Human beings do not live forever, but how open or repressed are we about this fact? What can we learn from Greek tragedy, and from the ideas of Socrates and Plato, about the meaning of death and its relevance to understandings of selfhood, responsibility and virtue? Do individualistic societies and consumer-oriented cultures make it easier or more difficult to reckon with our inevitable biological fate? Is the prevalence of the ‘mid-life crisis’ an indication that we are maladapted to the truth or struggling to embrace it, and is this truth more difficult to recognise in an anthropogenic world that is increasingly endangering the very future of life on earth? Bringing existing knowledge of the Western history of death into dialogue with sociological and philosophical approaches to the study of mortality, this book explores these questions while inviting new reflections on the ethical significance of our biological vulnerability and its relevance to our care for perishable life. It reviews sociological debates around the ‘denial’ and the ‘revival’ of death, explores the social construction of death in both religious and secular culture, and uses existential phenomenology, as well as Freudian psychology, to examine the search for meaning in the midst of fragile and finite life.