time to work through. Finding meaning in life, dealing with the fear of death, and seeking support are all important ways to cope with mortality and grief. Remember to take care of yourself, allow yourself to feel your emotions, and seek support when needed.

The Ethics of Death: A Philosophical Exploration

Death is an inevitable part of life, and it is something that we will all experience at some point. It is a topic that has fascinated philosophers for centuries, and it continues to be debated to this day. In this article, we will explore the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, considering questions such as what it means to die, the morality of assisted suicide, and the meaning of life in the face of death.

Death is a topic that elicits a wide range of emotions, from fear and sadness to acceptance and peace. Philosophers have long been interested in exploring the ethical implications of death, and in this article, we will delve into some of the most pressing questions in this field.

What does it mean to die?

The concept of death is a complex one, and there are many different ways to approach it from a philosophical perspective. One question that arises is what it means to die. Is death simply the cessation of bodily functions, or is there something more to it than that? Many philosophers argue that death represents the end of consciousness and the self, which raises questions about the nature of the soul and the afterlife.

The morality of assisted suicide

Assisted suicide is a controversial topic, and it raises several ethical concerns. On the one hand, some argue that individuals have the right to end their own lives if they are suffering from a terminal illness or unbearable pain. On the other hand, others argue that assisting someone in taking their own life is morally wrong and violates the sanctity of life. We will explore these arguments and consider the ethical implications of assisted suicide.

The meaning of life in the face of death

The inevitability of death raises important questions about the meaning of life. If our time on earth is finite, what is the purpose of our existence? Is there a higher meaning to life, or is it simply a product of biological processes? Many philosophers have grappled with these questions, and we will explore some of the most influential theories in this field.

The role of death in shaping our lives

While death is often seen as a negative force, it can also have a positive impact on our lives. The knowledge that our time on earth is limited can motivate us to live life to the fullest and to prioritize the things that truly matter. We will explore the role of death in shaping our values, goals, and priorities, and consider how we can use this knowledge to live more fulfilling lives.

The ethics of mourning

The process of mourning is an important part of the human experience, and it raises several ethical questions. How should we respond to the death of others, and what is our ethical responsibility to those who are grieving? We will explore these questions and consider how we can support those who are mourning while also respecting their autonomy and individual experiences.

The ethics of immortality

The idea of immortality has long been a fascination for humanity, but it raises important ethical questions. If we were able to live forever, what would be the implications for our sense of self, our relationships with others, and our moral responsibilities? We will explore the ethical implications of immortality and consider how it might challenge our understanding of what it means to be human.

The ethics of death in different cultural contexts

Death is a universal human experience, but how it is understood and experienced varies across different cultures. We will explore how different cultures approach death, mourning, and the afterlife, and consider the ethical implications of these differences.

Death is a complex and multifaceted topic, and it raises important questions about the nature of life, morality, and human experience. By exploring the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, we can gain a deeper understanding of these questions and how they shape our lives.

The Ripple Effect of Loss: How Death Impacts Relationships

Losing a loved one is one of the most challenging experiences one can go through in life. It is a universal experience that touches people of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds. The grief that follows the death of someone close can be overwhelming and can take a significant toll on an individual's mental and physical health. However, it is not only the individual who experiences the grief but also the people around them. In this article, we will discuss the ripple effect of loss and how death impacts relationships.

Understanding Grief and Loss

Grief is the natural response to loss, and it can manifest in many different ways. The process of grieving is unique to each individual and can be affected by many factors, such as culture, religion, and personal beliefs. Grief can be intense and can impact all areas of life, including relationships, work, and physical health.

The Impact of Loss on Relationships

Death can impact relationships in many ways, and the effects can be long-lasting. Below are some of how loss can affect relationships:

1. Changes in Roles and Responsibilities

When someone dies, the roles and responsibilities within a family or social circle can shift dramatically. For example, a spouse who has lost their partner may have to take on responsibilities they never had before, such as managing finances or taking care of children. This can be a difficult adjustment, and it can put a strain on the relationship.

2. Changes in Communication

Grief can make it challenging to communicate with others effectively. Some people may withdraw and isolate themselves, while others may become angry and lash out. It is essential to understand that everyone grieves differently, and there is no right or wrong way to do it. However, these changes in communication can impact relationships, and it may take time to adjust to new ways of interacting with others.

3. Changes in Emotional Connection

When someone dies, the emotional connection between individuals can change. For example, a parent who has lost a child may find it challenging to connect with other parents who still have their children. This can lead to feelings of isolation and disconnection, and it can strain relationships.

4. Changes in Social Support

Social support is critical when dealing with grief and loss. However, it is not uncommon for people to feel unsupported during this time. Friends and family may not know what to say or do, or they may simply be too overwhelmed with their grief to offer support. This lack of social support can impact relationships and make it challenging to cope with grief.

Coping with Loss and Its Impact on Relationships

Coping with grief and loss is a long and difficult process, but it is possible to find ways to manage the impact on relationships. Below are some strategies that can help:

1. Communication

Effective communication is essential when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to talk about how you feel and what you need from others. This can help to reduce misunderstandings and make it easier to navigate changes in relationships.

2. Seek Support

It is important to seek support from friends, family, or a professional if you are struggling to cope with grief and loss. Having someone to talk to can help to alleviate feelings of isolation and provide a safe space to process emotions.

3. Self-Care

Self-care is critical when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to take care of your physical and emotional well-being. This can include things like exercise, eating well, and engaging in activities that you enjoy.

4. Allow for Flexibility

It is essential to allow for flexibility in relationships when dealing with grief and loss. People may not be able to provide the same level of support they once did or may need more support than they did before. Being open to changes in roles and responsibilities can help to reduce strain on relationships.

5. Find Meaning

Finding meaning in the loss can be a powerful way to cope with grief and loss. This can involve creating a memorial, participating in a support group, or volunteering for a cause that is meaningful to you.

The impact of loss is not limited to the individual who experiences it but extends to those around them as well. Relationships can be greatly impacted by the death of a loved one, and it is important to be aware of the changes that may occur. Coping with loss and its impact on relationships involves effective communication, seeking support, self-care, flexibility, and finding meaning.

What Lies Beyond Reflections on the Mystery of Death

Death is an inevitable part of life, and yet it remains one of the greatest mysteries that we face as humans. What happens when we die? Is there an afterlife? These are questions that have puzzled us for centuries, and they continue to do so today. In this article, we will explore the various perspectives on death and what lies beyond.

Understanding Death

Before we can delve into what lies beyond, we must first understand what death is. Death is defined as the permanent cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. This can occur as a result of illness, injury, or simply old age. Death is a natural process that occurs to all living things, but it is also a process that is often accompanied by fear and uncertainty.

The Physical Process of Death

When a person dies, their body undergoes several physical changes. The heart stops beating, and the body begins to cool and stiffen. This is known as rigor mortis, and it typically sets in within 2-6 hours after death. The body also begins to break down, and this can lead to a release of gases that cause bloating and discoloration.

The Psychological Experience of Death

In addition to the physical changes that occur during and after death, there is also a psychological experience that accompanies it. Many people report feeling a sense of detachment from their physical body, as well as a sense of peace and calm. Others report seeing bright lights or visions of loved ones who have already passed on.

Perspectives on What Lies Beyond

There are many different perspectives on what lies beyond death. Some people believe in an afterlife, while others believe in reincarnation or simply that death is the end of consciousness. Let's explore some of these perspectives in more detail.

One of the most common beliefs about what lies beyond death is the idea of an afterlife. This can take many forms, depending on one's religious or spiritual beliefs. For example, many Christians believe in heaven and hell, where people go after they die depending on their actions during life. Muslims believe in paradise and hellfire, while Hindus believe in reincarnation.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the belief that after we die, our consciousness is reborn into a new body. This can be based on karma, meaning that the quality of one's past actions will determine the quality of their next life. Some people believe that we can choose the circumstances of our next life based on our desires and attachments in this life.

End of Consciousness

The idea that death is simply the end of consciousness is a common belief among atheists and materialists. This view holds that the brain is responsible for creating consciousness, and when the brain dies, consciousness ceases to exist. While this view may be comforting to some, others find it unsettling.

Death is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that continues to fascinate us. While we may never fully understand what lies beyond death, it's important to remember that everyone has their own beliefs and perspectives on the matter. Whether you believe in an afterlife, reincarnation, or simply the end of consciousness, it's important to find ways to cope with the loss of a loved one and to find peace with your mortality.

Final Words

In conclusion, these powerful essays on death offer inspiring perspectives and deep insights into the human experience of coping with mortality, grief, and loss. From personal accounts to philosophical reflections, these essays provide a diverse range of perspectives that encourage readers to contemplate their mortality and the meaning of life.

By reading and reflecting on these essays, readers can gain a better understanding of how death shapes our lives and relationships, and how we can learn to accept and cope with this inevitable part of the human experience.

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Essays About Death: Top 5 Examples and 9 Essay Prompts

Death includes mixed emotions and endless possibilities. If you are writing essays about death, see our examples and prompts in this article.

Over 50 million people die yearly from different causes worldwide. It’s a fact we must face when the time comes. Although the subject has plenty of dire connotations, many are still fascinated by death, enough so that literary pieces about it never cease. Every author has a reason why they want to talk about death. Most use it to put their grievances on paper to help them heal from losing a loved one. Some find writing and reading about death moving, transformative, or cathartic.

To help you write a compelling essay about death, we prepared five examples to spark your imagination:

1. Essay on Death Penalty by Aliva Manjari

2. coping with death essay by writer cameron, 3. long essay on death by prasanna, 4. because i could not stop for death argumentative essay by writer annie, 5. an unforgettable experience in my life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. life after death, 2. death rituals and ceremonies, 3. smoking: just for fun or a shortcut to the grave, 4. the end is near, 5. how do people grieve, 6. mental disorders and death, 7. are you afraid of death, 8. death and incurable diseases, 9. if i can pick how i die.

“The death penalty is no doubt unconstitutional if imposed arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably, discriminatorily, freakishly or wantonly, but if it is administered rationally, objectively and judiciously, it will enhance people’s confidence in criminal justice system.”

Manjari’s essay considers the death penalty as against the modern process of treating lawbreakers, where offenders have the chance to reform or defend themselves. Although the author is against the death penalty, she explains it’s not the right time to abolish it. Doing so will jeopardize social security. The essay also incorporates other relevant information, such as the countries that still have the death penalty and how they are gradually revising and looking for alternatives.

You might also be interested in our list of the best war books .

“How a person copes with grief is affected by the person’s cultural and religious background, coping skills, mental history, support systems, and the person’s social and financial status.”

Cameron defines coping and grief through sharing his personal experience. He remembers how their family and close friends went through various stages of coping when his Aunt Ann died during heart surgery. Later in his story, he mentions Ann’s last note, which she wrote before her surgery, in case something terrible happens. This note brought their family together again through shared tears and laughter. You can also check out these articles about cancer .

“Luckily or tragically, we are completely sentenced to death. But there is an interesting thing; we don’t have the knowledge of how the inevitable will strike to have a conversation.”

Prasanna states the obvious – all people die, but no one knows when. She also discusses the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Research also shows that when people die, the brain either shows a flashback of life or sees a ray of light.

Even if someone can predict the day of their death, it won’t change how the people who love them will react. Some will cry or be numb, but in the end, everyone will have to accept the inevitable. The essay ends with the philosophical belief that the soul never dies and is reborn in a new identity and body. You can also check out these elegy examples .

“People have busy lives, and don’t think of their own death, however, the speaker admits that she was willing to put aside her distractions and go with death. She seemed to find it pretty charming.”

The author focuses on how Emily Dickinson ’s “ Because I Could Not Stop for Death ” describes death. In the poem, the author portrays death as a gentle, handsome, and neat man who picks up a woman with a carriage to take her to the grave. The essay expounds on how Dickinson uses personification and imagery to illustrate death.

“The death of a loved one is one of the hardest things an individual can bring themselves to talk about; however, I will never forget that day in the chapter of my life, as while one story continued another’s ended.”

The essay delve’s into the author’s recollection of their grandmother’s passing. They recount the things engrained in their mind from that day –  their sister’s loud cries, the pounding and sinking of their heart, and the first time they saw their father cry. 

Looking for more? Check out these essays about losing a loved one .

9 Easy Writing Prompts on Essays About Death

Are you still struggling to choose a topic for your essay? Here are prompts you can use for your paper:

Your imagination is the limit when you pick this prompt for your essay. Because no one can confirm what happens to people after death, you can create an essay describing what kind of world exists after death. For instance, you can imagine yourself as a ghost that lingers on the Earth for a bit. Then, you can go to whichever place you desire and visit anyone you wish to say proper goodbyes to first before crossing to the afterlife.

Every country, religion, and culture has ways of honoring the dead. Choose a tribe, religion, or place, and discuss their death rituals and traditions regarding wakes and funerals. Include the reasons behind these activities. Conclude your essay with an opinion on these rituals and ceremonies but don’t forget to be respectful of everyone’s beliefs. 

Smoking is still one of the most prevalent bad habits since tobacco’s creation in 1531 . Discuss your thoughts on individuals who believe there’s nothing wrong with this habit and inadvertently pass secondhand smoke to others. Include how to avoid chain-smokers and if we should let people kill themselves through excessive smoking. Add statistics and research to support your claims.

Collate people’s comments when they find out their death is near. Do this through interviews, and let your respondents list down what they’ll do first after hearing the simulated news. Then, add their reactions to your essay.

There is no proper way of grieving. People grieve in their way. Briefly discuss death and grieving at the start of your essay. Then, narrate a personal experience you’ve had with grieving to make your essay more relatable. Or you can compare how different people grieve. To give you an idea, you can mention that your father’s way of grieving is drowning himself in work while your mom openly cries and talk about her memories of the loved one who just passed away. 

Explain how people suffering from mental illnesses view death. Then, measure it against how ordinary people see the end. Include research showing death rates caused by mental illnesses to prove your point. To make organizing information about the topic more manageable, you can also focus on one mental illness and relate it to death.

Check out our guide on  how to write essays about depression .

Sometimes, seriously ill people say they are no longer afraid of death. For others, losing a loved one is even more terrifying than death itself. Share what you think of death and include factors that affected your perception of it.

People with incurable diseases are often ready to face death. For this prompt, write about individuals who faced their terminal illnesses head-on and didn’t let it define how they lived their lives. You can also review literary pieces that show these brave souls’ struggle and triumph. A great series to watch is “ My Last Days .”

You might also be interested in these epitaph examples .

No one knows how they’ll leave this world, but if you have the chance to choose how you part with your loved ones, what will it be? Probe into this imagined situation. For example, you can write: “I want to die at an old age, surrounded by family and friends who love me. I hope it’ll be a peaceful death after I’ve done everything I wanted in life.”

To make your essay more intriguing, put unexpected events in it. Check out these plot twist ideas .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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How death shapes life

As global COVID toll hits 5 million, Harvard philosopher ponders the intimate, universal experience of knowing the end will come but not knowing when

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Does the understanding that our final breath could come tomorrow affect the way we choose to live? And how do we make sense of a life cut short by a random accident, or a collective existence in which the loss of 5 million lives to a pandemic often seems eclipsed by other headlines? For answers, the Gazette turned to Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Susanna Siegel

GAZETTE: How do we get through the day with death all around us?

SIEGEL: This question arises because we can be made to feel uneasy, distracted, or derailed by death in any form: mass death, or the prospect of our own; deaths of people unknown to us that we only hear or read about; or deaths of people who tear the fabric of our lives when they go. Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss. This fact has profound consequences for every facet of life: politics and governance, interpersonal relationships, and all forms of human consciousness.

When things go well, death stays in the background, and from there, covertly, it shapes our awareness of everything else. Even when we get through the day with ease, the prospect of death is still in some way all around us.

GAZETTE:   Can philosophy help illuminate how death impacts consciousness?

SIEGEL: The philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger each discuss death, in their own ways, as a horizon that implicitly shapes our consciousness. It’s what gives future times the pressure they exert on us. A horizon is the kind of thing that is normally in the background — something that limits, partly defines, and sets the stage for what you focus on. These two philosophers help us see the ways that death occupies the background of consciousness — and that the background is where it belongs.

“Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss,” says Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

These philosophical insights are vivid in Rainer Marie Rilke’s short and stunning poem “Der Tod” (“Death”). As Burton Pike translates it from German, the poem begins: “There stands death, a bluish concoction/in a cup without a saucer.” This opening gets me every time. Death is standing. It’s standing in the way liquid stands still in a container. Sometimes cooking instructions tell you to boil a mixture and then let it stand, while you complete another part of the recipe. That’s the way death is in the poem: standing, waiting for you to get farther along with whatever you are doing. It will be there while you’re working, it will be there when you’re done, and in some way, it is a background part of those other tasks.

A few lines later, it’s suggested in the poem that someone long ago, “at a distant breakfast,” saw a dusty, cracked cup — that cup with the bluish concoction standing in it — and this person read the word “hope” written in faded letters on the side of mug. Hope is a future-directed feeling, and in the poem, the word is written on a surface that contains death underneath. As it stands, death shapes the horizon of life.

GAZETTE: What are the ethical consequences of these philosophical views?

SIEGEL: We’re familiar with the ways that making the prospect of death salient can unnerve, paralyze, or derail a person. An extreme example is shown by people with Cotard syndrome , who report feeling that they have already died. It is considered a “monothematic” delusion, because this odd reaction is circumscribed by the sufferers’ other beliefs. They freely acknowledge how strange it is to be both dead and yet still there to report on it. They are typically deeply depressed, burdened with a feeling that all possibilities of action have simply been shut down, closed off, made unavailable. Robbed of a feeling of futurity, seemingly without affordances for action, it feels natural to people in this state to describe it as the state of being already dead.

Cotard syndrome is an extreme case that illustrates how bringing death into the foreground of consciousness can feel utterly disempowering. This observation has political consequences, which are evident in a culture that treats any kind of lethal violence as something we have to expect and plan for. A glaring example would be gun violence, with its lockdown drills for children, its steady stream of the same types of events, over and over — as if these deaths could only be met with a shrug and a sigh, because they are simply part of the cost of other people exercising their freedom.

It isn’t just depressing to bring death into the foreground of consciousness by creating an atmosphere of violence — it’s also dangerous. Any political arrangement that lets masses of people die thematizes death, by making lethal violence perceptible, frequent, salient, talked-about, and tolerated. Raising death to salience in this way can create and then leverage feelings of existential precarity, which in turn emotionally equip people on a mass, nationwide scale to tolerate violence as a tool to gain political power. It’s now a regular occurrence to ram into protestors with vehicles, intimidate voters and poll workers, and prepare to attack government buildings and the people inside. This atmosphere disparages life, and then promises violence as defense against such cheapening, and a means of control.

GAZETTE: When we read about an accidental death in the newspaper, it can be truly unnerving, even though the victim is a stranger. And we’ve been hearing about a steady stream of deaths from COVID-19 for almost two years, to the point where the death count is just part of the daily news. Why is the process of thinking about these losses important?

SIEGEL: It might not seem directly related to politics, but when you react to a life cut short by thinking, “If this terrible thing could happen to them, then it could happen to me,” that reaction is a basic form of civic regard. It’s fragile, and highly sensitive to how deaths are reported and rendered in public. The passing moment of concern may seem insignificant, but it gets supplanted by something much worse when deaths are rendered in ways likely to prompt such questions as “What did they do to get in trouble?” or such suspicions as “They probably had it coming,” or such callous resignations as “They were going to die anyway.” We have seen some of those reactions during the pandemic. They are refusals to recognize the terribleness of death.

Deaths can seem even more haunting when they’re not recognized as a real loss, which is why it’s so important how deaths are depicted by governments and in mass communication. The genre of the obituary is there to present deaths as a loss to the public. The movement for Black lives brought into focus for everyone what many people knew and felt all along, which was that when deaths are not rendered as losses to the public, then they are depicted in a way that erodes civic regard.

When anyone dies from COVID, our political representatives should acknowledge it in a way that does justice to the gravity of that death. Recognizing COVID deaths as a public emergency belongs to the kind of governance that aims to keep the blue concoction where it belongs.

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student opinion

How Do You View Death?

Does thinking about your own mortality make you appreciate life? Or does the thought fill you with dread?

By Nicole Daniels

Note to Teachers: We don’t often take on the subject of death, but with the world experiencing a devastating pandemic, we thought this article might help students think about their own understanding of mortality.

This past year has been filled with death: More than 300,000 people in the United States and 1.6 million worldwide have died from the coronavirus.

Has the pandemic changed your understanding of death and dying? Have you had to grieve the death of a loved one? Has it made you consider your own mortality more? Has it made you appreciate the impermanence of life? Or have the staggering numbers made you feel numb?

In “ What Is Death? ,” Dr. BJ Miller writes about how the coronavirus pandemic has transformed our understanding of mortality and offers several frameworks for thinking about death:

This year has awakened us to the fact that we die. We’ve always known it to be true in a technical sense, but a pandemic demands that we internalize this understanding. It’s one thing to acknowledge the deaths of others, and another to accept our own. It’s not just emotionally taxing; it is difficult even to conceive. To do this means to imagine it, reckon with it and, most important, personalize it. Your life. Your death. Covid-19’s daily death and hospitalization tallies read like ticker tape or the weather report. This week, the death toll passed 300,000 in the United States. Worldwide, it’s more than 1.6 million. The cumulative effect is shock fatigue or numbness, but instead of turning away, we need to fold death into our lives. We really have only two choices: to share life with death or to be robbed by death. Fight, flight or freeze. This is how we animals are wired to respond to anything that threatens our existence. We haven’t evolved — morally or socially — to deal with a health care system with technological powers that verge on godly. Dying is no longer so intuitive as it once was, nor is death necessarily the great equalizer. Modern medicine can subvert nature’s course in many ways, at least for a while. But you have to have access to health care for health care to work. And eventually, whether because of this virus or something else, whether you’re young or old, rich or poor, death still comes. What is death? I’ve thought a lot about the question, though it took me many years of practicing medicine even to realize that I needed to ask it. Like almost anyone, I figured death was a simple fact, a singular event. A noun. Obnoxious, but clearer in its borders than just about anything else. The End. In fact, no matter how many times I’ve sidled up to it, or how many words I’ve tried on, I still can’t say what it is. If we strip away the poetry and appliqué our culture uses to try to make sense of death — all the sanctity and style we impose on the wild, holy trip of a life that begins, rises and falls apart — we are left with a husk of a body. No pulse, no brain waves, no inspiration, no explanation. Death is defined by what it lacks.

The essay continues:

Beyond fear and isolation, maybe this is what the pandemic holds for us: the understanding that living in the face of death can set off a cascade of realization and appreciation. Death is the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks. Reveling in love is one sure way to see through and beyond yourself to the wider world, where immortality lives. A pretty brilliant system, really, showing you who you are (limited) and all that you’re a part of (vast). As a connecting force, love makes a person much more resistant to obliteration. You might have to loosen your need to know what lies ahead. Rather than spend so much energy keeping pain at bay, you might want to suspend your judgment and let your body do what a body does. If the past, present and future come together, as we sense they must, then death is a process of becoming. So, once more, what is death? If you’re reading this, you still have time to respond. Since there’s no known right answer, you can’t get it wrong. You can even make your life the answer to the question.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

How often do you think about the fact that you will die one day — that we all will? Does contemplating your own mortality make life more vibrant for you? Or does it fill you with dread?

How do you view death? Do any of the perspectives shared by Dr. Miller resonate with you? Do you see death as a medical condition? An anatomical process? A religious or spiritual experience? Or something else?

Dr. Miller asks: “What is death to you ? When do you know you’re done? What are you living for in the meantime?” How would you answer these questions and why?

Have you had any experience with death — the death of a loved one, a community member or someone you looked up to? How did that experience shape your understanding of death? How did it affect the way you live your own life, if at all?

Is death something that is easy for you to talk about with your family and community? Why or why not? Do you and your family have rituals — religious, secular or spiritual — that help you reckon with death and dying?

How well do you think our society deals with death? Are we able to look at the meaning of death — and its relation to life — with care and nuance? Or do we hide from and minimize it? How do you think we could confront the inevitability of death better?

About Student Opinion

• Find all our Student Opinion questions in this column . • Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? Tell us about it . • Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning .

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

Reflections on Death in Philosophical/Existential Context

• Symposium: Reflections Before, During, and Beyond COVID-19
• Published: 27 July 2020
• Volume 57 , pages 402–409, ( 2020 )

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• Nikos Kokosalakis 1  

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Is death larger than life and does it annihilate life altogether? This is the basic question discussed in this essay, within a philosophical/existential context. The central argument is that the concept of death is problematic and, following Levinas, the author holds that death cannot lead to nothingness. This accords with the teaching of all religious traditions, which hold that there is life beyond death, and Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories about the immortality of the soul. In modernity, since the Enlightenment, God and religion have been placed in the margin or rejected in rational discourse. Consequently, the anthropocentric promethean view of man has been stressed and the reality of the limits placed on humans by death deemphasised or ignored. Yet, death remains at the centre of nature and human life, and its reality and threat become evident in the spread of a single virus. So, death always remains a mystery, relating to life and morality.

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Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life: Precis and Further Reflections

An Attempt at Clarifying Being-Towards-Death

Death and the modern imagination.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? William Shakespeare ( 1890 : 132), Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, 303–312.

In mid-2019, the death of Sophia Kokosalakis, my niece and Goddaughter, at the age of 46, came like a thunderbolt to strike the whole family. She was a world-famous fashion designer who combined, in a unique way, the beauty and superb aesthetics of ancient and classical Greek sculptures and paintings with fashion production of clothes and jewellery. She took the aesthetics and values of ancient and classical Greek civilization out of the museums to the contemporary art of fashion design. A few months earlier she was full of life, beautiful, active, sociable and altruistic, and highly creative. All that was swept away quickly by an aggressive murderous cancer. The funeral ( κηδεία ) – a magnificent ritual event in the church of Panaghia Eleftherotria in Politeia Athens – accorded with the highly significant moving symbolism of the rite of the Orthodox Church. Her parents, her husband with their 7-year-old daughter, the wider family, relatives and friends, and hundreds of people were present, as well as eminent representatives of the arts. The Greek Prime Minister and other dignitaries sent wreaths and messages of condolences, and flowers were sent from around the world. After the burial in the family grave in the cemetery of Chalandri, some gathered for a memorial meal. This was a high profile, emotional final goodbye to a beloved famous person for her last irreversible Journey.

Sophia’s death was circumscribed by social and religious rituals that help to chart a path through the transition from life to death. Yet, the pain and sorrow for Sophia’s family has been very deep. For her parents, especially, it has been indescribable, indeed, unbearable. The existential reality of death is something different. It raises philosophical questions about what death really means in a human existential context. How do humans cope with it? What light do religious explanations of death shed on the existential experience of death and what do philosophical traditions have to say on this matter?

In broad terms religions see human life as larger than death, so that life’s substance meaning and values for each person are not exhausted with biological termination. Life goes on. For most religions and cultures there is some notion of immortality of the soul and there is highly significant ritual and symbolism for the dead, in all cultures, that relates to their memory and offers some notion of life beyond the grave. In Christianity, for example, life beyond death and the eternity and salvation of the soul constitutes the core of its teaching, immediately related to the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Theologically, Christ’s death and resurrection, declare the defeat of death by the death and the resurrection of the son of God, who was, both, God and perfectly human (theanthropos). This teaching signifies the triumph of life over death, which also means, eschatologically, the salvation and liberation of humankind from evil and the injustice and imperfection of the world. It refers to another dimension beyond the human condition, a paradisiac state beyond the time/space configuration, a state of immortality, eternity and infinity; it points to the sublimation of nature itself. So, according to Christian faith, the death of a human being is a painful boundary of transition, and there is hope that human life is not perishable at death. There is a paradox here that through death one enters real life in union with God. But this is not knowledge. It is faith and must be understood theologically and eschatologically.

While the deeply faithful, may accept and understand death as passage to their union with God, Sophia’s death shows that, for ordinary people, the fear of death and the desperation caused by the permanent absence of a beloved person is hard to bear – even with the help of strong religious faith. For those with lukewarm religious faith or no faith at all, religious discourse and ritual seems irrelevant or even annoying and irrational. However, nobody escapes the reality of death. It is at the heart of nature and the human condition and it is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of adult human beings. Indeed, of all animals it is only humans who know that they will die and according to Heidegger ( 1967 :274) “death is something distinctively impending”. The fear of death, consciously or subconsciously, is instilled in humans early in life and, as the ancients said, when death is near no one wants to die. ( Ην εγγύς έλθει θάνατος ουδείς βούλεται θνήσκειν. [Aesopus Fables]). In Christianity even Christ, the son of God, prayed to his father to remove the bitter cup of death before his crucifixion (Math. 26, 38–39; Luke, 22, 41–42).

The natural sciences say nothing much about the existential content and conditions of human death beyond the biological laws of human existence and human evolution. According to these laws, all forms of life have a beginning a duration and an end. In any case, from a philosophical point of view, it is considered a category mistake, i.e. epistemologically and methodologically wrong, to apply purely naturalistic categories and quantitative experimental methods for the study, explanation and interpretation of human social phenomena, especially cultural phenomena such as the meaning of human death and religion at large. As no enlightenment on such issues emerges from the natural sciences, maybe insights can be teased out from philosophical anthropological thinking.

Philosophical anthropology is concerned with questions of human nature and life and death in deeper intellectual, philosophical, dramaturgical context. Religion and the sacred are inevitably involved in such discourse. For example, the verses from Shakespeare’s Hamlet about the nature of man, at the preamble of this essay, put the matter in a nutshell. What is this being who acts like an angel, apprehends and creates like a god, and yet, it is limited as the quintessence of dust? It is within this discourse that I seek to draw insights concerning human death. I will argue that, although in formal logical/scientific terms, we do not know and cannot know anything about life after/beyond death, there is, and always has been, a legitimate philosophical discourse about being and the dialectic of life/death. We cannot prove or disprove the existence and content of life beyond death in scientific or logical terms any more than we can prove or disprove the existence of God scientifically. Footnote 1

Such discourse inevitably takes place within the framework of transcendence, and transcendence is present within life and beyond death. Indeed, transcendence is at the core of human consciousness as humans are the only beings (species) who have culture that transcends their biological organism. Footnote 2 According to Martin ( 1980 :4) “the main issue is… man’s ability to transcend and transform his situation”. So human death can be described and understood as a cultural fact immediately related to transcendence, and as a limit to human transcendental ability and potential. But it is important, from an epistemological methodological point of view, not to preconceive this fact in reductionist positivistic or closed ideological terms. It is essential that the discourse about death takes place within an open dialectic, not excluding transcendence and God a priori, stressing the value of life, and understanding the limits of the human potential.

The Problem of Meaning in Human Death

Biologically and medically the meaning and reality of human death, as that of all animals, is clear: the cessation of all the functions and faculties of the organs of the body, especially the heart and the brain. This entails, of course, the cessation of consciousness. Yet, this definition tells us nothing about why only the human species, latecomers in the universe, have always worshiped their gods, buried their dead with elaborate ritual, and held various beliefs about immortality. Harari ( 2017 :428–439) claims that, in the not too distant future, sapiens could aim at, and is likely to achieve, immortality and the status of Homo Deus through biotechnology, information science, artificial intelligence and what he calls the data religion . I shall leave aside what I consider farfetched utopian fictional futurology and reflect a little on the problem of meaning of human death and immortality philosophically.

We are not dealing here with the complex question of biological life. This is the purview of the science of biology and biotechnology within the laws of nature. Rather, we are within the framework of human existence, consciousness and transcendence and the question of being and time in a philosophical sense. According to Heidegger ( 1967 :290) “Death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life. Life must be understood as a kind of Being to which there belongs a Being-in-the-world”. He also argues (bid: 291) that: “The existential interpretation of death takes precedence over any biology and ontology of life. But it is also the foundation for any investigation of death which is biographical or historiological, ethnological or psychological”. So, the focus is sharply on the issue of life/death in the specifically human existential context of being/life/death . Human life is an (the) ultimate value, (people everywhere raise their glass to life and good health), and in the midst of it there is death as an ultimate threatening eliminating force. But is death larger than life, and can death eliminate life altogether? That’s the question. Whereas all beings from plants to animals, including man, are born live and die, in the case of human persons this cycle carries with it deep and wide meaning embodied within specific empirical, historical, cultural phenomena. In this context death, like birth and marriage, is a carrier of specific cultural significance and deeper meaning. It has always been accompanied by what anthropologists refer to as rites of passage, (Van Gennep, 1960 [1909]; Turner, 1967; Garces-Foley, 2006 ). These refer to transition events from one state of life to another. All such acts and rites, and religion generally, should be understood analysed and interpreted within the framework of symbolic language. (Kokosalakis, 2001 , 2020 ). In this sense the meaning of death is open and we get a glimpse of it through symbols.

Death, thus, is an existential tragic/dramatic phenomenon, which has preoccupied philosophy and the arts from the beginning and has been always treated as problematic. According to Heidegger ( 1967 : 295), the human being Dasein (being-there) has not explicit or even theoretical knowledge of death, hence the anxiety in the face of it. Also, Dasein has its death, “not in isolation, but as codetermined by its primordial kind of Being” (ibid: 291). He further argues that in the context of being/time/death, death is understood as being-towards-death ( Sein zum Tode ). Levinas Footnote 3 ( 2000 :8), although indebted to Heidegger, disagrees radically with him on this point because it posits being-towards death ( Sein zum Tode) “as equivalent to being in regard to nothingness”. Leaving aside that, phenomenologically the concept of nothingness itself is problematic (Sartre: 3–67), Levinas ( 2000 :8) asks: “is that which opens with death nothingness or the unknown? Can being at the point of death be reduced to the ontological dilemma of being or nothingness? That is the question that is posed here.” In other words, Levinas considers this issue problematic and wants to keep the question of being/life/death open. Logically and philosophically the concept of nothingness is absolute, definitive and closed whereas the concept of the unknown is open and problematic. In any case both concepts are ultimately based on belief, but nothingness implies knowledge which we cannot have in the context of death.

Levinas (ibid: 8–9) argues that any knowledge we have of death comes to us “second hand” and that “It is in relation with the other that we think of death in its negativity” (emphasis mine). Indeed, the ultimate objective of hate is the death of the other , the annihilation of the hated person. Also death “[is] a departure: it is a decease [deces]”. It is a permanent separation of them from us which is felt and experienced foremost and deeply for the departure of the beloved. This is because death is “A departure towards the unknown, a departure without return, a departure with no forward address”. Thus, the emotion and the sorrow associated with it and the pain and sadness caused to those remaining. Deep-down, existentially and philosophically, death is a mystery. It involves “an ambiguity that perhaps indicates another dimension of meaning than that in which death is thought within the alternative to be/not- to- be. The ambiguity: an enigma” (ibid: 14). Although, as Heidegger ( 1967 :298–311) argues, death is the only absolute certainty we have and it is the origin of certitude itself, I agree with Levinas (ibid: 10–27) that this certitude cannot be forthcoming from the experience of our own death alone, which is impossible anyway. Death entails the cessation of the consciousness of the subject and without consciousness there is no experience. We experience the process of our dying but not our own death itself. So, our experience of death is primarily that of the death of others. It is our observation of the cessation of the movement, of the life of the other .

Furthermore, Levinas (Ibid: 10–13) argues that “it is not certain that death has the meaning of annihilation” because if death is understood as annihilation in time, “Here, we are looking for other dimension of meaning, both for the meaning of time Footnote 4 and for the meaning of death”. Footnote 5 So death is a phenomenon with dimensions of meaning beyond the historical space/time configuration. Levinas dealt with such dimensions extensively not only in his God, Death and Time (2000) but also in his: Totality and Infinity (1969); Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1991); and, Of God Who comes to mind (1998). So, existentially/phenomenologically such dimensions inevitably involve the concept of transcendence, the divine, and some kind of faith. Indeed, the question of human death has always involved the question of the soul. Humans have been generally understood to be composite beings of body/soul or spirit and the latter has also been associated with transcendence and the divine. In general the body has been understood and experienced as perishable with death, whereas the soul/spirit has been understood (believed) to be indestructible. Thus beyond or surviving after/beyond death. Certainly this has been the assumption and general belief of major religions and cultures, Footnote 6 and philosophy itself, until modernity and up to the eighteenth century.

Ancient and classical Greek philosophy preoccupied itself with the question of the soul. Footnote 7 Homer, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, has several reference on the soul in hades (the underworld) and Pythagoras of Samos (580–496 b.c.) dealt with immortality and metempsychosis (reincarnation). Footnote 8 In all the tragedies by Sophocles (496–406 b,c,), Aeschylus (523–456 b. c.), and Euripides (480–406 b.c.), death is a central theme but it was Plato Footnote 9 (428?-347 b.c.) and Aristotle Footnote 10 (384–322 b.c.) – widely acknowledged as the greatest philosophers of all times – who wrote specific treatises on the soul. Let us look at their positions very briefly.

Plato on the Soul

Plato was deeply concerned with the nature of the soul and the problem of immortality because such questions were foundational to his theory of the forms (ideas), his understanding of ethics, and his philosophy at large. So, apart from the dialogue Phaedo , in which the soul and its immortality is the central subject, he also referred to it extensively in the Republic , the Symposium and the Apology as well in the dialogues: Timaeus , Gorgias, Phaedrus, Crito, Euthyfron and Laches .

The dialogue Phaedo Footnote 11 is a discussion on the soul and immortality between Socrates (470–399 b.c.) and his interlocutors Cebes and Simias. They were Pythagorians from Thebes, who went to see Socrates in prison just before he was about to be given the hemlock (the liquid poison: means by which the death penalty was carried out at the time in Athens). Phaedo, his disciple, who was also present, is the narrator. The visitors found Socrates very serene and in pleasant mood and wondered how he did not seem to be afraid of death just before his execution. Upon this Socrates replies that it would be unreasonable to be afraid of death since he was about to join company with the Gods (of which he was certain) and, perhaps, with good and beloved departed persons. In any case, he argued, the true philosopher cannot be afraid of death as his whole life, indeed, is a practice and a preparation for it. So for this, and other philosophical reasons, death for Socrates is not to be feared. ( Phaedo; 64a–68b).

Socrates defines death as the separation of the soul from the body (64c), which he describes as prison of the former while joined in life. The body, which is material and prone to earthly materialistic pleasures, is an obstacle for the soul to pursue and acquire true knowledge, virtue, moderation and higher spiritual achievements generally (64d–66e). So, for the true philosopher, whose raison-d’être is to pursue knowledge truth and virtue, the liberation of the soul from bodily things, and death itself when it comes, is welcome because life, for him, was a training for death anyway. For these reasons, Socrates says is “glad to go to hades ” (the underworld) (68b).

Following various questions of Cebes and Simias about the soul, and its surviving death, Socrates proceeds to provide some logical philosophical arguments for its immortality. The main ones only can be mentioned here. In the so called cyclical argument, Socrates holds that the immortality of the soul follows logically from the relation of opposites (binaries) and comparatives: Big, small; good, bad; just, unjust; beautiful, ugly; good, better; bad; worse, etc. As these imply each other so life/death/life are mutually inter-connected, (70e–71d). The second main argument is that of recollection. Socrates holds that learning, in general, is recollection of things and ideas by the soul which always existed and the soul itself pre-existed before it took the human shape. (73a–77a). Socrates also advises Cebes and Simias to look into themselves, into their own psych e and their own consciousness in order to understand what makes them alive and makes them speak and move, and that is proof for the immortality of the soul (78ab). These arguments are disputed and are considered inadequate and anachronistic by many philosophers today (Steadman, 2015 ; Shagulta and Hammad, 2018 ; and others) but the importance of Phaedo lies in the theory of ideas and values and the concept of ethics imbedded in it.

Plato’s theory of forms (ideas) is the basis of philosophical idealism to the present day and also poses the question of the human autonomy and free will. Phaedo attracts the attention of modern and contemporary philosophers from Kant (1724–1804) and Hegel (1770–1831) onwards, because it poses the existential problems of life, death, the soul, consciousness, movement and causality as well as morality, which have preoccupied philosophy and the human sciences diachronically. In this dialogue a central issue is the philosophy of ethics and values at large as related to the problem of death. Aristotle, who was critical of Plato’s idealism, also uses the concept of forms and poses the question of the soul as a substantive first principle of life and movement although he does not deal with death and immortality as Plato does.

Aristotle on the Soul

Aristotle’s conception of the soul is close to contemporary biology and psychology because his whole philosophy is near to modern science. Unlike many scholars, however, who tend to be reductionist, limiting the soul to naturalistic/positivistic explanations, (as Isherwood, 2016 , for instance, does, unlike Charlier, 2018 , who finds relevance in religious and metaphysical connections), Aristotle’s treatment of it, as an essential irreducible principle of life, leaves room for its metaphysical substance and character. So his treatise on the soul , (known now to scholars as De Anima, Shields, 2016 ), is closely related to both his physics and his metaphysics.

Aristotle sees all living beings (plants, animals, humans) as composite and indivisible of body, soul or form (Charlton, 1980 ). The body is material and the soul is immaterial but none can be expressed, comprehended or perceived apart from matter ( ύλη ). Shields ( 2016 ) has described this understanding and use of the concepts of matter and form in Aristotle’s philosophy as hylomorphism [ hyle and morphe, (matter and form)]. The soul ( psyche ) is a principle, arche (αρχή) associated with cause (αιτία) and motion ( kinesis ) but it is inseparable from matter. In plants its basic function and characteristic is nutrition. In animals, in addition to nutrition it has the function and characteristic of sensing. In humans apart from nutrition and sensing, which they share with all animals, in addition it has the unique faculty of noesis and logos. ( De Anima ch. 2). Following this, Heidegger ( 1967 :47) sees humans as: “Dasein, man’s Being is ‘defined’ as the ζωον λόγον έχον – as that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse”. (So, only human beings talk, other beings do not and cannot).

In Chapter Five, Aristotle concentrates on this unique property of the human soul, the logos or nous, known in English as mind . The nous (mind) is both: passive and active. The former, the passive mind, although necessary for noesis and knowledge, is perishable and mortal (φθαρτός). The latter, the poetic mind is higher, it is a principle of causality and creativity, it is energy, aitia . So this, the poetic the creative mind is higher. It is the most important property of the soul and it is immaterial, immortal and eternal. Here Aristotle considers the poetic mind as separate from organic life, as substance entering the human body from outside, as it were. Noetic mind is the divine property in humans and expresses itself in their pursuit to imitate the prime mover, God that is.

So, Aristotle arrives here at the problem of immortality of the soul by another root than Plato but, unlike him, he does not elaborate on the metaphysics of this question beyond the properties of the poetic mind and he focuses on life in the world. King ( 2001 :214) argues that Aristotle is not so much concerned to establish the immortality of the human individual as that of the human species as an eidos. Here, however, I would like to stress that we should not confuse Aristotle’s understanding with contemporary biological theories about the dominance and survival of the human species. But whatever the case may be, both Aristotle’s and Plato’s treatises on the soul continue to be inspiring sources of debate by philosophers and others on these issues to the present day.

Death in Modernity

By modernity here is meant the general changes which occurred in western society and culture with the growth of science and technology and the economy, especially after the Enlightenment, and the French and the Industrial Revolutions, which have their cultural roots in the Renaissance, the Reformation and Protestantism.

It is banal to say that life beyond death does not preoccupy people in modernity as it did before and that, perhaps, now most people do not believe in the immortality of the soul. In what Charles Taylor ( 2007 ) has extensively described as A SECULAR AGE he frames the question of change in religious beliefs in the west as follows: “why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (p. 25). The answer to this question is loaded with controversy and is given variously by different scholars. Footnote 13 Taylor (ibid: 65–75, 720–726) shows how and why beliefs have changed radically in modernity. Metaphysical transcendent beliefs on life and death have shrunk into this-worldly secular conceptions in what he calls, “the immanent frame”. As a consequence, transcendence and the sacred were exiled from the world or reduced to “closed world structures”. Footnote 14 In this context many scholars spoke of “the death of God” (ibid: 564–575).

In criticizing postmodern relativism, which brings various vague conceptions of God and transcendence back in play, Gellner ( 1992 :80–83) praises what he calls Enlightenment Rationalist fundamentalism, which “at one fell swoop eliminates the sacred from the world”. Although he acknowledges that Kant, the deepest thinker of the Enlightenment, left morality reason and knowledge outside the purview of the laws of nature, thus leaving the question of transcendence open, he still claims that Enlightenment rationalism is the only positive scientific way to study religious phenomena and death rituals. This position seems to be epistemologically flawed, because it pre-empts what concerns us here, namely, the assumptions of modernity for the nature of man and its implications for the meaning and reality of death.

In rejecting religion and traditional conceptions of death, Enlightenment rationalism put forward an overoptimistic, promethean view of man. What Vereker ( 1967 ) described as the “God of Reason” was the foundation of eighteenth century optimism. The idea was that enlightened rationalism, based on the benevolent orderly laws of nature, would bring about the redeemed society. Enlightened, rational leaders and the gradual disappearance of traditional religious beliefs, obscurantism and superstitions, which were sustained by the ancient regime, would eventually transform society and would abolish all human evil and social and political injustice. Science was supportive of this view because it showed that natural and social phenomena, traditionally attributed to divine agencies and metaphysical forces, have a clear natural causation. These ideas, developed by European philosophers (Voltaire 1694–1778; Rousseau, 1712–1778; Kant, 1724–1804; Hume, 1711–1776; and many others), were foundational to social and political reform, and the basis of the French Revolution (1789–1799). However, the underlying optimism of such philosophical ideas about the benevolence of nature appeared incompatible with natural phenomena such as the great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, which flattened the city and killed over 100,000 people. Enlightenment rationalism overemphasised a promethean, anthropocentric view of man without God, and ignored the limits of man and the moral and existential significance of death.

In his critique of capitalism, in the nineteenth century, Marx (1818–1883), promoted further the promethean view of man by elevating him as the author of his destiny and banishing God and religion as “the opium of the people”. In his O rigin of the Species (1859), Charles Darwin also showed man’s biological connections with primates, thereby challenging biblical texts about the specific divine origin of the human species. He confirmed human dominance in nature. Important figures in literature, however, such as Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Tolstoy (1828–1910), pointed out and criticised the conceit and arrogance of an inflated humanism without God, promoted by the promethean man of modernity.

By the end of the twentieth century the triumph of science, biotechnology, information technology, and international capitalist monetary economics, all of them consequences of modernity, had turned the planet into a global village with improved living standards for the majority. Medical science also has doubled average life expectancy from what it was in nineteenth century and information technology has made, almost every adult, owner of a mobile smart phone. Moreover, visiting the moon has inflated man’s sense of mastery over nature, and all these achievements, although embodying Taylor’s ( 1992 ) malaise of modernity at the expense of the environment, have strengthen the promethean view and, somehow, ignored human limits. As a consequence, the reality of death was treated as a kind of taboo, tucked under the carpet.

This seems a paradox because, apart from the normal death of individuals, massive collective deaths, caused by nature and by hate and barbarity from man to man, were present in the twentieth century more than any other in history. The pandemic of Spanish flue 1917–1919 killed 39 million of the world’s population according to estimates by Baro et al. (2020). In the First World War deaths, military and civilians combined, were estimated at 20.5 million (Wikipedia). In the Second World War an estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, (Wikipedia). This did not include estimates of more than seven million people who died in the gulags of Siberia and elsewhere under Stalin. But Auschwitz is indicative of the unlimited limits, which human barbarity and cruelty of man to man, can reach. Bauman ( 1989 :x), an eminent sociologist, saw the Holocaust as a moral horror related to modernity and wrote: “ The Holocaust was born and executed in modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture. ”

Questions associated with the mass death are now magnified by the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19). This has caused global panic and created unpredictability at all levels of society and culture. This sudden global threat of death makes it timely to re-examine our values, our beliefs (secular or religious), and the meaning of life. Max Weber (1948: 182), who died a hundred years ago in the pandemic of great influenza, was sceptical and pessimistic about modernity, and argued that it was leading to a cage with “ specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it had attained a level of civilization never before achieved. ”

So, what does this examination of philosophical anthropology illuminate in terms of questions of human nature and life and death in deeper intellectual, philosophical, dramaturgical context? Now, we are well into the twenty-first century, and with the revolution in information science, the internet, biotechnology and data religion , the promethean view of man seems to have reached new heights. Yet, massive death, by a single virus this time, threatens again humanity; are there any lessons to be learned? Will this threat, apart from the negativity of death, bring back the wisdom, which T. S. Elliot said we have lost in modern times? Will it show us our limits? Will it reduce our conceit and arrogance? Will it make us more humble, moderate, prudent, and more humane for this and future generations, and for the sake of life in this planet at large? These are the questions arising now amongst many circles, and it is likely that old religious and philosophical ideas about virtuous life and the hope of immortality (eschatologically) may revive again as we are well within late modernity (I do not like the term postmodernity, which has been widely used in sociology since the 1980s).

The central argument of this essay has been that death has always been and remains at the centre of life. Philosophically and existentially the meaning of death is problematic, and the natural sciences cannot produce knowledge on this problem. Religious traditions always beheld the immortality of the soul and so argued great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Modernity, since the Enlightenment, rejected such views as anachronistic and advanced an anthropocentric promethean, view of man, at the expense of the sacred and transcendence at large. Instead, within what Taylor (1967: 537–193) has described as the immanent frame, it developed “closed world structures,” which are at the expense of human nature and human freedom. One consequence of this has been massive death during the twentieth century.

Following Levinas ( 2000 ), I argued that death should not be understood to lead to nothingness because nothingness means certitude and positive knowledge, which we cannot have existentially in the case of death. In this sense the reality of death should not be understood to lead to annihilation of life and remains a mystery. Moreover, the presence and the reality of death as a limit and a boundary should serve as educative lesson for both the autonomy and creativity of man and against an overinflated promethean view of her/his nature.

David Martin ( 1980 :16) puts the matter about human and divine autonomy as follows: “Indeed, it is all too easy to phrase the problem so that the autonomy of God and the autonomy of man are rival claimants for what science leaves over”. This concurs with his, ( 1978 :12), understanding of religion, (which I share), as “acceptance of a level of reality beyond the observable world known to science, to which we ascribe meanings and purposes completing and transcending those of the purely human realm”.

We do not know how and when human beings acquired this capacity during the evolutionary process of the species. It characterises however a radical shift from nature to culture as the latter is defined by Clifford Geertz (1973:68): “an ordered system of meanings and symbols …in terms of which individuals define their world, express their feelings and make their judgements”.

For a comprehensive extensive and impressive account and discussion of Levinas’ philosophy and work, and relevant bibliography, see Bergo ( 2019 ).

Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that the meaning of the concept of time, as it was in Cartesian Philosophy and Newtonian physics, has changed radically with Einstein’s theories of relativity and contemporary quantum physics (Heisenberg 1959 ). Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Hilgervood and Uffink, 2016 ) is very relevant to non- deterministic conceptions of time/space and scientific and philosophical discourse generally.

Various religions articulate the structure of these meanings in different cultural contexts symbolically and all of them involve the divine and an eschatological metaphysical dimension beyond history, beyond our experience of time and space.

Ancient Egyptian culture is well known for its preoccupation with life after death, the immortality of the soul and the elaborate ritual involved in the mummification of the Pharaohs. See: anen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_ Egyptian_ funerary_ practices). Also the findings of archaeological excavations of tombs of kings in all ancient cultures constitute invaluable sources of knowledge not only about the meaning of death and the beliefs and rituals associated with it in these cultures but also of life and religion and politics and society at large.

For an extensive account of general theories of the soul in Greek antiquity see: Lorenz ( 2009 ).

For a good account on Pythagoras’ views on the transmigration of the souls see: Huffman ( 2018 ).

For a recent good account on the diachronic importance of Plato’s philosophy see: Kraut ( 2017 ).

For a very extensive analytical account and discussion of Aristotle’s philosophy and work with recent bibliography see: Shields ( 2016 ).

For an overview of Phaedo in English with commentary and the original Greek text see: Steadman ( 2015 ).

See, for instance, Wilson ( 1969 ) and Martin ( 1978 ) for radically different analyses and interpretations of secularization.

Marxism is a good example. God, the sacred and tradition generally are rejected but the proletariat and the Party acquire a sacred significance. The notion of salvation is enclosed as potentiality within history in a closed system of the class struggle. This, however, has direct political consequences because, along with the sacred, democracy is exiled and turned into a totalitarian system. The same is true, of course, at the other end of the spectrum with fascism.

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Reflections on Death in Philosophical/Existential Context

Nikos kokosalakis.

P.O. Box 49, 34002 Vasiliko, Evia Greece

Is death larger than life and does it annihilate life altogether? This is the basic question discussed in this essay, within a philosophical/existential context. The central argument is that the concept of death is problematic and, following Levinas, the author holds that death cannot lead to nothingness. This accords with the teaching of all religious traditions, which hold that there is life beyond death, and Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories about the immortality of the soul. In modernity, since the Enlightenment, God and religion have been placed in the margin or rejected in rational discourse. Consequently, the anthropocentric promethean view of man has been stressed and the reality of the limits placed on humans by death deemphasised or ignored. Yet, death remains at the centre of nature and human life, and its reality and threat become evident in the spread of a single virus. So, death always remains a mystery, relating to life and morality.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? William Shakespeare ( 1890 : 132), Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, 303–312.

In mid-2019, the death of Sophia Kokosalakis, my niece and Goddaughter, at the age of 46, came like a thunderbolt to strike the whole family. She was a world-famous fashion designer who combined, in a unique way, the beauty and superb aesthetics of ancient and classical Greek sculptures and paintings with fashion production of clothes and jewellery. She took the aesthetics and values of ancient and classical Greek civilization out of the museums to the contemporary art of fashion design. A few months earlier she was full of life, beautiful, active, sociable and altruistic, and highly creative. All that was swept away quickly by an aggressive murderous cancer. The funeral ( κηδεία ) – a magnificent ritual event in the church of Panaghia Eleftherotria in Politeia Athens – accorded with the highly significant moving symbolism of the rite of the Orthodox Church. Her parents, her husband with their 7-year-old daughter, the wider family, relatives and friends, and hundreds of people were present, as well as eminent representatives of the arts. The Greek Prime Minister and other dignitaries sent wreaths and messages of condolences, and flowers were sent from around the world. After the burial in the family grave in the cemetery of Chalandri, some gathered for a memorial meal. This was a high profile, emotional final goodbye to a beloved famous person for her last irreversible Journey.

Sophia’s death was circumscribed by social and religious rituals that help to chart a path through the transition from life to death. Yet, the pain and sorrow for Sophia’s family has been very deep. For her parents, especially, it has been indescribable, indeed, unbearable. The existential reality of death is something different. It raises philosophical questions about what death really means in a human existential context. How do humans cope with it? What light do religious explanations of death shed on the existential experience of death and what do philosophical traditions have to say on this matter?

In broad terms religions see human life as larger than death, so that life’s substance meaning and values for each person are not exhausted with biological termination. Life goes on. For most religions and cultures there is some notion of immortality of the soul and there is highly significant ritual and symbolism for the dead, in all cultures, that relates to their memory and offers some notion of life beyond the grave. In Christianity, for example, life beyond death and the eternity and salvation of the soul constitutes the core of its teaching, immediately related to the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Theologically, Christ’s death and resurrection, declare the defeat of death by the death and the resurrection of the son of God, who was, both, God and perfectly human (theanthropos). This teaching signifies the triumph of life over death, which also means, eschatologically, the salvation and liberation of humankind from evil and the injustice and imperfection of the world. It refers to another dimension beyond the human condition, a paradisiac state beyond the time/space configuration, a state of immortality, eternity and infinity; it points to the sublimation of nature itself. So, according to Christian faith, the death of a human being is a painful boundary of transition, and there is hope that human life is not perishable at death. There is a paradox here that through death one enters real life in union with God. But this is not knowledge. It is faith and must be understood theologically and eschatologically.

While the deeply faithful, may accept and understand death as passage to their union with God, Sophia’s death shows that, for ordinary people, the fear of death and the desperation caused by the permanent absence of a beloved person is hard to bear – even with the help of strong religious faith. For those with lukewarm religious faith or no faith at all, religious discourse and ritual seems irrelevant or even annoying and irrational. However, nobody escapes the reality of death. It is at the heart of nature and the human condition and it is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of adult human beings. Indeed, of all animals it is only humans who know that they will die and according to Heidegger ( 1967 :274) “death is something distinctively impending”. The fear of death, consciously or subconsciously, is instilled in humans early in life and, as the ancients said, when death is near no one wants to die. ( Ην εγγύς έλθει θάνατος ουδείς βούλεται θνήσκειν. [Aesopus Fables]). In Christianity even Christ, the son of God, prayed to his father to remove the bitter cup of death before his crucifixion (Math. 26, 38–39; Luke, 22, 41–42).

The natural sciences say nothing much about the existential content and conditions of human death beyond the biological laws of human existence and human evolution. According to these laws, all forms of life have a beginning a duration and an end. In any case, from a philosophical point of view, it is considered a category mistake, i.e. epistemologically and methodologically wrong, to apply purely naturalistic categories and quantitative experimental methods for the study, explanation and interpretation of human social phenomena, especially cultural phenomena such as the meaning of human death and religion at large. As no enlightenment on such issues emerges from the natural sciences, maybe insights can be teased out from philosophical anthropological thinking.

Philosophical anthropology is concerned with questions of human nature and life and death in deeper intellectual, philosophical, dramaturgical context. Religion and the sacred are inevitably involved in such discourse. For example, the verses from Shakespeare’s Hamlet about the nature of man, at the preamble of this essay, put the matter in a nutshell. What is this being who acts like an angel, apprehends and creates like a god, and yet, it is limited as the quintessence of dust? It is within this discourse that I seek to draw insights concerning human death. I will argue that, although in formal logical/scientific terms, we do not know and cannot know anything about life after/beyond death, there is, and always has been, a legitimate philosophical discourse about being and the dialectic of life/death. We cannot prove or disprove the existence and content of life beyond death in scientific or logical terms any more than we can prove or disprove the existence of God scientifically. 1

Such discourse inevitably takes place within the framework of transcendence, and transcendence is present within life and beyond death. Indeed, transcendence is at the core of human consciousness as humans are the only beings (species) who have culture that transcends their biological organism. 2 According to Martin ( 1980 :4) “the main issue is… man’s ability to transcend and transform his situation”. So human death can be described and understood as a cultural fact immediately related to transcendence, and as a limit to human transcendental ability and potential. But it is important, from an epistemological methodological point of view, not to preconceive this fact in reductionist positivistic or closed ideological terms. It is essential that the discourse about death takes place within an open dialectic, not excluding transcendence and God a priori, stressing the value of life, and understanding the limits of the human potential.

The Problem of Meaning in Human Death

Biologically and medically the meaning and reality of human death, as that of all animals, is clear: the cessation of all the functions and faculties of the organs of the body, especially the heart and the brain. This entails, of course, the cessation of consciousness. Yet, this definition tells us nothing about why only the human species, latecomers in the universe, have always worshiped their gods, buried their dead with elaborate ritual, and held various beliefs about immortality. Harari ( 2017 :428–439) claims that, in the not too distant future, sapiens could aim at, and is likely to achieve, immortality and the status of Homo Deus through biotechnology, information science, artificial intelligence and what he calls the data religion . I shall leave aside what I consider farfetched utopian fictional futurology and reflect a little on the problem of meaning of human death and immortality philosophically.

We are not dealing here with the complex question of biological life. This is the purview of the science of biology and biotechnology within the laws of nature. Rather, we are within the framework of human existence, consciousness and transcendence and the question of being and time in a philosophical sense. According to Heidegger ( 1967 :290) “Death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life. Life must be understood as a kind of Being to which there belongs a Being-in-the-world”. He also argues (bid: 291) that: “The existential interpretation of death takes precedence over any biology and ontology of life. But it is also the foundation for any investigation of death which is biographical or historiological, ethnological or psychological”. So, the focus is sharply on the issue of life/death in the specifically human existential context of being/life/death . Human life is an (the) ultimate value, (people everywhere raise their glass to life and good health), and in the midst of it there is death as an ultimate threatening eliminating force. But is death larger than life, and can death eliminate life altogether? That’s the question. Whereas all beings from plants to animals, including man, are born live and die, in the case of human persons this cycle carries with it deep and wide meaning embodied within specific empirical, historical, cultural phenomena. In this context death, like birth and marriage, is a carrier of specific cultural significance and deeper meaning. It has always been accompanied by what anthropologists refer to as rites of passage, (Van Gennep, 1960 [1909]; Turner, 1967; Garces-Foley, 2006 ). These refer to transition events from one state of life to another. All such acts and rites, and religion generally, should be understood analysed and interpreted within the framework of symbolic language. (Kokosalakis, 2001 , 2020 ). In this sense the meaning of death is open and we get a glimpse of it through symbols.

Death, thus, is an existential tragic/dramatic phenomenon, which has preoccupied philosophy and the arts from the beginning and has been always treated as problematic. According to Heidegger ( 1967 : 295), the human being Dasein (being-there) has not explicit or even theoretical knowledge of death, hence the anxiety in the face of it. Also, Dasein has its death, “not in isolation, but as codetermined by its primordial kind of Being” (ibid: 291). He further argues that in the context of being/time/death, death is understood as being-towards-death ( Sein zum Tode ). Levinas 3 ( 2000 :8), although indebted to Heidegger, disagrees radically with him on this point because it posits being-towards death ( Sein zum Tode) “as equivalent to being in regard to nothingness”. Leaving aside that, phenomenologically the concept of nothingness itself is problematic (Sartre: 3–67), Levinas ( 2000 :8) asks: “is that which opens with death nothingness or the unknown? Can being at the point of death be reduced to the ontological dilemma of being or nothingness? That is the question that is posed here.” In other words, Levinas considers this issue problematic and wants to keep the question of being/life/death open. Logically and philosophically the concept of nothingness is absolute, definitive and closed whereas the concept of the unknown is open and problematic. In any case both concepts are ultimately based on belief, but nothingness implies knowledge which we cannot have in the context of death.

Levinas (ibid: 8–9) argues that any knowledge we have of death comes to us “second hand” and that “It is in relation with the other that we think of death in its negativity” (emphasis mine). Indeed, the ultimate objective of hate is the death of the other , the annihilation of the hated person. Also death “[is] a departure: it is a decease [deces]”. It is a permanent separation of them from us which is felt and experienced foremost and deeply for the departure of the beloved. This is because death is “A departure towards the unknown, a departure without return, a departure with no forward address”. Thus, the emotion and the sorrow associated with it and the pain and sadness caused to those remaining. Deep-down, existentially and philosophically, death is a mystery. It involves “an ambiguity that perhaps indicates another dimension of meaning than that in which death is thought within the alternative to be/not- to- be. The ambiguity: an enigma” (ibid: 14). Although, as Heidegger ( 1967 :298–311) argues, death is the only absolute certainty we have and it is the origin of certitude itself, I agree with Levinas (ibid: 10–27) that this certitude cannot be forthcoming from the experience of our own death alone, which is impossible anyway. Death entails the cessation of the consciousness of the subject and without consciousness there is no experience. We experience the process of our dying but not our own death itself. So, our experience of death is primarily that of the death of others. It is our observation of the cessation of the movement, of the life of the other .

Furthermore, Levinas (Ibid: 10–13) argues that “it is not certain that death has the meaning of annihilation” because if death is understood as annihilation in time, “Here, we are looking for other dimension of meaning, both for the meaning of time 4 and for the meaning of death”. 5 So death is a phenomenon with dimensions of meaning beyond the historical space/time configuration. Levinas dealt with such dimensions extensively not only in his God, Death and Time (2000) but also in his: Totality and Infinity (1969); Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1991); and, Of God Who comes to mind (1998). So, existentially/phenomenologically such dimensions inevitably involve the concept of transcendence, the divine, and some kind of faith. Indeed, the question of human death has always involved the question of the soul. Humans have been generally understood to be composite beings of body/soul or spirit and the latter has also been associated with transcendence and the divine. In general the body has been understood and experienced as perishable with death, whereas the soul/spirit has been understood (believed) to be indestructible. Thus beyond or surviving after/beyond death. Certainly this has been the assumption and general belief of major religions and cultures, 6 and philosophy itself, until modernity and up to the eighteenth century.

Ancient and classical Greek philosophy preoccupied itself with the question of the soul. 7 Homer, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, has several reference on the soul in hades (the underworld) and Pythagoras of Samos (580–496 b.c.) dealt with immortality and metempsychosis (reincarnation). 8 In all the tragedies by Sophocles (496–406 b,c,), Aeschylus (523–456 b. c.), and Euripides (480–406 b.c.), death is a central theme but it was Plato 9 (428?-347 b.c.) and Aristotle 10 (384–322 b.c.) – widely acknowledged as the greatest philosophers of all times – who wrote specific treatises on the soul. Let us look at their positions very briefly.

Plato on the Soul

Plato was deeply concerned with the nature of the soul and the problem of immortality because such questions were foundational to his theory of the forms (ideas), his understanding of ethics, and his philosophy at large. So, apart from the dialogue Phaedo , in which the soul and its immortality is the central subject, he also referred to it extensively in the Republic , the Symposium and the Apology as well in the dialogues: Timaeus , Gorgias, Phaedrus, Crito, Euthyfron and Laches .

The dialogue Phaedo 11 is a discussion on the soul and immortality between Socrates (470–399 b.c.) and his interlocutors Cebes and Simias. They were Pythagorians from Thebes, who went to see Socrates in prison just before he was about to be given the hemlock (the liquid poison: means by which the death penalty was carried out at the time in Athens). Phaedo, his disciple, who was also present, is the narrator. The visitors found Socrates very serene and in pleasant mood and wondered how he did not seem to be afraid of death just before his execution. Upon this Socrates replies that it would be unreasonable to be afraid of death since he was about to join company with the Gods (of which he was certain) and, perhaps, with good and beloved departed persons. In any case, he argued, the true philosopher cannot be afraid of death as his whole life, indeed, is a practice and a preparation for it. So for this, and other philosophical reasons, death for Socrates is not to be feared. ( Phaedo; 64a–68b).

Socrates defines death as the separation of the soul from the body (64c), which he describes as prison of the former while joined in life. The body, which is material and prone to earthly materialistic pleasures, is an obstacle for the soul to pursue and acquire true knowledge, virtue, moderation and higher spiritual achievements generally (64d–66e). So, for the true philosopher, whose raison-d’être is to pursue knowledge truth and virtue, the liberation of the soul from bodily things, and death itself when it comes, is welcome because life, for him, was a training for death anyway. For these reasons, Socrates says is “glad to go to hades ” (the underworld) (68b).

Following various questions of Cebes and Simias about the soul, and its surviving death, Socrates proceeds to provide some logical philosophical arguments for its immortality. The main ones only can be mentioned here. In the so called cyclical argument, Socrates holds that the immortality of the soul follows logically from the relation of opposites (binaries) and comparatives: Big, small; good, bad; just, unjust; beautiful, ugly; good, better; bad; worse, etc. As these imply each other so life/death/life are mutually inter-connected, (70e–71d). The second main argument is that of recollection. Socrates holds that learning, in general, is recollection of things and ideas by the soul which always existed and the soul itself pre-existed before it took the human shape. (73a–77a). Socrates also advises Cebes and Simias to look into themselves, into their own psych e and their own consciousness in order to understand what makes them alive and makes them speak and move, and that is proof for the immortality of the soul (78ab). These arguments are disputed and are considered inadequate and anachronistic by many philosophers today (Steadman, 2015 ; Shagulta and Hammad, 2018 ; and others) but the importance of Phaedo lies in the theory of ideas and values and the concept of ethics imbedded in it.

Plato’s theory of forms (ideas) is the basis of philosophical idealism to the present day and also poses the question of the human autonomy and free will. Phaedo attracts the attention of modern and contemporary philosophers from Kant (1724–1804) and Hegel (1770–1831) onwards, because it poses the existential problems of life, death, the soul, consciousness, movement and causality as well as morality, which have preoccupied philosophy and the human sciences diachronically. In this dialogue a central issue is the philosophy of ethics and values at large as related to the problem of death. Aristotle, who was critical of Plato’s idealism, also uses the concept of forms and poses the question of the soul as a substantive first principle of life and movement although he does not deal with death and immortality as Plato does.

Aristotle on the Soul

Aristotle’s conception of the soul is close to contemporary biology and psychology because his whole philosophy is near to modern science. Unlike many scholars, however, who tend to be reductionist, limiting the soul to naturalistic/positivistic explanations, (as Isherwood, 2016 , for instance, does, unlike Charlier, 2018 , who finds relevance in religious and metaphysical connections), Aristotle’s treatment of it, as an essential irreducible principle of life, leaves room for its metaphysical substance and character. So his treatise on the soul , (known now to scholars as De Anima, Shields, 2016 ), is closely related to both his physics and his metaphysics.

Aristotle sees all living beings (plants, animals, humans) as composite and indivisible of body, soul or form (Charlton, 1980 ). The body is material and the soul is immaterial but none can be expressed, comprehended or perceived apart from matter ( ύλη ). Shields ( 2016 ) has described this understanding and use of the concepts of matter and form in Aristotle’s philosophy as hylomorphism [ hyle and morphe, (matter and form)]. The soul ( psyche ) is a principle, arche (αρχή) associated with cause (αιτία) and motion ( kinesis ) but it is inseparable from matter. In plants its basic function and characteristic is nutrition. In animals, in addition to nutrition it has the function and characteristic of sensing. In humans apart from nutrition and sensing, which they share with all animals, in addition it has the unique faculty of noesis and logos. ( De Anima ch. 2). Following this, Heidegger ( 1967 :47) sees humans as: “Dasein, man’s Being is ‘defined’ as the ζωον λόγον έχον – as that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse”. (So, only human beings talk, other beings do not and cannot).

In Chapter Five, Aristotle concentrates on this unique property of the human soul, the logos or nous, known in English as mind . The nous (mind) is both: passive and active. The former, the passive mind, although necessary for noesis and knowledge, is perishable and mortal (φθαρτός). The latter, the poetic mind is higher, it is a principle of causality and creativity, it is energy, aitia . So this, the poetic the creative mind is higher. It is the most important property of the soul and it is immaterial, immortal and eternal. Here Aristotle considers the poetic mind as separate from organic life, as substance entering the human body from outside, as it were. Noetic mind is the divine property in humans and expresses itself in their pursuit to imitate the prime mover, God that is.

So, Aristotle arrives here at the problem of immortality of the soul by another root than Plato but, unlike him, he does not elaborate on the metaphysics of this question beyond the properties of the poetic mind and he focuses on life in the world. King ( 2001 :214) argues that Aristotle is not so much concerned to establish the immortality of the human individual as that of the human species as an eidos. Here, however, I would like to stress that we should not confuse Aristotle’s understanding with contemporary biological theories about the dominance and survival of the human species. But whatever the case may be, both Aristotle’s and Plato’s treatises on the soul continue to be inspiring sources of debate by philosophers and others on these issues to the present day.

Death in Modernity 12

It is banal to say that life beyond death does not preoccupy people in modernity as it did before and that, perhaps, now most people do not believe in the immortality of the soul. In what Charles Taylor ( 2007 ) has extensively described as A SECULAR AGE he frames the question of change in religious beliefs in the west as follows: “why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (p. 25). The answer to this question is loaded with controversy and is given variously by different scholars. 13 Taylor (ibid: 65–75, 720–726) shows how and why beliefs have changed radically in modernity. Metaphysical transcendent beliefs on life and death have shrunk into this-worldly secular conceptions in what he calls, “the immanent frame”. As a consequence, transcendence and the sacred were exiled from the world or reduced to “closed world structures”. 14 In this context many scholars spoke of “the death of God” (ibid: 564–575).

In criticizing postmodern relativism, which brings various vague conceptions of God and transcendence back in play, Gellner ( 1992 :80–83) praises what he calls Enlightenment Rationalist fundamentalism, which “at one fell swoop eliminates the sacred from the world”. Although he acknowledges that Kant, the deepest thinker of the Enlightenment, left morality reason and knowledge outside the purview of the laws of nature, thus leaving the question of transcendence open, he still claims that Enlightenment rationalism is the only positive scientific way to study religious phenomena and death rituals. This position seems to be epistemologically flawed, because it pre-empts what concerns us here, namely, the assumptions of modernity for the nature of man and its implications for the meaning and reality of death.

In rejecting religion and traditional conceptions of death, Enlightenment rationalism put forward an overoptimistic, promethean view of man. What Vereker ( 1967 ) described as the “God of Reason” was the foundation of eighteenth century optimism. The idea was that enlightened rationalism, based on the benevolent orderly laws of nature, would bring about the redeemed society. Enlightened, rational leaders and the gradual disappearance of traditional religious beliefs, obscurantism and superstitions, which were sustained by the ancient regime, would eventually transform society and would abolish all human evil and social and political injustice. Science was supportive of this view because it showed that natural and social phenomena, traditionally attributed to divine agencies and metaphysical forces, have a clear natural causation. These ideas, developed by European philosophers (Voltaire 1694–1778; Rousseau, 1712–1778; Kant, 1724–1804; Hume, 1711–1776; and many others), were foundational to social and political reform, and the basis of the French Revolution (1789–1799). However, the underlying optimism of such philosophical ideas about the benevolence of nature appeared incompatible with natural phenomena such as the great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, which flattened the city and killed over 100,000 people. Enlightenment rationalism overemphasised a promethean, anthropocentric view of man without God, and ignored the limits of man and the moral and existential significance of death.

In his critique of capitalism, in the nineteenth century, Marx (1818–1883), promoted further the promethean view of man by elevating him as the author of his destiny and banishing God and religion as “the opium of the people”. In his O rigin of the Species (1859), Charles Darwin also showed man’s biological connections with primates, thereby challenging biblical texts about the specific divine origin of the human species. He confirmed human dominance in nature. Important figures in literature, however, such as Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Tolstoy (1828–1910), pointed out and criticised the conceit and arrogance of an inflated humanism without God, promoted by the promethean man of modernity.

By the end of the twentieth century the triumph of science, biotechnology, information technology, and international capitalist monetary economics, all of them consequences of modernity, had turned the planet into a global village with improved living standards for the majority. Medical science also has doubled average life expectancy from what it was in nineteenth century and information technology has made, almost every adult, owner of a mobile smart phone. Moreover, visiting the moon has inflated man’s sense of mastery over nature, and all these achievements, although embodying Taylor’s ( 1992 ) malaise of modernity at the expense of the environment, have strengthen the promethean view and, somehow, ignored human limits. As a consequence, the reality of death was treated as a kind of taboo, tucked under the carpet.

This seems a paradox because, apart from the normal death of individuals, massive collective deaths, caused by nature and by hate and barbarity from man to man, were present in the twentieth century more than any other in history. The pandemic of Spanish flue 1917–1919 killed 39 million of the world’s population according to estimates by Baro et al. (2020). In the First World War deaths, military and civilians combined, were estimated at 20.5 million (Wikipedia). In the Second World War an estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, (Wikipedia). This did not include estimates of more than seven million people who died in the gulags of Siberia and elsewhere under Stalin. But Auschwitz is indicative of the unlimited limits, which human barbarity and cruelty of man to man, can reach. Bauman ( 1989 :x), an eminent sociologist, saw the Holocaust as a moral horror related to modernity and wrote: “ The Holocaust was born and executed in modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture. ”

Questions associated with the mass death are now magnified by the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19). This has caused global panic and created unpredictability at all levels of society and culture. This sudden global threat of death makes it timely to re-examine our values, our beliefs (secular or religious), and the meaning of life. Max Weber (1948: 182), who died a hundred years ago in the pandemic of great influenza, was sceptical and pessimistic about modernity, and argued that it was leading to a cage with “ specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it had attained a level of civilization never before achieved. ”

So, what does this examination of philosophical anthropology illuminate in terms of questions of human nature and life and death in deeper intellectual, philosophical, dramaturgical context? Now, we are well into the twenty-first century, and with the revolution in information science, the internet, biotechnology and data religion , the promethean view of man seems to have reached new heights. Yet, massive death, by a single virus this time, threatens again humanity; are there any lessons to be learned? Will this threat, apart from the negativity of death, bring back the wisdom, which T. S. Elliot said we have lost in modern times? Will it show us our limits? Will it reduce our conceit and arrogance? Will it make us more humble, moderate, prudent, and more humane for this and future generations, and for the sake of life in this planet at large? These are the questions arising now amongst many circles, and it is likely that old religious and philosophical ideas about virtuous life and the hope of immortality (eschatologically) may revive again as we are well within late modernity (I do not like the term postmodernity, which has been widely used in sociology since the 1980s).

The central argument of this essay has been that death has always been and remains at the centre of life. Philosophically and existentially the meaning of death is problematic, and the natural sciences cannot produce knowledge on this problem. Religious traditions always beheld the immortality of the soul and so argued great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Modernity, since the Enlightenment, rejected such views as anachronistic and advanced an anthropocentric promethean, view of man, at the expense of the sacred and transcendence at large. Instead, within what Taylor (1967: 537–193) has described as the immanent frame, it developed “closed world structures,” which are at the expense of human nature and human freedom. One consequence of this has been massive death during the twentieth century.

Following Levinas ( 2000 ), I argued that death should not be understood to lead to nothingness because nothingness means certitude and positive knowledge, which we cannot have existentially in the case of death. In this sense the reality of death should not be understood to lead to annihilation of life and remains a mystery. Moreover, the presence and the reality of death as a limit and a boundary should serve as educative lesson for both the autonomy and creativity of man and against an overinflated promethean view of her/his nature.

was a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Liverpool until 1995, when he left as Honorary Senior Fellow, and then a research professor in social policy in KEKMOKOP, Panteion University in Athens until 2010. He now lives in 34002, Evia, Greece. He extends his gratitude to Professor Lynne Hunt, his friend from Perth, W. Australia, who read, commented, and edited a draft of this essay.

1 David Martin ( 1980 :16) puts the matter about human and divine autonomy as follows: “Indeed, it is all too easy to phrase the problem so that the autonomy of God and the autonomy of man are rival claimants for what science leaves over”. This concurs with his, ( 1978 :12), understanding of religion, (which I share), as “acceptance of a level of reality beyond the observable world known to science, to which we ascribe meanings and purposes completing and transcending those of the purely human realm”.

2 We do not know how and when human beings acquired this capacity during the evolutionary process of the species. It characterises however a radical shift from nature to culture as the latter is defined by Clifford Geertz (1973:68): “an ordered system of meanings and symbols …in terms of which individuals define their world, express their feelings and make their judgements”.

3 For a comprehensive extensive and impressive account and discussion of Levinas’ philosophy and work, and relevant bibliography, see Bergo ( 2019 ).

4 Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that the meaning of the concept of time, as it was in Cartesian Philosophy and Newtonian physics, has changed radically with Einstein’s theories of relativity and contemporary quantum physics (Heisenberg 1959 ). Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Hilgervood and Uffink, 2016 ) is very relevant to non- deterministic conceptions of time/space and scientific and philosophical discourse generally.

5 Various religions articulate the structure of these meanings in different cultural contexts symbolically and all of them involve the divine and an eschatological metaphysical dimension beyond history, beyond our experience of time and space.

6 Ancient Egyptian culture is well known for its preoccupation with life after death, the immortality of the soul and the elaborate ritual involved in the mummification of the Pharaohs. See: anen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_ Egyptian_ funerary_ practices). Also the findings of archaeological excavations of tombs of kings in all ancient cultures constitute invaluable sources of knowledge not only about the meaning of death and the beliefs and rituals associated with it in these cultures but also of life and religion and politics and society at large.

7 For an extensive account of general theories of the soul in Greek antiquity see: Lorenz ( 2009 ).

8 For a good account on Pythagoras’ views on the transmigration of the souls see: Huffman ( 2018 ).

9 For a recent good account on the diachronic importance of Plato’s philosophy see: Kraut ( 2017 ).

10 For a very extensive analytical account and discussion of Aristotle’s philosophy and work with recent bibliography see: Shields ( 2016 ).

11 For an overview of Phaedo in English with commentary and the original Greek text see: Steadman ( 2015 ).

12 By modernity here is meant the general changes which occurred in western society and culture with the growth of science and technology and the economy, especially after the Enlightenment, and the French and the Industrial Revolutions, which have their cultural roots in the Renaissance, the Reformation and Protestantism.

13 See, for instance, Wilson ( 1969 ) and Martin ( 1978 ) for radically different analyses and interpretations of secularization.

14 Marxism is a good example. God, the sacred and tradition generally are rejected but the proletariat and the Party acquire a sacred significance. The notion of salvation is enclosed as potentiality within history in a closed system of the class struggle. This, however, has direct political consequences because, along with the sacred, democracy is exiled and turned into a totalitarian system. The same is true, of course, at the other end of the spectrum with fascism.

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115 Death Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Death is an inevitable part of life that has been contemplated and explored by humans throughout history. It is a subject that evokes a wide range of emotions and thoughts, from fear and sorrow to curiosity and acceptance. Writing an essay about death can be a profound and thought-provoking experience, allowing individuals to reflect on their own mortality and explore existential questions. To inspire your writing, here are 115 death essay topic ideas and examples.

• The concept of death in different cultures.
• The role of death in religious beliefs.
• The fear of death and its impact on human behavior.
• Death as a theme in literature and poetry.
• The portrayal of death in art and cinema.
• The psychology of grief and mourning.
• The stages of grief according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
• How to cope with the loss of a loved one.
• The impact of death on family dynamics.
• The connection between death and existentialism.
• Near-death experiences and their implications.
• The debate between the existence of an afterlife and oblivion.
• The significance of death rituals and funeral customs.
• The ethics of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
• The right to die: exploring the concept of death with dignity.
• The role of death in philosophical thought.
• Death as a catalyst for personal growth and transformation.
• The impact of death anxiety on mental health.
• Exploring the concept of a "good death."
• The portrayal of death in popular culture.
• Death and the meaning of life.
• The portrayal of death in ancient mythology.
• Death and the concept of time.
• The impact of death on medical ethics.
• The portrayal of death in children's literature.
• The intersection of death and technology.
• Death and the fear of the unknown.
• The impact of death on social media and digital legacies.
• The acceptance of death: exploring different perspectives.
• The role of humor in coping with death.
• Death and the concept of justice.
• The impact of death on religious beliefs and practices.
• The influence of death on artistic expression.
• Death and the concept of free will.
• The portrayal of death in different historical periods.
• Death and the concept of fate.
• The impact of death on the concept of identity.
• Death and the concept of soul.
• Death and the concept of pain.
• The impact of death on medical advancements.
• Death and the concept of forgiveness.
• The portrayal of death in video games.
• Death and the concept of sacrifice.
• The impact of death on cultural traditions.
• Death and the concept of legacy.
• Death and the concept of beauty.
• The portrayal of death in religious texts.
• Death and the concept of morality.
• The impact of death on social structures.
• Death and the concept of justice in different societies.
• The portrayal of death in different artistic mediums.
• Death and the concept of love.
• The impact of death on the concept of time.
• Death and the concept of truth.
• The portrayal of death in different musical genres.
• Death and the concept of suffering.
• The impact of death on the concept of freedom.
• Death and the concept of redemption.
• The portrayal of death in different dance forms.
• Death and the concept of rebirth.
• The impact of death on the concept of beauty.
• Death and the concept of forgiveness in different cultures.
• The portrayal of death in different architectural styles.
• Death and the concept of fate in different societies.
• The impact of death on the concept of identity in different periods.
• Death and the concept of pain in different cultures.
• The portrayal of death in different fashion trends.
• Death and the concept of sacrifice in different religions.
• The impact of death on the concept of legacy in different civilizations.
• Death and the concept of beauty in different art forms.
• The portrayal of death in different culinary traditions.
• Death and the concept of justice in different historical eras.
• The impact of death on the concept of morality in different societies.
• Death and the concept of love in different cultures.
• The portrayal of death in different sports.
• Death and the concept of suffering in different religions.
• The impact of death on the concept of freedom in different periods.
• Death and the concept of redemption in different belief systems.
• The portrayal of death in different circus acts.
• Death and the concept of rebirth in different mythologies.
• The impact of death on the concept of beauty in different civilizations.
• Death and the concept of forgiveness in different cultural practices.
• The portrayal of death in different gardening styles.
• Death and the concept of fate in different belief systems.
• The impact of death on the concept of identity in different societies.
• Death and the concept of pain in different historical periods.
• The portrayal of death in different interior design trends.
• Death and the concept of sacrifice in different cultural practices.
• Death and the concept of beauty in different fashion trends.
• The portrayal of death in different music genres.
• The impact of death on the concept of morality in different periods.
• The portrayal of death in different film genres.
• The impact of death on the concept of freedom in different societies.
• The portrayal of death in different theater styles.
• The portrayal of death in different dance styles.
• The portrayal of death in different visual art forms.
• Death and the concept of beauty in different architectural styles.
• The portrayal of death in different literary genres.

Whether you choose to explore the philosophical, cultural, psychological, or artistic aspects of death, these essay topic ideas provide a wide range of possibilities to delve into this profound subject. Remember to approach the topic with sensitivity and respect, as death is a deeply personal and meaningful experience for many individuals.

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Life and Death Essay

As life and death exist, so do arguments over whether or not death exists at a certain point, or when life truly begins. It goes without the necessity of mentioning that life and death have been and remain to be controversial subjects in a variety of contexts, be it legal, medical, scientific, or even religious. Regardless, this constant controversy has been influenced mostly in part of religious organizations and public interest groups. For the longest time people have looked down upon things such as abortions because they interfere with what their religious law tells them. This religion aspect has pull on not only life, but also on death- as many thoughts and beliefs about the end of life are religious, such as concepts as heaven, hell, rebirth, and afterlife to name a few. On the other hand, groups such as Planned Parenthood advocate more for the life and well-being of mothers than fetuses. This point is not for argument, just a statement of fact. The concept of life, then must differ drastically if one group is to shame abortion for being “murder” while another advocates for it to save lives. This concept of life, and what life is to different people and groups often starts from as early as conception.

There is no set in stone point at which life begins that has been widely agreed upon. That out of the way, I can discuss a few different arguments on the beginning of life. Many folks, more traditionally valued and right wing, tend to believe a life starts at conception. The cells of a human being are present, and therefore a human life has begun. A common argument among these “pro-lifers” is that a fetus has working and functioning human parts, such as limbs, or organs. This argument is also typically supported with religion being a basis for the morality of the decision of deciding what life is. Meanwhile, another common viewpoint on the beginning of life is that life begins as soon as a baby is born. This argument seems to be favored more by liberal, progressively idealed people versus the more conservative viewpoint aforementioned. Arguments include that since a fetus simply cannot function as a human being, interacting and learning; breathing air and being conscious are not facts of this amniotic “life”. More science is looked into in the basis of this argument, as solid, logical reason defines life from this point of view. Nonetheless, as much as the beginning of life sparks controversy among people, the end of it seems to spark just a bit more.

Death. Death seems on the surface to be more concrete; a more solid, matter-of-fact process than conception. Death is widely agreed upon as being the ending of a human life- but what the ending of that life really means is what initiates so much debate.  There are many arguments as to what death really is, and especially as to what death means. Death, to some is simply a rite of passage onto another life, while to others, death can be a solid end. A point of no return, a Game Over sequence on the longest game of them all. Still and all, the concept of what’s after death is for later discussion. Death can be defined in a number of ways, medically, biologically, even legally. These different ways to define death have given people many different ways to interpret death in societies new and old. A scientific view on death can be that one truly dies when their brain activity ceases; the flow of consciousness and action simply stops in its’ tracks. Biologically, death is seen as the point in which all biological functions that sustain human life are terminated. Heartbeats stop; lungs breathe their last breath, and brains come to a complete and total halt. This biological argument is the main agreement on what the end of life is, however, it’s what comes after that’s open to mass human interpretation.

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Human life is the ability to consciously assert one’s existence to another human being. It does not entail remembering your actions, but as long as one can communicate, be it by word of mouth or sign language, and see, hear, or feel they are getting a response, they are alive. Human life entails the ability to communicate in any way, shape, or form, with your fellow man. Communication, then is seen as key in my argument, which I think seems to be the number one facet of human life, and intelligence as a whole. Communication is how we work; isolation is simply unhealthy for one and can be outright deadly. Not to ramble on death of course, but the fact is if there’s no way for you to consciously communicate with your fellow people, you’re not alive. One may beg the question of, “What about comatose people?” or “How about the disabled?” Look at it from this perspective. You weren’t born comatose; and you definitely can communicate if you’re disabled. A complete lack of communication- starting at one’s birth- defines my idea of the lack of life. One can be considered alive if they have fallen into a coma, or lost their senses of sight, hearing, or ability of speech. Once a human life, always a human life- that is, until Death.

Death, the termination of life, however is when one is biologically dead. No more, no less. If your body simply cannot function as a human, you’re dead. This can come early, or naturally; forced, or begged for. Life ends when the last neuron fires; the last breath taken, last pump of the heart. It is not always peaceful or pretty, but death is definitely the marker and point in time at which one ceases to exist on the biological plane. Yes, one’s body may physically exist, however, it remains a lifeless lump once death has truly been reached.

Life begins at birth. The first breath of air marks the first breath of life, and life only exists if a baby is outside of it’s mother’s womb. This means that fetuses would not be considered human life, and this is because a fetus does not breathe air; it does not perform human functions, it cannot consciously communicate with other humans, and it is still technically a growth off of its’ mother as long as its’ umbilical cord is intact. Once a baby is freed of its’ lifeline and forced to start crying for its’ nourishment it is truly considered human. Life, however ends at the ceasing of any and all brain activity. Be it premature or not, it is still death if a brain is completely nonfunctioning. A body’s heart may have stopped beating; lungs stopped breathing- but if brain activity is still recorded and present, someone is still alive. Life and consciousness have quite a close relationship looking at it from this perspective. One may be biologically deceased but as long as brain activity can be detected the life is not all lost. For instance, people on life support are still alive if they’re conscious and aware of their failing body parts. This also means that if someone’s organs are being kept run on life support while the brain is for all intensive purposes dead, the human life is lost. If one is unconscious and no brain activity can be monitored, they are deceased.

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The Meaning of Life Through Death, Essay Example

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Death is noted as the final stage of everything; the final strand that puts a person or any living creature at that to its end. The wonders of life simply make death rather ‘boring’. However, there are instances when death itself offers a new challenge that people tend to make peace with. One issue is how they would be able to survive the life before and after death. Confusing as it may, people do have an inkling on what will happen next after death; this is especially true for those who may have terminal health cases who may have not planned dying but wanted to accept it as a part of their ‘fate’ and yet are still wanting to make the best out of it. This may also be true of those who may be facing death with particular issues, a matter of being passed on by responsibilities by whosoever might die before them. These thoughts often develop fear among those involved in the situation. In the story Your Fears are Justified by Rick DeMarinis, and Survivors by Kim Addonizio, it could be understood that both assumptions about death and the worries that come along with it are all accounted for and valid to be realized by those involved in it. These short stories present life in a rather odd situation, but within a real context that define the reality of life to those who perfectly knew that their life has been cut short and that they should make a decision to make their time worthwhile before its end comes. In the discussion that follows, a focus on the theme of doubtful death shall be given attention to; addressing the doubts of the people whose lives have been presented in the stories, this analysis shall define what death does to those who know it is their time, and what changes does it actually make upon a person’s being and behavior towards life itself.

In the story Survivors by Kim Addonizio, the theme directs beyond the constraints of death. Being that the characters share a supposedly loving relationship between two males, the issue of ‘who goes first’ presents a rather crucial scenario that the survivor must be able to endure until he dies. The presentation of the situation takes the vision of one of the male partners who wishes to die first because of AIDS. His desire to die is dependent on the lack of courage to face life without his partner because of the many complications it may present him. One is that of the need to deal with the parents of his partner who would eventually become his responsibility. Although the mother may not be as adamant to the situation that he and their son is sharing, she does not approve of it either. It was also noted that the father of his partner was strictly against their ‘living situation’. The partner also has a parrot, a pet who seems to represent more than just the partner of the male individual whose vision is being presented in the story. Freedom is one theme that this story tends to explore. The parrot, being planned to be set free by the man after he partner dies implicates more than just the desire of the other individual to be alone after the other dies, it also represents the desire to be free from any responsibility; a reason why he actually wanted to die first. This fear of complications continue to linger in his mind as he wishes to go first, although it may seem that the signs are saying that his partner is clearly to ‘go’ earlier; a fact that would make it harder for him to face the last years of his life carrying the burden of taking care of his partner’s parrot and parents at the same time as he deals with his own health and gender issues.

Meanwhile, the story Your Fears are Justified by Rick DeMarinis presents a dying man with brain tumor. His case is rather terminal, a matter that specifically worries him. In the narration, it could be considered that the man has not come to settle with the situation yet. This could be observed through the beginning of the story where the patient narrates how he knew there was a bomb in the plane. His heart beat fast as if wanting to explode, and yet he tried to calmly deal with it. In a way, he knew he was dying anyway; that there was no reason to falter in the face of the particularly dangerous situation. Although he was calm, it does not mean he has already accepted his death; observably, the narration further implicates how nervous he was of the situation. Upon arriving at the hospital, he was placed beside a heart patient who was seemingly in need of a heart donor. The repetitive questioning and glancing of the couples from the other side of the bed specifically gave the narrator a distinct distaste of the situation. He did not approve of their though; as if waiting for him to die so that they can have his heart. In the end of the story, the line “ yes, there is no hope, some fuses are duds, some tumors are benign, some heart patients recover on their own…you have time to change your life ”, shows how the narrator is trying to come up with a final decision on whether or not to make his heart available for others to use as donor part for other patients. True, it might not be that easy to decide on matters such as this one. Only those who have accepted their situation and the status of their life and their health would be able to willingly offer their organs for donation. Such inconclusive acceptance of the situation poses a distinct source of fear for most individuals who know it is already time to let go; as they fight for the possibility of stretching the length of their life, it may be hard to take into account the fact that they are already dying. However, such state of mind could be achieved if a person is willing to accept that he is to leave the world and he is in need of leaving a legacy of his existence behind. Only and only because of this would the character in this story be able to come into terms with his situation and the decision he has to make about the meaning that his death is going to take.

Evidently, as seen from these particular stories, it could be understood that there are different reasons why people tend to face death with great fear. Being scared for themselves and being scared for those whom they love is a specifically valid reason for fear. As presented in the first story, one of the reasons for fearing death is the result that it may have on the loved ones that are to be left behind. The complications of life and the choices one make are supposed to end when death comes to end his life; however, this is not true for those whom they love and those whom they have shared their lives with. Relatively, the real fear over such situation involves the need of the loved ones left behind to thrive with whatever consequences of the decisions made by the dying man. After death, those decisions and choices would have a great impact on the lives of the ones he would leave behind. Relatively, this is the reason why it is important that a person thinks of others too before they actually meet with situations that questions their capacity to change things. On the other hand, other reasons for fear against death include the desire to leave a legacy; a meaning that would not only define their existence by the value that their life would have for others. For the second story noted in this discussion, it has been proven that the legacy that one leaves when he does specifically provides a great impact on how the value of his life is realized by others [whether or not they have a connection to the people they are likely to give meaning to]. The character of the second story still has a chance to change the course of his life through giving it a more meaningful value to others who might be able to use his body parts [which at some point would not have use for him after he dies]. Such a decision can only be made once he accepts that it is a rather more meaningful decision to make sure that his life would have better worth to others even after he dies. This decision is not an easy condition to accept nor make. Take into account those individuals who may be living at the peak years of their active lives when they get diagnosed with terminal health cases. It would be acceptable to note that they would experience a considerable point of disappointment; as for a fact, most individuals undergo a point of denial before they could actually take into account the reality of the situations they are subjected to. Only after getting through the point of denial would they be able to make reasonable decisions that would be able to establish more meaning to their existence even after they have died.

Overall, it could be understood that death is already a part of living. Although it may post a sense of ‘ending’ to everything, people still have different concerns regarding the need to face and accept its existence. Most of the time, understanding it, facing it and accepting its reality are three different issues that a person needs to give attention to; especially for those who seem to have no choice but to accept it. People with terminal health cases are however given a better chance to make sure that their death would have a meaningful impact on others. Depending on the stories that have been examined herein, the characters involved in each narrative are facing death as an unavoidable part of their being; a matter that cannot be stopped anymore. While this may be scary, this particular situation also provides them with a good sense of controlling matters and make sure that their death would not be the end of everything else. Preparing for the things that might come ahead provides them a good sense of control on how they are able to affect others positively. Unlike others who die abruptly, individuals who have been diagnosed with terminal cases could draw a time line in accordance with time still left for them to live to make sure that those days or years would be meaningful enough to prepare the ones they love for the instance when they are already gone. Fixing their decisions and making sure that their loved ones would not be burdened with their death is a chance given to them to make their lives more meaningful. Making sure that their lives would have better meaning through becoming organ donors is also an important aspect of preparing for death. Nevertheless, fear will always be a part of all these procedures. However, with acceptance and realization of death as a mere chance to leave a better legacy with the people they love and the people they hope to affect, people facing death would be able to face such life’s fact with a more positive attitude. Through this, death does not need to be the end of everything, but a chance to define one’s legacy, establishing the value of life that one has lived with; something that his loved ones would be able to remember with much pride and fulfillment.

Addonizio, K. Survivors. DeMarinis, R. Your Fears are Justified.

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242 Death Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best death topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on death, 📌 most interesting death topics to write about, ✅ simple & easy death essay titles, 💡 good research topics about death, ✍️ death essay topics for college, ❓ interesting questions about death.

• The Death of My Grandmother and Lessons Learnt Often the loss of a grandmother is the first loss in life, which only complicates the feelings experienced. The loss of my grandmother was the biggest tragedy that has happened to me.
• Life After Death In many religions across the world, people belief in life after death and also being born again in the world after an individual. Life after death is the belief in the continuation of life after […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Dealing With the Death of a Grandfather In my mind, I never expected grandpa to depart from us, and when he finally did, I felt that God was so unfair to me because He should have left grandpa to see my children.
• Death Ceremonies in Luhya Tribe This tribe is called the Luhya tribe and is one of the 42 tribes of the Republic of Kenya. This is because a clan might actually size to exist due to the death of a […]
• Detailed Coronial Analysis of a Chest Pain Related Death The coroner’s report reviewed in this paper is for the patient AD who was brought to the emergency department by the Queensland Ambulance Service with the diagnosis of the acute coronary syndrome.
• Life After Death: Christianity and Islam Perspectives The afterlife, or the resurrection, is the purpose of most religions. This is the question we ask when we talk of the afterlife and the resurrection.
• The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Death and the Afterlife The main purpose of the Gilgamesh myth is to illustrate the weakness of man in the face of destiny. By the time this dream appears in the story, the reader is already aware Enkidu is […]
• Plato on Death: Comparison With Aristotle Afterlife – Essay on Life After Death Philosophy On the other hand, religion has maintained that the soul is immortal and survives the death of the body. Plato argued that the soul is immortal and therefore survives the death of the body.
• Are the Witches Responsible for Duncan’s Death? For example, Banquo was given good news by the witches about the likelihood of his children becoming kings and yet he did not rush to murder as it’s in the Macbeth’s case.
• Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection End of life care for my mother took a toll on me, and I had to reevaluate my aspirations to see whether I treated life as an endless path.
• “Sylvia’s Death” by Anne Sexton The poem “Sylvia’s Death” by Anne Sexton is devoted, as the title suggests, to the death of poet Sylvia Plath. The poem itself is like a monologue or a short speech devoted to Sylvia and […]
• “Death and Justice” by Edward I. Koch Although the issue of the death penalty is quite controversial, it is the most effective deterrence and the fairest justice that can be done to the victims of the most serious offenses.
• The Peculiarities of Discussing the Theme of Death in Poetry and Prose The question of this fringe helps to emphasize the problem of the lovers’ separation.”The separation of the soul from the body, and the separation of lovers from each other, is not an ending but the […]
• Sea Otters’ Life Cycle From Birth to Death However, after the species had almost become extinct and their protection began, the species began to recover and towards the close of the 20th century, conservation had given rise to tens of thousands of sea […]
• Death and the Afterlife: A Spiritual World After Death The spiritual world for people means the immortality of their souls, which is in general highly important from the point of view of religion and philosophy.
• Late Adulthood and Death This paper examines ageism and the stereotypes associated with late adulthood; how individuals can promote health and wellness in late adulthood; the importance of relationships and social interactions; and personal attitudes towards death in late […]
• “Death” by Thomas Nagel: The Issue of Death and How People Think of It In a way, this contradicts his above reasoning that if there is no one to experience the loss of good life, then the absence of suffering and realization is not bad at all.
• Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Most of these studies focused on the incidences of SIDS, factors that are responsible for the condition, and the possible measures that could be put in place to reduce the incidence of the condition.
• The Probable Cause of Marilyn Monroe’s Death She had many lovers, many admirers, she associated with the rich and powerful, but in the end, she was so emotionally and psychologically troubled that when she died in 1962, with bottles of drugs beside […]
• Perspectives of Death In the different interpretations of death, there is a section of people that believe death is the final stage in the life journey of both human beings and plants.
• The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf It was as if they were mindful of what had happened to the moth but in truth these creatures were simply taking a break.
• Philosophy: “Death” Essay by Thomas Nagel Therefore, the first element of viewing death is evil that the author examines is the contrast of this occurrence to life, which is perceived as good.
• A Systematic Study of Suffering and Death in Christianity There exist six major perspectives that try to explain the meaning and existence of suffering in Christianity: First, the Bible exploits well the subject of suffering; it does not leave it to the believers’ own […]
• Cleopatra’s Life, From Her Ascension to the Throne to Solemn Death The bond between Antony and Cleopatra continued to strengthen and resulted in the return of most of Egypt’s empires that had been conquered by the Romans.
• Death and Dying in Christianity and Buddhism Birth and death are part of everybody’s life: birth is the beginning of living, and death is the end of it.
• Worldviews in Religions on the Aspect of Death and Afterlife The essay compares and contrasts the worldviews of Christianity, medieval Buddhist and Muslim on the aspect of death and afterlife and is covered as follows.
• Why Are We Afraid of Death? However, it can be interesting to understand why the rest of the people are so afraid of death. People are afraid of the unknown.
• Modern Christianity View and Perspective on Death and Dying Some Christians believe that death is safe to the people of God and that it is a necessity to fit in the complete delight of God.
• Analysis of Nagel’s Death: The Assumptions and Theories He explained death as the end of living; this meant the life of an individual would be terminated at the time of death.
• All Are Equal in Death Death refers to the lasting termination of all life’s tasks in a human being. Death chances on its prey in the middle of their actions and strikes equally to all.
• “Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa” The conflict is expressed in how the author describes her culture shock when introduced to the native women’s way of treating children or the procedure of female genital mutilation, for that matter.
• Experience With Death in Personal Life Facing death is an ordeal because it leads to nervousness, prolonged sadness, and pain of loss. Third, facing death is an ordeal because we feel the pain of loss.
• Protests Over the Death of George Floyd The suspect was cooperating with the officers who instead treated him harshly and pinned him to the ground against the police conduct.
• The Theme of Death in Literary Works The Duke reflects on the death of the Duchess and finding a new mistress to please him. The significance of the use of dramatic monologue is that it distinguishes the poet from the main speaker […]
• Death and Suffering: War Opposing Viewpoints The number of human casualties is very much alarming Take the case of the Second World War. It is considered to be the worst and the most deadly war ever fought in the history of […]
• Life After Death: Scientific and Religious Answers Is there a life after death? In any way, there is no life after death.
• Death and Dying in Modern Christianity This is well elaborated in the bible as an explanation of the reward to the righteous and the justices that will be accorded to the evil.
• The Kind of Sara’s Death: Medical and Religious Aspects Sara Monopoli’s problems had started with a cough and a pain in her back and by the time, the doctors discovered that it was lung cancer; the disease had already spread to the lining of […]
• Buddhism: The Concept of Death and Dying Life is permanent but death is the transition of a human soul to either one of the six Buddhist realms. The purpose of this paper is to explain the concept of death from the Buddhist […]
• The Theme of Death in the World of Literature Important is the fact that the death is personified in the poem and has the role of the gentleman. The death is presented as a powerful element of the poem and of the narrator’s life […]
• Ethical Issues of Death and Dying The aim of the end of life care is to ensure that the dying person encounters the least discomfort during the dying process.
• The Concepts of Death and Afterlife in Religious Beliefs I find it most interesting how human societies tend to come up with the idea of the temporal nature of death due to the cycles of seasons and the day and night that they witnessed […]
• Death in Psychological and Personal Understanding Of course, young people are often ignorant of this issue, but there is always certain period when people have to face the problem. I believe people have to think about death when they are young […]
• From Birth to Death: Human’s Destiny The reason people seem to be so attached to Facebook and blogs is because they think this is their primary means of communicating and connecting to the world.
• Reflection on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “On Death” We are not aware what happens at the moment of death or after it and seek to find the answers to the questions raised by Shelley in the poem “On Death”.
• Death & Mourning Rituals in China The unique beliefs put into the basis of Chinese philosophy, particularly those concerning the phenomena of death and dying may have a significant impact upon the patients’ attitudes and decision in the end-of-life care and […]
• The Elephant in the Room: Existentialism and the Denial of Death In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Peter Ivanovich experiences a chilling moment as he contemplates his own mortality in light of the long and painful period of torture and agony that befell his colleague […]
• Environmental Pollution and Increased Birds Death The increase in the population of different animals may also cause the death of birds. This leads to the extinction of some animals and birds hence massive death.
• Good Life and Death for Humans and Other Animals As such, the question of what is a “good life” and a “good death” both for humans and animals raises many arguments and opinions, some of which are so remarkably contradictory that it seems strange […]
• Self-Reflection on Life Values, Goals, and Death I want my life to be full of genuine relationships despite how challenging it is to find and cultivate such bonds in modern society.
• Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas Loss-related grief hurts and is frequently intolerable, and it can be challenging to maintain a good outlook on life when one is in pain.
• Atkinson’s Death Penalty Article: Rebuttal Argument Regardless of unrealistic and irrelevant assertions about therapeutic jurisprudence, the death sentence is an efficient deterrence and punishment mechanism when seen within the context of vigilante justice and as a part of the current legal […]
• Restorative Justice and the Death Penalty Draft thesis: The death penalty, when viewed under the retributive justice framework and as a part of the existing justice system, is an effective deterrent and punishment measure irrespective of impractical and irrelevant restorative justice […]
• The Death Definition and the Need for Euthanasia If the concept of the soul is to be believed in, then one’s death is simply a process that detaches the soul from the body.
• Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty Furthermore, the defense and, in the United States, the prosecution has the right of vexatious challenge, which allows it to confront several participants without providing a reason.
• Heracles’ Death in Women of Trachis and Modern Perspective The concept of a good death changes over time, and what was considered a good and glorifying death in ancient times may be terrifying today.
• Psychology: The Aftermath of a Death Thus it is necessary to analyze the emotions and experiences of others in order to have a general idea of the problems that occur in different people.
• The Wisdom of Silenus: The Meaning of Life & Death When thinking about this idea, it is difficult to take any specific point of view about it because the meaning of life primarily lies in the process of a lifetime; making any goal the meaning […]
• Can There Be Agreement as to What Constitutes Human Death From a biological point of view, death is considered a natural fact of the termination of life due to the exhaustion of the body’s vital resources.
• Medical Ethics and Life & Death Decisions I believe there is no need to use medical technology if the patient’s condition is too severe to react to treatment, such as attempting a prolonged treatment for metastatic cancer.
• Low Vitamin D and Risk of Premature Death Categories of clear communication index, including the Main Message and Call to Action, Language, Information Design, State of the Science, Behavioral Recommendations, Numbers, and Risks, will evaluate the general consumer publication.
• The Black Death: Causes and Reactions This paper discusses the causes of the Black Death, human contribution to the spread of the disease, and describes the responses to the Black Death.
• Media Journal Assignment: Elijah McClain’s Death The death of a young Elijah was quite a shocking revelation about injustice that is taking place in the country. It demonstrates the social solidarity of people on the injustice that has taken a place.
• The Impact of Martin Luther King’s Death Luther King’s personality, his life, and his death caused more significant changes in expanding the rights of the African American people.
• “Death on Demand Is Not Death With Dignity” by Debra Saunders The author uses the example of Brittany Maryland, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer and moves to Oregon as assisted suicide is legal there.
• Impact of Divorce vs. Death of Loved One On the contrary, suffering as a result of divorce is similar to experiencing a loved one’s death in many aspects. In my view, the impact of divorce and the death of a loved one should […]
• Social Causes of Suicide: Sex, Race, Ethnicity, Age Group, and Mechanism of Death Suicide is one of the top ten main causes of death in the United States, making it a major issue. The suicide rate in the West is higher than in the South, Midwest, and Northeast.
• Euthanasia: Nurses’ Attitudes Towards Death The weakest part of the article is that most of the participants did not clearly define the concept of euthanasia, which casts doubt on the reliability of the sampled data.
• Health Policy to Solve Premature Death Inequality Further, the policy will teach the community about the dangers of drug and substance abuse and how it relates to premature deaths.
• Newspaper Coverage of Adolf Hitler’s Death It marks the end of the era of the terrible events of the Holocaust, the seizure of Poland, the extermination of millions of people.
• Impact of Intentional Death Problem Moreover, the negative consequences of euthanasia are the devaluation of human life, violation of the equality of people before the law, medical duty, and the structure of the doctor-patient relationship.
• Tyler Skaggs’s Death Reminding About Opioid Crisis The case of Tyler Skaggs serves as a reminder of the problem that is crucial in the United States nowadays the opioid crisis.
• Attitude Towards Death Essay: Life-Span Development Therefore, I try to maintain respect for this phenomenon and thereby try to enjoy every moment of life so as not to regret anything on my deathbed. It became an increasingly sensitive topic to me […]
• Death Case Insanity: Application of a Treatment to a Convict It is possible that this forcible application of a treatment to a convict may find expressions elsewhere in the future, using the case discussed in the article as a catalyst.
• Medical Error as Causes of Preventable Death One of the notable examples of significant damage to patient health due to a medical error in our hospital was the case of LIS caused by rapid correction of hyponatremia.
• The Investigation of Rigor Mortis: Method to Determine the Time of Death One of the methods to determine the time of death is the investigation of rigor mortis. Considering the state of the body, it is possible to determine the time of death using the progression of […]
• Death and Funeral Customs of the Ainu and Nuer Peoples The high level of interest in the thematic is due to transformations in the rituals that indicate changes in the social order and conditions of its existence.
• Death and Stages of Grief However, such an understanding can be questioned due to the invention of life support devices and the development of the death of the brain concept.
• Experiences of the Death of Spouse In order to elaborate the appropriate one, it is crucial to address Maslow’s Human Motivation and Hierarchy of Basic Human Needs.
• Regulated Cell Death Induced by Membrane-Interacting Peptide Amphiphiles Media from the cells will be removed and replaced with the fluorescent dilution media and incubated for 45 minutes. For visualization, the PA solution with 1 wt% of a fluorescent analog will be used.
• Death Perspectives in Epicurus’ Theory Starting with the assumptions that fear of this phenomenon is one of the most important stimuli in the life of people and ending with the suggestions that death is not bad for the deceased, thinkers […]
• Understanding of the Death Concept by Children The death component of irreversibility involves the child’s ability to conceptualize that death is permanent and the dead never return to life.
• Researching of Why Human Beings Fear Death From the religious perspective, some people know about their sins committed on earth in their life and are afraid of the punishment for those sins as opposed to people who believe in God and His […]
• Atherosclerosis: St. Louis Cardinal’s Death The function of the arteries is to carry oxygenated blood from the heart to other parts of the body, while the function of the veins is to transport deoxygenated blood from other organs to the […]
• Circumstances and Facts Behind the Death of Pamela Langley This memorandum highlights the circumstances and facts behind the death of Pamela Langley and the subsequent trial of the accused, Mr.
• Women’s Life Stories: Maori Sudden Infant Death Keeping in mind the analysis of both – modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors in relation to SIDS, it becomes obvious that equal attention is to be paid to biological and behavioral variables along with social […]
• Wrongful Death: How to Prove Legally That Death Was Wrongful The plaintiff sued the vehicle’s driver, County and the driver’s defendant on behalf of the decedent’s estate and as a family member.
• Mr. B’s Death: Valium Case However, this was not the case as the patient was only monitored for the blood pressure and the saturation of oxygen without monitoring the pulse rate and the breathing rhythm.
• The Line Between Life and Death: The Terri Schiavo Case A clear definition of a person who is alive is important in order to be able to make decisions about patients in a vegetative state.
• A Psychological Perspective on Death and Mourning The psychological perspective in health psychology is interested in trying to explain how biological, environmental, and psychological factors have influenced and affected health psychology and also the prevention and treatment of illness and diseases.
• Death Rates and Causes: Global Health Assessment Furthermore, it has been recognized that both methods of research are applicable within the cultural context as well within the context of beliefs and perceptions of the individuals the conducts the research and individuals that […]
• Heart Disease: Cell Death During Myocardial Infarction This process is known as the non-reversible cell injury because of the changes in the cell structure and functions when the cell membrane is damaged, and the cell dies.
• The Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Ordinal variables show a “clear ordering of the categories”. In a ratio scale, the size interval represents a ratio or proportion of the total values.
• A Root Cause Analysis for Mr. B’s Death Without the tools, the doctor could neither measure the response to the sedation appropriately nor sense when the situation of the patient was worsening.
• Alzheimer Related Morbidity and Death Among New Yorkers Generally, Alzheimer disease is a form of dementia, which inflicts a loss of memory, thinking and behavior. The proportion of ethnic and racial diversity in the US is increasing.
• Vibrio Cholerae: Death by Diarrhoea Although it is widely believed that Vibrio cholerae is a human pathogen, implying that human beings serve as the natural host, it has the capacity to persist and survive in the absence of a human […]
• The Book “On Death and Denying” by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross According to Kubler-Ross, the stage of denial is the first in the grieving process. According to the Bible, Job says, “shall we not accept the good things that God does and adversities?” This is an […]
• The Death of a Loved One: Methods of Coping for the Elderly Prior to the start of the study, Mr.G.stated he did not remember the information the researcher had discussed and did not remember signing the consent.
• Abortion-Related-Maternal Death in Dominican Republic There is need to focus the effort in pressuring the lawmakers to respect the rights of women. The Dominican law prohibits women from abortion even the life of woman and the child is in danger.
• Problem of Death and Bereavement: Case Studies The life of a newborn child, no matter how disabled or handicapped it may be, is guarded by the ‘sanctity of human life’ doctrine, and the wishes of the parents or the prospects of the […]
• Death From Preventable Injuries: Predicting When Emergency Surgery Is Needed as Early as Possible The first attempt to quantify this occurred in 1999 when, at the instigation of a presidential task force, the Institute of Medicine extrapolated findings from three states to estimate that from 44,000 to 98,000 people […]
• Trauma and Death in World Literature and Films The themes of trauma and death unite the novel “The Day of the Locust” by Nathaniel West, the short story “Grief” by Scholastique Mukasonga, and the short film The Neighbors ‘Window by Marshall Curry.
• The Death of Hybrid Bodies in Literature and Cinematography The death itself is not always physical, it is the mental process of rejection or accommodation to the surrounding world, as the beast’s metamorphosis and integration into the human life paradigm is also a certain […]
• Hindu Death Rites and Provision of the End-of-Life Care Hindus have a particular perception of death and what happens to a person in the afterlife, shaping the appropriate for them end-of-life care.
• Global Inequity in Preventable Maternal Death Hence, in the framework of the international governance lens, discussions on the alienation of global inequity within the prevention of maternal deaths are relevant and reasonable to provide.
• The Role of Cocaine in the Death of Len Bias The primary focus of this paper is to analyze the existence of cocaine, its consumption, and connected public opinion at the end of the 20th century studying life and death of Len Bias, a renowned […]
• OSHA: Death Caused by Ladder Falls The first one is selecting the wrong type of ladder, which stems from the lack of understanding of essential tools. The most common cause of ladder accidents is the incorrect use of them.
• Magellan’s Death in the Philippines and Captain Cook’s Death in Hawaii Captain Cook was a surveyor in the royal navy and in 1778, he made his first trip to the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiians were very hospitable to the captain and his crew.
• Suffering of Death Organs: Organ Donors and Transplantation The author begins the article by discussing how the past cessation of breathing used to be one of the recognized signs of death and how the development of the iron lung and later the artificial […]
• U1 IP Medicolegal Death Investigation There is one more problem: the bigger the interval between the death time and the body found, the more inaccurate will be the estimation.
• Line-of-Duty Death (LODD) or Critical Injury A group of persons with knowledge on the insurance policies of the company should be appointed to render assistance to the family in the filing of claim forms.
• The Chinese Belief on Death and Dying These distinctions are visible due to several cultures act of subjecting to an influencing experience of death in the African perspective, the keeping with the nature of the Bible or its times, the people from […]
• When Butterflies Die: Alvarez and Her Idea of Death Considering a loss as a chance to take a closer look at ourselves, Alvarez interprets the old idea of drinking the honey and throwing away the bee, applying it to people’s subconscious and suggesting to […]
• Death and Terminal Illnesses Some of the diseases under this category are heart diseases in the advanced stages and to some extent cancer.”In popular use, terminal conditions indicate diseases which will end the life of the sufferers in a […]
• Greek Attitude Towards Death and Afterlife The thoughts about death and the beyond can send shivers down the spine of a contemporary person and the attitude of ancient Greeks to death was practically the same.
• Nature of Self, Death, and Ethics in Buddhism The state of ultimate reality is pervasive and it builds the foundation of being and the source of energy in every atom and the life of every creature.
• Death in TV-Series “Six Feet Under” The paradox that is based on the conventional fear of death and the perception of death almost as one more member of the family cannot but leave a significant sign on each member of the […]
• The Duty to Die. “Going to Meet Death” by John Hardwig This approach is considered with the fact of how these loved ones should, on the one hand, bear all those condemnations and disagreements with life and words about soon death along with a perpetual presence […]
• Wit by Margaret Edson How to Face Death Through the story, the writer explains the tragic life of the Professor and how she recalls the story of her life which she spent without anybody to care and love for.
• Denial of Death in Major Religions I will agree at this point that the God that both the Christians serve and the Muslims is the same God because both religions believe that this supreme God is not comparable and will never […]
• The Western Corpse: Are We a Death-Denying Society? This belief in the body as merely a shell is also assisted by the fact that the corpse in modern times is no longer prepared for disposal by the loving hands of the friends and […]
• Clinical Ethics of Death and Dying Patients Some factors that must be considered when taking a patient off a Ventilator, and the possibility of an End Of Life Decision, are the patient’s age, Multiple Organ Dysfunction Scores, the future outlook for the […]
• The Death of George Washington He is considered to be one of the most prominent politicians in the history of the United States. The twentieth century was marked with increased attention to the death of George Washington.
• Spiritual and Psychological Forms of Death As these are applied to cancer patients, they often involve identifying the patient’s pattern of negative stress-related beliefs and the environmental triggers for such beliefs.
• Death Sentence to Muslim Terrorists: Should We Murder People Who Had Done the Same Before? In my opinion, the aim to punish is not the most important in this, but we should try to avoid the same crimes in the future, and that is the aim of Mankind.
• Brain Death: Medical Analysis If death is defined as the loss of breathing and the loss of the heartbeat, which are both based on the proper functioning of the brain, then it can then be subjectively derived that life […]
• The Theme of Death in Fiction-Writing Nevertheless, while it is emotional, having to deal with death, the pain of losing a son, and having to deal with the sympathy of people around them, the story disguised the emotion of the individuals […]
• Aging and Death Relations The growth of damages in the organ elements that are required for the creation of new cells of the body leads to death.
• The Concept of Death as Depicted in the Iraq War It is a fact that the most prominent and evident aspect of the war is the phenomenon of death. The reactions of people to the thought of death depend on how death is represented through […]
• Ancient Conceptions of Death and the Afterlife Although the specific elements of the religion of the mostly pagan society of the composer of Beowulf around 1000 AD is fundamentally different from the Christian religion of Alfred Lord Tennyson who wrote Morte D’Arthur […]
• Final Wishes Before Death The better your visualization and your solutions to the problems that you have envisaged, the better is the peace that reigns in your home after you pass away.
• Death-Denying Culture Among Patients The author has argued that society has become a death-denying society where prolonging life becomes a test of the machines and technology that is bent on prolonging death.
• Life Sentence vs. Death Sentence: Discussion For the Federal Crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington D. In 1969, Terry Melcher visited Spahn Ranch to hear a musical performance by Manson and […]
• Healthy People 2020: Death Causes & Health Indicators Healthy People 2020 is a science-based governmental program designed to track progress on the national goals for improving public health in the United States. The scope of Healthy People 2020 is broad.
• Death Causes and Health Indicators in Georgia, US The analysis of the leading causes of death across the country identifies the most problematic health issues on the national scale.
• Overview of Sudden Death Infant Syndrome The cause of death in SIDS remains inexplicable in spite of a thorough examination of history and a detailed postmortem. In the United States of SIDS is the leading cause of post-neonatal infant mortality.
• Low-Carb Diets as a Cause of Premature Death There are various claims and misconceptions in the field of nutrition due to the fact that it is highly difficult to identify the core influencing factors.
• Emily Dickinson and Death as a Theme in Her Poetry Using the theme of death, the author says that she has to cut her connections with the world and anticipates death.
• Philosophical Perspectives on Death and Dying These are fear of premature death, fear of the idea of death, fear of the dying process, fear of the death of significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of being destroyed, fear of the […]
• Death in the Work of Danticat, Marshall and Roumaine The despair of Celianne in “Children of the Sea” as she throws herself into the ocean is felt by the male narrator of the same story when he embraces death and by Grace’s mother in […]
• Terri Schiavo’s Patient Rights and Death Euthanasia is the process of stopping the medical maintenance of a patient’s life when the patient/herself does not want to suffer anymore and the doctors are sure that no improvements in the patient’s condition are […]
• A Matter of Life and Death Compositional Elements Through the usage of color scheme, props, and the setting of the last mise en scene, A Matter of Life and Death facilitated the propagandist message of Anglo-American understanding within the pursuit of individual happiness.
• Death in the Western Hemisphere This paper aims to examine the concept of death and dying and the perception of the two notions in Western cultures.
• Ethics of Organ Donation After Human Death In reference to this case, the ethical dilemma is related to the fact that the hospital administrator needs to disregard the necessity of informed consent for organ donation.
• Maternal Death Audit: Millennium Development Goal
• Dying With Dignity: Euthanasia Debate
• Death and Dying From Children’s Viewpoint
• Determining Manners of Death
• Manners of Death in Police
• Manners of Death in the United States
• Spirituality Issues: Death and Dying
• Medicolegal Death Investigation System in the US
• Medicolegal Death Investigation: Coroner System
• The Death Scenario: Positive Psychology
• Death Causes and Gender Factor in Herkimer County
• Child Death Causes by World Health Organization
• Journalistic Mechanisms for Covering Death in Violent Conflicts
• Internal Family Briefing After the Victim’s Death
• Knowing Age of Death and Its Disadvantages
• Blood Test Predicting Death Age for Better Life
• Medical Ethics in Charlie Card’s Death Case
• Death Awareness Effects on Self-Realization
• Death of the Historical Buddha in Zen Buddhism
• The Love of Poets for Nature: Life and Death
• Why Is Death Bad?
• PTSD as the Primary Factor Causing Infant Death
• Shaken Baby Syndrome and Pathology of Death
• “Life After Death” a Book by Damien Echols
• Forensic Psychology: Death Notifications Importance
• Change in Attitudes Towards Death and Dying
• Death Types in Criminal Investigation
• Buddha’s Speculation About Life After Death
• Death With Dignity as a Social Concept
• Exertional Heat Stroke and Sudden Death
• Life and Death in The Rio Grande by Américo Paredes
• Life After Death: Ideas in Religion and Culture
• End of Life Issues: Hospital Versus Home Death
• Christian and Worldview Perceptions on Death
• Muammar Gaddafi Death: Aspects and Publicity
• Media Announcements: Human Death Deserved to Be Private
• Muammar Gaddafi’s Death: Scene and Dilemma
• Brian Terry’s Death: Difficulties of Investigation
• Euthanasia: Is It the Best Solution?
• Amusing Ourselves to Death Thesis
• Power, Memory and Spectacle on Saddam Hussein’s Death
• Socrates on Death and Virtue
• Muammar Gaddafi Deserved a Private Death
• Gaddafi Deserved a Private Death
• Philosophical Views on Life and Death
• Death Anxiety Is a Multidimensional Concept
• Children Literature Analysis: The Concept of Death
• A Matter of Life and Death, or Did You Hear Someone Knocking?
• Social Issue: The Death of the Whitney Houston
• A Comparison Between Pat Tillman’s Death and the Bourgeois Theory
• We Are Not Harmed by Our Own Death
• Different Approaches to the Theme of Death
• The Policy of One Child Per Couple in China: Death and Birth Rate
• Death and Everyday Life
• Does the Death Sentence Offer Justice to the Criminal?
• Death in The Shipping News
• The Matter of Life and Death
• How Death and Dying Is Dealt With in Other Cultures and Countries
• Death Lore: Texas Rituals, Superstitions, and Legends of the Hereafter
• Parameters of a Children’s Book That Talks About Death and Dying
• Effects of a Parental Death on Younger Children
• Philosophical Analysis on the Death of Osama Bin Laden
• Death, Loss, and Grieving
• Poe’s Favorite Subject Matter Is Death
• Death and the Maiden: Emily Dickinson’s Thematic Obsession With Death
• Death, Dying and Bereavement
• Change of Death Attitude From Traditional to Modern Way
• Why Physician-Assisted Death on the Terminally Ill lacks Justification
• Becoming Original: Truth and Death in Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil
• Death’s Head, Cherub, Urn and Willow: The Views of Religion and Death in 1720–1820
• Schutzstaffel: Hitler’s Infamous Legions of Death
• The American Way of Death: Process Analysis in Writing
• Socrates: His Life, Philosophy, & Death
• Is There Life After Death in Buddhism?
• How Did the Black Death Affect European Societies of the Mid-Fourteenth Century?
• Why Didn’t Socrates Fear Death?
• Can the Death Penalty Make Citizens Feel Safer?
• How Is the American Middle Class Affected by the Death?
• What Is the Implication of Death to the Meaning of Life and to the Human Person?
• How Is Death Viewed in Different Cultures?
• Will We Ever Be Able to Control Death?
• Could Death Row Inmates Be a Viable Source for Organ Donation?
• How Does Death Affect One’s Decision to Live an Authentic or Good Life?
• Does the Death Penalty Effectively Deter Crime?
• What Are the Cultural Aspects of Death?
• How Do Society and Culture Influence Our Views and Attitudes Toward Death?
• Does the Death Sentence Kill the Crime or the Criminal?
• Whether the Personal Consciousness Survives Death?
• How Does Death Affect Social Development?
• Did the Black Death Greatly Improve the European Society?
• How Does the Japanese Culture View Death?
• Should Physician-Assisted Death Be Legalized in the United States?
• How Has Death Changed in the Past 100 Years?
• Does the Brain Stay Active After Death?
• Should the Tobacco Industry Be Held Liable for Illness and Death Caused by Smoking?
• How Did the Black Death Impact Medieval History?
• Was Bob Marley’s Death a Conspiracy?
• How Does Mark Antony Manipulate the Crowd After the Death of Caesar?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . (2024) '242 Death Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 2 March.

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1. IvyPanda . "242 Death Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/death-essay-topics/.

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IvyPanda . "242 Death Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/death-essay-topics/.

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Life and death.

• Word Count: 607
• Approx Pages: 2
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• Grade level: High School
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                          Life and death are two related terms. But we people cannot face the fact that we have to die one day. We always try to avoid the fact and think death as something unnecessary in life or undesirable. I have personally seen people cry over somebody's death for many days. It is natural to cry but we have to accept the fact that life is inevitable. Life is impermanent, we can die anytime. There is no certain time or fixed time for death. It can occur anytime not necessarily that we have to become sick and die. So, life and death are co-related with each other and accept the fact that death is part of our lives.              Death is like changing into your new dress says the holy rinpochen. Yes, it is true. When our dress becomes old and worn out, we change our dress. So, death is like changing dress. Your physical appearance varies but your soul is the same. People are so busy with their lives that they even forget that they have to die one day. They get so attached with the worldly pleasure and during the time of dying they cannot face it. So, we should be able to face death and be prepared to die.              Those people who accept death as a part of life prefer to have peaceful death. According to Buddhists philosophy, one can have peaceful death only if have accumulated merits in our present and past life. It also depends on one important thing that is during the time of dying we should have positive ideas and thoughts. We should clear our evil thoughts then we can have peaceful death. Those people who have accumulated demerits in their lives can also die peacefully if their attitude changes during the time of dying. Like if they remove evil inside them and become optimistic during the time of dying then they can have peaceful death. The other thing we have to keep in mind is that we shouldn't be so attached with things like money, power, and possessions that way we cannot die peacefully. Most of the people are so into materialistic world, they think that if we have money and power they have everything.

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Essays Related to LIFE AND DEATH

1. death penalty.

It stands for the total abolition of the death penalty but allows states parties to retain the death penalty in time of war. ... Some people think the death penalty is fair. ... The death penalty is a global issue. ... A person convicted of first-degree murder shall be punished by death, imprisonment for life without parole, or imprisonment for life. ... They have no remorse or value for human life, so why should we value theirs? ...

• Word Count: 1284
• Approx Pages: 5
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2. Death Penality

At 12:18 am on December 12, he was shocked with electricity for two minutes, and his body still showed signs of life. ... The death penalty contradicts the whole idea of human rights. ... Supporters of the death penalty believe that the death penalty helps keep the crime and murder rate down, but that is not so. States with death penalty laws do not have lower crime or rates than states that with death penalty laws. Also, by incarcerating criminals for life, instead of executing them, it makes them think about what they did and forces them to live with the consequences of their act...

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3. Accepting Dying and Death.

The purpose of this chapter is to help people and you students to realize that the reality of death can make act into trying to enjoy life; making the most of it, be productive, and contribute to life. ... Furthermore, we have to live life to its fullest, as if it were our last. Death gives us our absolute reason for living. ... Direct [active] euthanasia involves a person either intentionally put to death or allowed to die without the help of life saving efforts. ... Physicians who disconnect life support systems from terminally ill patients or those who withhold life saving technique...

• Word Count: 671
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4. A Gift Of Life

Nevertheless, with the complicated moral and ethical issues, the transplants have become a standard medical procedure to preserve the life of thousands of hopeless patients throughout the world. ... Few endeavors in medicine enable the physician to profoundly influence change in a patient's physiology and thereby improve the quality of life. ... With one bold stroke, health and life can be restored with considerable reliability and safety. ... The death percent was higher (19% and 16%, respectively) for the patients waiting for hearts and livers. Within the medical world itself, the...

• Word Count: 2405
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5. Against the Death Penalty

Though, some supporters of the death penalty consider that if a person takes another people's life he should be killed, there are certain reasons that question the immorality of the death penalty. ... God, thus, has the power to give and take away life as he chooses. All men are to preserve life to the best of their ability. ... The argument most often cited by supporters of death penalty is that the threat of executions deters crimes more than life imprisonment. ... Murderers should suffer, and life imprisonment is insufficient suffering as retribution for taking a life", says Finckenaue...

• Word Count: 1279

6. America and the Death Penalty

The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, is the execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by a court of law of a criminal offence. ... Currently, there have been over 1,000 deaths due to the death penalty since 1976 (Death Penalty Information Center). ... They believe that the only person that can give and take away life is God himself. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops "No matter how heinous the crime, if society can protect itself without ending a human life, it should do so (USCCB).... I believe that God is the only one that ca...

• Word Count: 1504
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7. Death Penalty

I am against the death penalty. ... If someone was convicted for murder and sentenced to life in prison and later was proved innocent, we could still let the person go. ... "The Death Penalty on Trial." ... "A Life or Death Gamble." ... "Debating the Death Penalty." ...

• Word Count: 900
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8. Euthenasia, Is It Morally Acceptable To Choose Death?

Death, like life, is a gift and an opportunity. It is the community that values life and death and makes everyone feel welcome. ... Passive euthanasia is defined as speeding up death by allowing a natural death without life support. ... This is euthanasia without the consent of the patient who is likely unable to speak and unlikely to regain consciousness and the ability to express desires on death or life. ... While moral and ethical judgments can come from many sources, it is what people think and do that affect life and death. ...

• Word Count: 1622

9. Liberating A Death Camp

Liberating a Death Camp I am a lieutenant from the American Liberation Force being sent into Treblinka, a Nazi Death Camp in northern Poland to liberate the Jewish and Catholic prisoners. I am in charge of my battalion and I am leading 180 troops into the depths of the camp to find out exactly how and why these people have been executed and worked to death for the last few years. ... I would not wish this vision on anyone in my life. ...

• Word Count: 771

10. Death Penalty

(Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty Website) The main argument that advocates for the death penalty have is that the death penalty deters crime, that the threat of execution is enough to make criminals think twice about committing a capital crime. ... (National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Website) Another argument I would like to refute is that it costs too much of taxpayers dollars to keep an inmate in jail for a life sentence. ... (Death Penalty Information Center Website) People justify the death penalty in saying that in the Bible God says that mu...

• Word Count: 641