The moment my mother disappeared, my life changed drastically. The world lost all possible meaning and grief covered every aspect of it.

For years I danced with death, through butō dance, but the experience of mourning shone a different light on my every gesture. Faced with grief, I asked myself questions I had never attempted to answer.

How is it possible to bear the pain of grief? What is the meaning of death? Today, two things seem certain in our eyes: we are born and we die. And this destiny of humanity appears incontrovertible.

Therefore, not subject to error. And yet, if we go to the root of these words (destiny, incontrovertible, error, appearing) we will come to question that initial certainty for which we take the meaning of being born and dying for granted.

We are definitely missing something, in our interpretation of things, if we do not look life and death in the face with the gaze of philosophy. What if this gaze showed an unprecedented sense of life and death? What if it showed the contradiction behind the thought that wants a mortal destiny for humanity? Each of us dies in relation to the way we conceive the meaning of death.

The philosophy witnessed in the writings of Emanuele Severino, in particular, warns us that if we understand death as a return to nothingness, as an annihilation, the pain and anguish become extreme. Letters to my mum is a book dedicated to those who, like me, have found themselves invested by grief and are looking for an answer on the meaning of death by looking to philosophy.

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