Always ready to face death's admonition

The counsel to prepare for death at any hour is presented as an attempt to reclaim death by anticipating it: if life is lived in expectation of death, death might seem to seal and complete that life. The argument grants this counsel a real appeal, but ultimately rejects the hope behind it. Death remains absurd and cannot be made into a resolved ending merely by readiness or resolve.

The promise of anticipated death

The counsel rests on a transformation. Instead of treating death as a limit imposed from outside, a person tries to interiorize it—to make the prospect of death part of a freely adopted way of living. Christian wisdom gives this preparation its stark practical form: one should live as though death could come at any hour. The text recognizes why this seems persuasive. If the meaning of life becomes the expectation of death, then death, when it arrives, appears able only to place its seal upon a life already oriented toward it.

This is identified as the most positive content of Martin Heidegger’s idea of resolute decision. Readiness promises to turn an unpredictable end into an anticipated possibility, and thereby to recover, through freedom, what first seemed to restrict freedom. But the passage treats this recovery as an appearance that must be examined rather than accepted as a solution.

The interruption that defeats the preparation

The text rejects the image of death as a resolved chord at the end of a melody. Its counterexample is a condemned man who bravely prepares to meet the ultimate penalty and does everything possible to make a good showing on the scaffold, only to be carried off by a flu epidemic in the meantime. His careful readiness cannot determine the manner or timing of his death. The ending arrives through an interruption unrelated to the death he has prepared himself to face.

The example distinguishes expecting a particular death from expecting death as such. A person can anticipate a specified possibility, but cannot thereby make the event that eventually overtakes them conform to that anticipation. Preparation may organize a life around a projected end; it cannot guarantee that death will fulfill that project or serve as its fitting conclusion.

The limit of resolve

The passage therefore locates the failure not in human weakness or an original tendency toward inauthenticity, but in death itself. The advice to prepare is easier to give than to follow because its central object cannot be anticipated in the same way as a particular death. The notion of readiness does not remove the contingency that makes death capable of arriving otherwise than expected.

The counsel remains significant as an attempt to make death one’s own through freedom, but it cannot establish that death will confirm the meaning a person has given to life. The text’s decisive contrast is between a life directed toward an expected end and an actual death that may break into that expectation without completing it.