Secular ways of speaking about death

Epigraph

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

— Seneca, Letter 1, §2; Richard M. Gummere translation

What this article is about

On a library table lie photographs of someone who spent years helping readers find the books they needed. Two acquaintances are preparing a short account of her life. One suggests saying that she will always remain beside them. The other objects that they should say only what observation can support. The disagreement soon grows larger than the text itself. Must they settle whether a soul exists before they can name kindness, work and loss? Can they speak about death without religious promises while avoiding an attack on someone else’s faith? A secular vocabulary here makes it possible to discuss finite life through events, relationships and actions accessible to the participants. It does not demand a unanimous answer about what lies beyond that life. Epicurus, Seneca and Montaigne approach mortality differently. Their ideas help distinguish questions; they do not form a universal remedy for fear. Sometimes precision begins by admitting a boundary: we know what we have lost, and we may not know everything else.

I. What is the conversation about?

In this imagined library scene, Irina and Kirill are discussing a note about Anna, a former member of staff. Irina wants to preserve warmth; Kirill worries that visitors will be asked to accept an unsupported claim. While they argue about the soul, the particular person disappears: her patience with new readers, her habit of repairing damaged covers, her humour. Rather than choosing between a solemn promise and cold silence, they can identify the note’s task. It describes Anna’s life and the significance of her work for the library. That subject leaves the metaphysical disagreement open, but lets the conversation continue without treating agreement on one question as agreement on every question. Even a small shared text needs this honest boundary.

The word death can refer to different subjects within a conversation. One person asks what happened; another asks how to live without a familiar voice; a third wonders what will become of them after their own life ends. An answer about the absence of consciousness cannot do the work of an account of lost companionship. Biographical memory cannot prove that personal existence continues. Religious testimony should not be presented without explanation as a fact everyone can share. Distinguishing these tasks does not divide conversation into sealed compartments. It helps us hear what a particular sentence refers to and what response the speaker is actually seeking. Several subjects can be discussed together when transitions are named rather than concealed by a familiar word.

A secular way of speaking about death therefore need not begin with a denial. It can begin with a shared situation: a person has died, their participation in ordinary activities has ceased, and the living face certain decisions. Those are substantial grounds for discussing memory, care and finite time. A religious participant may keep their beliefs; a nonreligious participant need not make statements they do not endorse. Shared speech does not have to describe everyone’s entire inner world. Its honesty depends on whether an expression fits its subject and whether it pressures someone to sign up to another person’s view of reality. Other matters can remain separate conversations, or never become public material at all.

II. Secular need not mean indifferent

Removing the words eternity and soul does not automatically make a sentence precise or humane. Someone can call death a biological fact and use that bounded description in a way that discounts relationships. Someone else can give a detailed account of an action and preserve warmth without promising an invisible presence. In our scene, Anna once set aside her own task to find a book in a language a child could read. That limited event cannot explain the whole meaning of her life. But a narrator can testify to it, and a reader can understand why her absence matters. Specific detail does emotional work here that need not be entrusted to a claim about eternity.

The distinction between a claim and an image is particularly clear in the words she is with us. For one speaker, they express faith in an actual spiritual presence. Another means surviving habits and influence. A third repeats a familiar formula without defining it. A shared text need not call all such speech deceptive, but can clarify its own usage: her work continues in the library collection and in the skills of people she helped. The form of continuation then becomes clear, without quietly replacing influence with personal immortality. If a participant wants to speak specifically about spiritual presence, that too can be identified as their belief, preserving other people’s freedom not to repeat it.

Warmth is not measured by certainty about the unknown. Saying I do not know what happens after death can sound detached when it closes down another person’s account. It can also open an attentive conversation when followed by a particular acknowledgement: what this person did matters to me, and I miss their participation. Secular language gives its user no automatic advantage. It requires the same responsibility for the listener, the situation and the consequences of words. Not every meeting is suited to discussing a worldview, and not everyone wants to speak now. Recognising that is part of precision, rather than a rejection of reason or an obligation to accept every claim.

III. Epicurus: the argument and its boundary

In the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus connects good and evil with awareness, and death with its absence. On that basis he argues that death does not become an experience of the person who has died: while we exist, death has not arrived; once it arrives, we no longer exist. This is a philosophical argument about the subject of experience. It should not be presented as the finding of a modern investigation into every possible form of existence. It invites us to consider whether we imagine our own absence as a continuing unpleasant experience. Even a reader who accepts the reasoning has not been told what feelings they must have now, or that events between living people cease to matter.

Crucially, an argument about a state nobody experiences is different from a claim that death has no consequences. Possible meetings, work and participation in someone else’s future come to an end; the circumstances of those who remain change. Irina may accept that Anna does not experience the library’s absence and still regret that a new exhibition takes place without her. That regret contains no logical contradiction: it concerns living relationships and a lost possibility. The distinction helps prevent Epicurus from becoming a weapon against sorrow. Anyone invoking his conclusion should understand which question it addresses, rather than dismissing every other question as the result of the listener’s philosophical mistake.

The letter itself also prevents us from simply casting Epicurus as a representative of modern atheism. It discusses the gods, their blessedness and mistaken beliefs about them. A contemporary reader can consider the argument about death without accepting the whole teaching, but should identify that choice. This article uses a particular argument rather than reconstructing the entire Epicurean worldview. Its clarity offers an opportunity to examine a thought of our own. It neither produces agreement among all secular people nor establishes that every fear has one cause. An honest encounter with an ancient writer preserves both his grounds and the distance between his letter and our present situation.

IV. Finite time without a productivity cult

Seneca’s first letter asks Lucilius to attend to time that is taken from him, quietly removed, or lost through his own carelessness. Death is then presented as more than a future event: the years already lived are no longer at our disposal. This shift can change the question. Rather than trying to imagine the entire picture of their own ending, someone considers the day still available. Yet an extra conclusion easily slips in: that every free minute must be useful and accounted for. Seneca’s language is morally demanding, but our contemporary interpretation does not turn his letter into a chart of achievements. Finite time supplies no universal list of tasks to which a worthy life must conform.

Kirill notices that they have spent an hour arguing about the note’s opening sentence. That does not make the whole discussion useless: it has revealed an important distinction. Their next step might simply be to ask which information they are prepared to put their names to. A discussion of time becomes concrete when it concerns an available choice and a real opportunity. For someone else, that hour is occupied by caring for a relative, difficult work, or waiting for a decision beyond their control. Shared mortality does not erase differences in circumstances. We cannot declare another person’s day wasted simply because its contents do not match an observer’s preferred image of an active life.

In section four, Seneca admits that he cannot boast of wasting no time; he can explain what he loses and why. That admission complicates any reading of the letter as a faultless manager of life addressing failures. A contemporary conversation can take from it a question about the meaning of a choice, while preserving room for rest, uncertainty and ordinary activities. Clarifying an intention does not require justifying every minute before a tribunal. If contemplating finite time merely increases demands on oneself, one need not keep repeating it as a useful practice. This article does not promise that attending to time removes the fear of death or gives every event a special meaning.

V. Montaigne: familiarity and freedom

In the selected passage from Montaigne’s essay, the thought of death is meant to lose its novelty and strangeness. He proposes encountering it in imagination, then connects such anticipation with freedom from subjection. The proposed mechanism is clear: if the threat of death no longer wholly governs someone, it is harder to use that threat to coerce them. The strength of the ideal, however, establishes no identical result for every reader. Montaigne discusses his own disposition and habits of reflection. That is a significant detail in the source. It prevents us from automatically converting his experience into a compulsory exercise, particularly when this article concerns accessible conversation rather than training someone’s response to danger.

A secular conversation can use this approach to ask whether fear governs its language: are we promising the impossible because we cannot otherwise find a way to begin? It need not demand that people constantly imagine their deaths. Irina decides to remove the word forever because she does not want to be responsible for its literal meaning. This is a small choice of expression, not proof of victory over mortality. Kirill should not measure her strength by how calmly she pictures her own end. Freedom in this particular conversation means being able to say what she actually believes is true, and declining a competition in fearlessness. Broader claims remain the essayist’s claims.

Montaigne’s religious context also needs to be preserved. In the same selected passage, he thanks God and says he is ready to depart whenever God wishes. It would therefore be inaccurate to present the whole passage as a straightforward rejection of religious hope. A secular reader may separately consider its ideas about familiarity, freedom and unfinished tasks, identifying that as their own interpretation. Encountering the source then requires neither a hidden conversion to its faith nor the removal of faith from its text. This precision makes comparison between different grounds possible. Without it, a historical writer becomes a convenient mask for today’s opinion, and apparent philosophical unanimity offers false support for a conversation about death.

VI. Unfinished need not mean failed

Near the end of the selected passage, Montaigne imagines himself continuing an ordinary activity even if his garden remains unfinished. That image differs from an order to complete everything in time. Life can end during an activity whose value does not depend on the final full stop. Anna left notes about books she wanted to put in order. Irina and Kirill may finish some of the work or choose another direction. An unfinished list does not prove that Anna lived wrongly. It reminds them that human activity unfolds within time nobody controls indefinitely. The garden belongs to Montaigne’s account; the library is this article’s imagined scene rather than historical testimony.

A comparison with Epicurus’s distinction between pleasant time and merely the longest time is useful here. Both texts let us question a quantitative measure of completion, though they do so on different grounds. Epicurus discusses the choice of life and pleasure within his own teaching. Montaigne describes his personal relation to ongoing work and its ending. A shared question does not yield a single philosophy of meaning. A contemporary participant has a limited opportunity: to name the value of a particular activity without making it the sole condition of a worthy death. Incompletion may hurt, may require decisions from others, or may simply reflect the nature of time. It need not be turned into a lesson.

Nor should a person be replaced by their legacy. The library collection preserves part of Anna’s work, but not her presence in its fullness. Even the most accurate memorial text cannot reproduce a conversation that is no longer possible. A secular description of influence is honest when it acknowledges that distinction. It can support further activity while also naming loss. We need not choose between saying that everything remains and concluding that nothing matters. Work survives in a particular form, relationships change, and some possibilities have closed. Those statements are compatible and offer a more precise account than a sweeping promise of continuation whose meaning the participants have never discussed.

VII. Memory as limited testimony

When shared speech turns to memory, a question arises about who is testifying and to what. Saying everyone loved Anna assumes knowledge of all her relationships that the note’s authors do not possess. They can say they know people for whom her help mattered, or describe an episode they witnessed. Such limits do not impoverish memory. They leave room for a complex person whose life cannot be reduced to a ceremonial adjective. This is a contemporary editorial question, not a rule literally stated in the three selected texts. Its connection with them lies in attention to the boundaries of a claim and to the way shared mortality can return conversation to a particular life.

Memory has no obligation to become public testimony. One person is willing to write a detailed account; another keeps a small detail privately; a third does not want to participate. Silence alone establishes neither indifference nor the depth of someone’s feeling. Irina invites Kirill to include his recollection, but he may decline without explaining his entire inward history. Voluntary testimony matters particularly in secular conversation: a publicly accessible vocabulary does not make all personal material publicly accessible. Not having a shared religious formula gives nobody the right to demand a sincere account in exchange. A note can use agreed information while leaving private relationships private, without presenting that choice as an absence of feeling.

Preserving memory also gives no guarantee that someone’s influence will remain unchanged forever. Books change hands, habits shift, and accounts are retold differently. A promise of eternal remembrance may therefore express an intention rather than a reliable prediction. It can be used in that capacity when the participants understand the convention. Or they can choose a more definite form: we will preserve these notes in the library archive and provide an accessible account of the work. That names an action, its agent and the limit of responsibility. Precision neither diminishes the person nor proves that continued existence of any kind is impossible. It simply makes the living responsible for what lies within their own decision.

VIII. Uncertainty need not be filled with pressure

Secular conversation permits different degrees of certainty. Someone may believe consciousness ends with death, leave the matter open, or decline to discuss it now. The absence of one metaphysical position does not prevent agreement on particular words. It matters to distinguish a personal belief from what is offered to everyone as the basis of a joint action. Kirill can state his position without making it a condition of Irina’s participation. Irina can retain faith in continuing life without treating Kirill’s signature on the note as assent to that faith. The agreed boundary of a text can be more modest than either person’s convictions and still have substantial content.

Epicurus’s thought about a future that is neither entirely ours nor entirely beyond us helps distinguish certainty from abandoning every action. In the letter it is not proof of anyone’s fate after death; it concerns our relation to what we anticipate. A contemporary interpretation may apply that caution to the library’s plans. The authors do not know who will read the note many years from now, but they can check information and arrange the archive today. An uncertain result does not cancel an available decision. At the same time, that choice cannot become a promise to control the whole future. Neither an archive, memory nor an ethical action gives the living power to determine the ultimate meaning of someone else’s life or settle death’s questions.

Sometimes the most honest language consists of two statements without an artificial bridge between them. We do not know what happens to personal existence after death. We do know that we can describe this work with care and avoid requiring a reader to accept someone else’s faith. The second statement neither proves the first nor needs it as a final metaphysical premise. It is a practical agreement in a particular situation. Participants who wish to continue their philosophical disagreement can do so separately. If they do not, stopping need not amount to reason’s defeat. Shared language matters less for the eternal questions it resolves than for its ability to hold a chosen subject clearly and preserve each person’s position.

IX. Speaking to a person rather than performing for death

Even a well-supported thought may fail to answer the request that began a conversation. If someone is describing how they miss a familiar inflection, an argument about the absence of a subject after death can amount to changing the subject. We can ask whether they want to discuss the philosophical argument or simply have room to finish their account. That question requires neither accepting another explanation nor making a diagnosis. It clarifies participation. A secular interlocutor retains the freedom to disagree reasonably, but need not turn every mention of death into a debate. A statement’s appropriateness depends on what is happening between people, as well as on its place in an abstract system of arguments.

The opposite demand does not follow either: that every disagreement must be hidden for the sake of warmth. When a claim in a joint note is attributed to all its authors, each can clarify its content. Care is not silent assent to someone else’s conclusions. Irina can say that memory has spiritual significance for her; Kirill can explain that his signature concerns the account of work and human influence. Conversation remains adult when this difference can be expressed without humiliation or a duty to find an immediate shared worldview. Not every word must be agreed at its deepest possible level. It is enough to avoid creating false testimony in the name of someone who has not given it.

In our scene, the final note contains several particular episodes and gratitude for help given to readers. The participants do not pronounce it the only correct form of remembrance or measure its success by whether regret disappears. They have obtained a text for which they can take responsibility. The outcome is limited: it does not repair death or replace every relationship with Anna. Acknowledging that limit distinguishes an action from a promise of consolation. Secular language can express the significance of a life while preserving people’s different convictions and uncertainty about further questions. Its quality depends on attentive use rather than the automatic superiority of a nonreligious formula over any other kind of speech.

X. Enough precision for life to continue

The three selected interlocutors reveal different ways of approaching finitude. Epicurus examines the relation between death and the subject of experience. Seneca returns attention to time still at our disposal. Montaigne considers familiarity with the thought and an activity that need not reach completion. Those differences remain even where conclusions sound related. They cannot be combined into proof of a single secular doctrine of death. A contemporary conversation can use individual questions while identifying its own responsibility for carrying them into the present. A primary text then supplies a basis for thought, rather than borrowed authority used to close an unsettled part of a discussion or demand a particular state from someone.

Secular speech about mortality can be modest: name an event, distinguish knowledge from belief, describe a particular connection, and propose an action within real possibilities. It need not prove that an entire life has acquired a completed meaning. Some people will retain religious hope; others, confidence in finitude; others, an open question. Joint work is possible without erasing that difference. The subject of agreement needs to be explicit. Shared remembrance or care for a library does not become a hidden vote about the immortality of the soul. Conversely, the absence of a common creed need not prevent gratitude, regret or further participation in other people’s lives.

The last word can remain ordinary. Today we will prepare the note; tomorrow someone may borrow a book Anna helped preserve. That is a continuation of particular work, not proof that her consciousness continues. The distinction does not make the event less significant. It frees a concrete action from the obligation to answer everything at once. A person can live with questions that have no shared answer yet, without making them a demand on every interlocutor. Finitude sets a boundary but dictates no single tone of conversation. Within it, people can speak clearly, listen by choice and use words that promise no more than the speaker is actually prepared to claim and do.

What this means in practice

If you want to examine your own language, choose one sentence about death, memory or finitude that you are willing to consider. There is no need to disclose a private history. First identify its subject: does it report an event, express a belief, describe influence through an image, or state an intention? Then consider whether the subject changes unnoticed. Preserving an account of someone and preserving their personal existence, for example, are different claims. You can keep your faith or worldview private and still clarify the meaning of a shared sentence.

If you wish, rewrite the sentence so that its speaker, basis and limit of responsibility become clear. Instead of an unspecified promise, name an action you actually choose. An image need not be destroyed by a literal examination: it is enough to understand its status and avoid requiring everyone to give it the same meaning. Before discussing the matter with another person, you can ask whether they want that conversation. A refusal or pause needs no explanation.

Finally, read the original and revised versions. Is it clearer what you claim and what you leave open? The result may be a more precise sentence, a difference in views preserved, or a decision to change nothing now. This is optional work with language, not a method guaranteed to remove fear, complete an experience of loss, or prepare someone correctly for death.

Key quotation

We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours,

— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, opening clause of the sentence about the future; Robert Drew Hicks translation

Connections between traditions

Question	Two textual grounds and concepts	Comparative mechanism	Limit of the inference
What kind of absence is at issue?	Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, death passage, carrier 28–30: absence of awareness excludes death as the deceased person’s experience. Seneca, Letter 1, §2: past years are no longer at the living person’s disposal.	One argument concerns the subject of experience, the other the living person’s relation to time; their distinction separates an imagined state after death from lost possibilities.	Neither empirical proof against an afterlife nor denial of consequences for others follows. An argument about the subject does not refute sorrow concerning relationships.
Must a life be quantitatively filled?	Epicurus, the same death passage, carrier 30: pleasant time is preferred to merely the longest time. Seneca, Letter 1, §§1–2: time can be taken, quietly removed or wasted, while the present day is available for action.	Different grounds return attention to the character of available life rather than its duration alone; the article separates attention to time from a compulsory achievement list.	Epicurean pleasure is not simply any entertainment; Seneca’s moral demands are not converted here into productivity every minute. Other people’s constraints establish no guilt.
Can a personal experience become everyone’s rule?	Montaigne, Essays, Book I, Chapter XIX in the selected edition, carrier 1265–1276: thoughts of death are connected with his own disposition and habit. Seneca, Letter 1, §4: the author admits losing time and being able to explain the loss.	Both self-descriptions make the speaker visible alongside an ideal; a contemporary conversation distinguishes testimony about experience from a demand made on the listener.	Neither a universal psychological effect, compulsory rehearsal of death nor a scale of courage follows. An ancient writer does not become a clinical adviser.
Can an unfinished action matter?	Montaigne, the same chapter, carrier 1308–1314: ordinary activity continues although the garden may remain unfinished. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, carrier 33: the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours.	The image of work without guaranteed completion meets a limit on control of the anticipated; the article’s library scene permits action today without promising an eternal result.	This neither bans long projects nor proves them useless, and requires no positive lesson from every unfinished task. The library scene is not attributed to either source.
Must shared secular speech make its sources nonbelievers?	Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, carrier 25–27: discussion of the gods retains its own theological grounds. Montaigne, the same chapter, carrier 1294: readiness to depart involves gratitude to God and God’s will.	Distinguishing historical grounds from present application allows a particular question to enter shared speech, with the editorial interpretation named explicitly.	These texts establish neither universal atheism nor agreement among religions. A shared account of life neither cancels private faith nor requires conversion to it.
Where does a promise of memory end?	Seneca, Letter 1, §3: time is a loan even a grateful recipient cannot repay. Montaigne, the same chapter, carrier 1284–1293: plans and relationships can remain unfinished, and the person does not determine their lifetime.	Limited control over time is connected with a specific promise; the article proposes naming an action to preserve a record rather than predicting uncontrollable eternal remembrance.	Neither text literally provides a modern archiving instruction. The comparison proves no continuing consciousness, does not replace a person with a legacy, and requires no public disclosure of memories.

Primary sources

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, Robert Drew Hicks’s English translation. The complete carrier letter, lines 18–50, was read; the adopted argument uses the gods at 25–27, death at 28–32 and the future at 33. Philosophical premises remain distinct from empirical confirmation. The carrier contains transcription errors outside the selected exact quotation; no Greek collation is claimed.
Seneca, Letter 1, On Saving Time, Richard M. Gummere’s translation. All §§1–5 and the note were read; the volume title confirms the translator and identifies a 1925 edition first printed in 1918. The discussion uses time, postponement and the admission of the author’s own losses. No reading of the entire collection or Latin text is claimed.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, Chapter XIX, the chapter on philosophy and preparing for death; Charles Cotton’s translation edited by William Carew Hazlitt, 1877. The continuous adopted passage, 1253–1314, was actually read together with surrounding carrier lines 1213–1368. The chapter number belongs to this carrier and is not silently changed to Chapter XX in other editions. The author’s disposition and appeal to God are retained; historical medical and ageing claims are not adopted as contemporary advice.

Russian quotations are United Wisdom’s own translations from the named English editions; the short English passages were literally checked against the stated carriers. The Epicurus quotation is an opening clause, retaining its final comma. Everyday scenes, contemporary distinctions and the optional practice are original editorial interpretation rather than historical authors’ words. General international reproduction permission is UNKNOWN; links and short quotations confer no permission to import or vectorise complete source texts.

About the authors

Andrey Zarinsh is the author and founder of United Wisdom. He explores inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut is a co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside her research, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding work in real life between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.