Most of the time we do not think about our mortality at length or in depth. At particular moments or periods in life we are likely to find it difficult not to think about it, however, and for some people, in some places and times, death is a more persistent puzzle if not a fearful preoccupation. This book asks what it means to think about death, and considers how we should be thinking about death in an age where the destruction of life, both human and non-human, is occurring on a scale that tests both our courage and our imagination. Its aim is to elucidate why death challenges and troubles us, but also to ‘trouble’ conventional understandings of death, especially the tendency to reduce the condition of mortality to the possession of a finite lifetime.

Outside of periods of personal crisis, mortality for the average citizen of an affluent Western society is a remote absence rather than a close presence – at best it is consciousness of the fact that eventually one's life will come to an end with an event we call ‘death’. I argue in this book, however, that we also need to think of mortality as a condition of permanent and inescapable vulnerability. As it is the vulnerability, rather than the finite length of, our lives which exposes us to and makes us dependent on the world, emphasizing our vulnerability allows us to make better sense of people's fear about the future of this world, as well as their care for lives other than their own.