This is an erudite attempt to show how a mature individual accepts death. Death is not an attempt to repeat an infantile idealized situation of returning to the womb. Even though death remains something unexperienced, the mature ego will handle it by mechanisms similar to those employed in accepting a new situation or concept by an analogy with something more familiar. The author contends that this is so even though personal death is almost impossible to conceptualize. Healthy and abnormal reactions are discussed which involve such factors as learning, denial of time and age, acting out, and the synthetic function of the ego.