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In everyday language, death is absence, the negation of life. We use euphemisms (“he has passed away,” “he has left us”) to soften its impact, to make sense of a reality that seems intractable to us. The word itself is often taboo, spoken in a whisper, associated with mourning, grief, and the unknown. The desirable future, by contrast, is what we want—what brings us joy, fulfillment, and continuity. How can these two concepts, so antithetical in their ordinary meaning, overlap?
And yet, language itself offers us some openings. When we speak of “eternal peace,” of “rest” after long suffering, of “liberation” from an intolerable existence, we are already using death in a linguistic game that attributes a positive—or at the very least, desirable—value to it. It is not death as annihilation, but death as the cessation of an evil, as the end of a painful or meaningless process. Here, death becomes the condition for a “future” understood as the absence of what is unbearable.
But the issue goes beyond words. The “non-linguistic,” in this context, is the lived experience of the body and the soul. When a body is worn down by chronic pain, when the mind is trapped in an irreversible condition that eliminates any possibility of autonomy and meaningful relationships, “living” becomes agony. In this form of life, the desirable future is not yet another day of suffering, but silence—the state of no longer being in that condition. Death, in these cases, is the only way out to preserve a final glimmer of dignity—understood as the ability to choose one’s own end, or at least to cease continuing to exist.
It is not a desire for annihilation in and of itself, but a desire for the cessation of a particular state of being that has become intolerable. It is the rejection of suffering and degradation, not the rejection of life itself. The individual, in an act of extreme autonomy, exercises his ultimate, fundamental free will: that of putting an end to a game of life that has ceased to have meaning and value for him.
The “desirable future” of death, therefore, is not a universal or readily accessible concept. It is a meaning that emerges in specific contexts, where life—as we understand it linguistically and hope it is experienced non-linguistically (with joy, meaning, and autonomy)—has come to an end. In such circumstances, death is not the brutal interruption of a happy journey, but the conclusion of a cycle that would otherwise drag on into endless suffering.
It’s a shift in the meaning of the word “death.” No longer just a terrifying end, but also liberation, rest, and the fulfillment of an act of will. The possibility that death might be a “desirable future” compels us to reflect not only on our own mortality, but also on the meaning of life itself and the conditions that make it such. And it reminds us that the meaning of our words—even the most fundamental ones—is always rooted in the forms of life they seek to describe and make intelligible.
