ABSTRACT
This chapter explores salient features of death: familiarity, humility, acceptance, hope and openness to mystery. Death as a state of the organism, medical problem, metaphysical essence, ethical issue, or sociological phenomenon sheds little light on its human significance. At the most fundamental level of analysis, death is not a problem of metaphysics or epistemology, medicine or ethics in need of solution but a mystery in need of a certain kind of reflection. When science and technology rule people ways of thinking about things in general, including human existence, mystery is abolished and with it any capacity to think about death. Death is a mystery that is universal at the same time that it is profoundly personal. Death remains a mystery in the way human existence itself is not a problem in need of solution, not a subject of tidy theorizing, but a mystery in Marcel's sense. Openness to the mystery requires a thinking that is beyond knowledge and a familiarity.
