My-Death

Abstract

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