I’m not certain how to answer for myself the question I posed to all of you: Which in general is more difficult, your own death or the death of the other? I sometimes imagine that I were the age my parents are now, knowing that more than half of my life is gone, and at best there’s only a couple of decades left. Time always seems to speed up, and it must eventually get to the point where a decade seems like such a small amount of time. There it is, looming up ahead: your inevitable, necessary non-existence.

Everything that you’ve ever done, all your memories, all the things you know, all the things you know you know, will be as if they never happened at all. The experience you are now having, and all the others, will be as though they never existed. Your existence, your life, becomes nothing, bordered on all sides by the same. Surely the other’s death is painful, in some cases unimaginable, but can this compare in quality to the inconceivability of your own non-existence and the terror one feels in the face of it?

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, writing in the second decade of the 20th century, argued that only when I acknowledge that my own death is certain can I lead an “authentic” life. This is because the thought of my own death is the only thing that can truly individuate me. It is the only thing that can tear me free of the social practices whereby the meaning of the world (and my life with it) is generated. It is the only thought that can pull away the blanket of safety sheltering me from the inevitable, allowing me to stare the truth of my existence straight in the face. In order for me to know that I am me – and by extension that anything can belong to me or be “mine” – I must know that I am going to die. Only by facing my own death do I seize control of my existence or what Heidegger calls my “destiny”.

I would like to suggest that there is some truth to this. All of us have to go through the process of recognizing that some day we are going to die, that “my world” will cease and “me” along with it. It’s something that happens to most of us when we’re teenagers. What we’re really thinking about is how we separate ourselves from our family. The reason every sixteen year old is a runway to suicide is because each has to imagine his life apart from his naturally given place in the family. It’s the most natural time to become obsessed with your own death, because it’s necessary to take responsibility over your own life. But the only way that life becomes conspicuous to you as your own is through a violent process of separation. The thought of death is the mechanism that makes that separation possible.

Incidentally, this is why many cultures have some rite of passage into adulthood that involves the risk of life. It is only because of our ability to set aside our natural desires and beliefs that we can then put ourselves in relation to more abstract and less immediate things like rules and laws. But the fear of death is the wedge that breaks our connection to our natural desires and beliefs, because it isolates our existence and abstracts it from the things that we are simply accustomed to having. The world looks different when your life has been threatened. Things that mattered before don’t seem to matter quite as much anymore. You’re suddenly free to reevaluate and decide what is important. Many people who have near-death experiences undergo this transformation.

Something like this idea animates our most popular conceptions of the self and its relationship to the world. According to a typical, modern version of individual autonomy, freedom and independence consist in the efficient satisfaction of one's own interests. One is truly autonomous and “his own person” if he is not determined by others to want what they want, and if he is not prevented by others from achieving what he wants. In order to claim self-determination, one has to look inside and search for her basic desires, needs, and interests, and then she must rationally pursue the satisfaction of them.

Another modern version of freedom, a derivative of which can be found to this day on the New Age shelf in most bookstores, the "romantic" ideal, states that one must discover one's true, unique, "authentic" self. He must end his enslavement to others, to those who create artificial wants in him. In many versions of this idea, the turn inward results in an expanding outward and finding one's place in the whole. Identifying "who you really are" means identifying that part of you that is itself an emanation of the cosmic energy, that is part of the life-soul of the universe, etc.

It’s easy to see how the fear of my own death allows these conceptions of individuality and finitude to emerge. Since fear of death creates distance between me and all of my given social roles, it allows me the space necessary to reflect upon those roles and to evaluate them. It allows me the space to think of myself, not in terms of how I am defined from the outside, but rather how I am defined from the inside. It makes conspicuous for the first time what I could not see before, viz.., that I am a subject with “interiority” or an inner life. Once I see that I am such a subject, it finally becomes a problem for me what “authentically” belongs to me and what is merely imposed upon me by others. This is why my taste in music, friends, and the like becomes so important in adolescence. For the first time, I see there’s a difference between those choices which are “mine” and those which belong to other people but are only attributed to me. It suddenly becomes a subject worthy of reflection in its own right. Through this process, “culture” becomes conspicuous for the first time.

So in a sense, “adolescence” and the fear of death accompanying it are the sources of all the higher pursuits of humanity. I bet you didn’t know that about your teenage son, daughter, sibling, friend, or self. The existence of all human culture requires an “emo” confrontation with the inevitability of “my own death”, otherwise there is no space within which to reflect upon the things that matter to cultures, viz., whether they are “our” culture or someone else’s.

But every culture that has ever existed and which ever will also includes within it rituals concerning the death of others. There’s a problem here. What happens to someone once they’re dead? Do they become an unreal, impotent shadow, just because they’re dead? Do they retreat immediately back into nature to become inert matter? If they do, then what does the life of a person mean? What has it meant? Is life just an interruption of nature, which itself is nothing but a world of the dead?

All death is finally natural death, since death is a natural state. My body is composed of the same decaying matter as the rest of the universe, and so it will meet death as its natural end. Yet – we can only make sense of human life in general if we can conceive of individuals as being more than mere parts of nature as such. It’s not enough that we simply have the space to have culture. It’s not enough that culture is merely a part of nature. It is not enough that the boundary of nature starts where the boundary of culture begins. We have to do more. We have to sustain the excess of culture beyond nature.

The problem of death is more than the problem of the relationship between culture and nature. It’s also the problem of the relative autonomy of culture, of the independence of the project of creating human meaning and purpose in general. But – let’s face it – that autonomy is very relative. People die. But how – once we get started down the path of culture, once we pass into adolescence – do we deal with that fact? If death is merely a natural fact, then culture becomes unintelligible to itself. It’s a meaningless interruption of the overall meaninglessness of nature, in which meaning for one, brief, but brilliant second flashes into existence, only to disappear just as quickly.

Or – we have to make the fact of death itself into a moment of culture. And this is why we bury people. When we bury someone who has died, that person can remain a member of the community. We can gather that individual up in her individuality, thereby transforming her death from a fact into a deed. We can’t make dying itself into a deed; that’s just a natural process. But we can make the fact of death itself into an act, thereby making the limit of culture (where it meets nature) become a part of culture itself. If there is a simple duality between life and death, between culture and nature, then culture is meaningless. That’s the moment of “Fuck it all, I’m going to die anyway, so what does it matter what I do?” But if the limit of culture is no longer wholly external to culture itself, life can have meaning again.

This is why every act of burial is an act in which the dead becomes an immortal member of the society. The belief in immortality is a necessary one, since without it, you have no account of death but only of life and dust. Of course, it is possible to misunderstand the meaning of immortality. Christianity is one, long, awful misinterpretation of just that type, thinking that immortality is really about the afterlife and just rewards. Thinking about whether or not there’s an afterlife is not thinking about immortality; it’s thinking about a better life. No, in order to be immortal, you have to really, really be dead. Only if you’re dead as a doornail can you really be immortal.

While the thought of my own death awakens me to the fact that I am me, as separate from other people, and there are certain things that are mine and certain things that are not mine, that conception of the self withers in the face of death and appears meaningless unless I can also conceptualize to myself the excess of human productivity in general over nature.

Sometimes when I’m thinking about my own death, I console myself by saying, “Yes, death is meaningless, but so is this life. It’s pure nonsense. I hardly understand what is happening to me, and it’s happening to me right this instant! I’m constantly in a fog. I’m not awake to my own true possibilities. This is very much like a dream.” It’s easy to see how the passage from life into death is just the movement from one meaningless state into another, but this is the consequence of thinking of death as a mere fact, as simply a given thing at the border between culture and nature. But the only way to overcome this sense of futility is to overcome the mere givenness of death, to turn it from a fact into a deed.

The act of burial is the act through which the dead become members of our society, and therefore it’s the act in which society acknowledges its fundamental and irrevocable dependence on what is no longer living. It is the condition for the comprehension and acknowledgement of the dependence of culture on nature. Because we must bury the dead in order to make sense of our own lives, we are dependent upon the past. Because the community can only be a meaningful community by making the boundary between the community and nature a manifestation of the community itself, every community is a community of both the living and the dead.

We have the world that we do because of those who have gone before us and died. So what do we owe the dead? We must owe them the same things we owe the living: respect and acknowledgement. Just because someone is dead, it’s okay that they get eaten by buzzards? Of course not. Are they now just bits of nature? What would it mean if they were? You can’t make sense out of caring about life unless you can make sense of it this way.

There’s nothing “mystical” or “mysterious” about death. It’s a fact of nature. It’s an important fact of nature, but it’s still a fact of nature. Confronting death doesn’t make you heroic. Coming to grips with the fact that you’re going to die doesn’t turn you into a superman. It doesn’t make you undisputed master over yourself. That’s a myth. That’s a fairy tale. That’s exactly the kind of fantasy projected by the fear of death itself, since it is the fear of death that creates that exaggerated notion of independence and pure “self” to begin with.

Fearing my own death is necessary in order to become a subject who can relate to abstract things like culture and morality. There is no sense of something really and truly being “mine” unless I confront the inevitability of my own death. In that sense the fear is “deep”. But there’s an important sense in which it isn’t deep at all. It’s not what it really means for something to be “mine”, to authentically belong to “me”, because unless I can also acknowledge my dependence upon others – both living and dead – I never really know who or what I am. The relationship to others is what makes me who I am. It is what really makes my life meaningful. If I fail to acknowledge that dependence of mine upon others, I remain in the dark about who I am. What’s really mine is what I inherit. My sense of self doesn’t come purely from the inside. It comes from the past. That means that my own death is easy. It’s the death of the other that’s the problem. Her death is more fundamental than my own, because it is the precondition of me being this particular person in the first place. If I can’t figure out the proper relation to her death, if I can’t figure out the proper way to grieve and mourn, I can never really become a self in the full sense of the word. I’m merely a fragment or a shadow.