death
DEATH
As a biological, social, and historical occurrence, death represents the
end of life and is a certain fact of living. As the German phenomenologist
Martin Heidegger elucidates in his classic work Sein und Zeit (Being and
Time) published in 1927, death is the only thing in life that is certain,
non-relative, irreversible and imminent. Heidegger states that death
makes an individual whole by completing the totality of a person’s life.
The individual is a being-unto-death, which implies a way of life that
looks at the possibility of death as an intimate part of life, while it also
isolates a person and throws the person back upon himself. According to
Heidegger, death is not simply an event that puts an end to one’s life
because it is a part of life itself. This suggests that death is always present
in a person’s life; it is here and now. Death is always mine, which means
that one must die one’s own death because no one can take one’s place in
death. Heidegger observes also that death represents the possibility of all
possibilities, implying that it stands ahead of us, and forms the ultimate
possibility for us because we are always moving towards it. The final
thing that we can be is dead. Moreover, death is an unsurpassable possi-
bility, and cannot be avoided. It is a non-relational possibility because
death dissolves all social relations.
The certainty and unavoidability of death that Heidegger mentions is
shared by religious traditions around the globe. Various religious have
been fascinated about the origin of death, and have shared narratives
about its beginnings over the course of generations. The Judeo-Christian
tradition mythically explains that death is the result of a transgression of
a divine decree. In other traditions, death is attributed to a cruel and arbi-
trary act of a demonic being, a frequent adversary of the creator god.
Sometimes, death is attributed to an accident, such as the message that
fails among some African cultures. In one version, a deity sends a cha-
meleon with a message that humans will be immortal. A little later, a
lizard is sent by the god with an exact opposite message. Because the
chameleon stops along the way, the lizard arrives first with its message
that humans must die a tragic accident that results in human mortality. In
a more absurd narrative of Melanesian origin, the narrative relates that
originally humans could rejuvenate themselves when they grow old by
sloughing off their skin. Having sloughed off her skin, a woman is unrec-
ognized by her child when she returns home. In order to pacify the child,
she put on her old skin, and her act stops the effectiveness of the process.
A Micronesian myth relates a tale of a wrong choice made by cultural
ancestors in the story of the stone and the banana. According to this