First she decided she no longer wanted to go out. Then she decided she no longer wanted to get up. Finally, in death, decision making was no longer an issue and her house-bound, bed-bound days gave way to a period of violent decomposition during which the religious-minded believe souls to be heaven-bound, when really it's merely a return of hydro-carbon atoms to the material world, having broken free from their imprisonment in a particular life-form.
Whether we like it or not, matter is always struggling to escape essence and to abandon vital complexity; always seeking to return to a state of inanimate simplicity. Our bodies have no loyalty to their own organization or substance; they continually decay and race towards catastrophe (we call this ageing).
But we shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life. This sounds a bit like mysticism, but science will confirm that organisms are so vigorously recycled at death that every atom we possess will have already been part of many millions of earlier living (and non-living) things.
Thus, whilst there is no personal survival of death - the self is destroyed and not simply transformed or spirited away from the scene of the crime at the last instance - we do house and reincarnate the atomic souls of the dead. This is why death is always our affair and why, ultimately, Nietzsche was right to say that being alive is simply a very rare and unusual way of being dead.
I thought this in 2006 and I still think it now: I find it helps as I watch my mother, who is 88, and recently diagnosed with dementia, slip away ...
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