It is a major topic that we, however, do not want to talk about. Never. Why? Because it frightens us. But our lives are full of it: not only because life inevitably ends with death, but also throughout its duration.

From the arts in their highest expression, music, global literature, and painting, to cinema and television series, and even in the video games that children play, death stars everywhere. It seems as if we are trying to approach it without it noticing us, to see it up close and overcome our fear of it.

And, of course, much more so, by resorting to religions, all of which promise that when it comes, then our real life begins, which is why we must behave accordingly to their rules in the meantime.

This book attempts an x-ray of the way we see death. As individuals, as collectives, as cultures. And, above all, it proposes a way to transform the fear of death that, consciously or not, dominates the lives of most people into its opposite: into freedom and the desire for a better life, of which it is the real end.

Into a realization that will utilize the knowledge of this end, so that life is not wasted in vain, so that it is not dramatically degraded, as often happens. Because there, we have a say.

With dense cultural, spiritual, historical, and current references, and with a good dose of humor, the journalist and author of this different book, G. P. Malouhos, attempts a timeless study of life and death, a manual of mortality inspired by Homer, Epictetus, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, Heine, Remarque, and other great shapers of European art and thought.