Death is not only the ultimate dissolution of identity, as all the physical, psychological, and social ligatures that tether it in place are severed; death is also that in the face of which we make our identity. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T. S. Eliot put it in The Waste Land. Habits, interests, love, the hourly, the daily, and all the busyness of life. Above all, art.
It was the philosopher Bernard Williams who argued, in an essay on Leoš Janáček's opera —about a woman gifted, or rather cursed, with immortality—that life makes sense only in the face of its finitude. We are “lucky in having the chance to die,” Williams concluded. This does not require that death itself be desirable: death can destroy meaning
