“Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.” Ray Kurzweil. But does it? Heidegger thought so. For him the awareness of death is transformative, and in that awareness the individual is truly authentic. What though is it that gives meaning? What does the signifier 'death' signify? Nothingness, the void, finitude, ashes? How does consciousness of nothingness or finitude change anything? How does some sense of our mortality intensify the time remaining? And is this sense and intensity driven by death or life? That's to wonder if the quote above has it the wrong way round. It is not that death gives meaning to life but that an individual in life projects into death something of enormous significance. That is, a self created significance, symbolised by the fear of dying.