Death changes life into Destiny

…to the quick. I do not dissociate myself from my past. Of course, in time I can attempt this dissociation; I can declare that “I am no longer what I was,” argue that there has been a change, progress. But this is a matter of a secondary reaction, which is given as such. To deny my solidarity of being with my past at this or that particular point is to affirm it for the whole of my life. At my limit, at that infinitesimal instant of my death, I shall be no more than my past. It alone will define me. This is what Sophocles wants to express in the Trachiniae when he has Deianeira say, “It is a proverb current for a long time among men that one cannot pass judgment on the life of mortals and say if it has been happy or unhappy, until their death.” This is also the meaning of that sentence of Malraux’ which we quoted earlier. “Death changes life into Destiny.” Finally this is what strikes the Believer when he realizes with terror that at the moment of death the chips are down, there remains not a card to play. Death reunites us with ourselves. Eternity has changed us into ourselves. At the moment of death we are; that is, we are defenseless before the judgments of others. They can decide in truth what we are; ultimately we have no longer any chance of escape from what an all-knowing intelligence could do. A last hour repentance is a desperate effort to crack all this being which has slowly congealed and solidified around us, a final leap along with the rest; it does no more than to enter into combination with what has preceded it, as one factor among others, as one particular determination, which is understood only in terms of the totality. By death the for-itself is changed forever into an in-itself in that it has slipped entirely into the past. Thus the past is the ever-growing totality of the in-itself, which we are.

extracted from sartre's 'being and nothingness'