The author of this book is convinced that reflecting on death is, at the same time, reflecting on life. Rivara rejects the belief that thinking about life entails distancing oneself from all thought about death, expelling it, exorcising it, or at least illuminating it with systems that lessen the anguish of death through the illusion of hope. This attitude is yet another manifestation of the pain that our mortal condition causes us. Human beings, solitary creatures, mortally wounded: neither animal nor god, self-creators, have forged a being, a history, to heal their wound—through culture, science, philosophy, and religion.
Rivara Kamaji complements her reflection with the work of thinkers who addressed death as a phenomenon of life and posited, from an ontological perspective, the impossibility of separating one phenomenon from the other.