No. 1 (2025): Death as an Emanation of Life

Editorial Note

The inaugural issue of Existential Analysis and the Phenomenology of Life (ISSN 3071-978X) is devoted to the themes of death, mourning, parting, accompaniment, understanding, and the search for meaning in loss – explored from the perspective of physicians, psychotherapists, philosophers, and human beings.

Its inspiration: fathers.
Created because of fathers, for fathers. And in spite of them. Three fathers, three stories, three lives.
We are grateful that this voice can be heard in the opening volume of our journal.

In this issue, we ask: What is death?

How can we understand dying and saying goodbye – not as a medical process, but as a relational and existential event? How can we make sense of mourning and grief, both from the perspective of diagnostic classifications and through the experiential-existential lens of those who have faced death?

The authors whose texts appear in the following pages approach these questions from various angles: from philosophical reflections on temporality and transience in Heidegger’s thought, through analyses of sorrow and loss grounded in existential perspectives, to deeply personal and boundary-experiencing voices – revealing that death, grief, and mourning are not merely theoretical subjects, but part of lived human experience.

A cultural, social, and profoundly relational phenomenon – also explored in the context of funeral rituals across cultures, as forms of accepting what is ultimately inevitable.

Authors share their personal experiences of accompanying others through dying – of being present in a boundary situation, a transformative event where the awareness of finitude restores access to authentic life. The issue also addresses persistent treatment, complicated grief from a clinical perspective in light of the ICD-11, and perhaps most importantly – the idea of a good death.

We hope this issue will become a space for contemplation – but above all, an invitation to reflect on what it means to be – all the way to the inevitable end.

With respect,
Dorota Draczyńska & Agnieszka Nowakowska
Editor-in-Chief & Chair of the Editorial Board