This is the oldest question and the most honest one. No culture has managed to walk around it. Plato built his republic with an eye on immortality. Augustine rewrote the history of humankind through death and resurrection. Ibn Sina reconciled Aristotle with Islam — and the soul with the body. Tolstoy feared death all his life and wrote the most honest thing about it in Russian literature. Dostoevsky made the fear of death the engine of his novels. Five answers — and not one of them final.
Plato was the first to build a philosophy around this question. In the Phaedo, Socrates meets death calmly — because his whole life had been spent separating the soul from the body. The body is a prison, death a release. The soul is immortal because it shares in the eternal Forms, and they cannot perish. This is not consolation but argument: Plato proves it the way a mathematician proves.
Augustine passed through Manichaeism, scepticism, Neoplatonism — and found his answer in Christianity. His Confessions opens with the line: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in Thee." Death is not an end but a meeting. Yet Augustine added something dark: not everyone will meet it alike. Predestination. That thought would torment the Christian West for another thousand years.
Ibn Sina — "Avicenna" — wrote The Book of Healing and The Book of Salvation. The question is already in the titles. He devised the thought experiment of the "Floating Man": imagine yourself suspended in the air, stripped of every sensation. You are still aware of yourself. So the soul exists independently of the body. That is seven centuries before Descartes. And nine before neuroscience began to talk about consciousness.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is eighty pages about an educated, decent, successful man dying and understanding, for the first time in his life, that he has lived wrongly. Tolstoy wrote it after his own "Arzamas horror" — the night when a fear of death fell on him with such force that he could not stay in the room. No one in world literature has rendered that fear more exactly.
Dostoevsky lived through a staged execution — he was marched onto the parade ground, the sentence was read out, his eyes were bound, and at the last moment a reprieve was announced. After that, the question of death was physical for him. In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan says: if there is no God, everything is permitted. Alyosha answers not with an argument but with an embrace. Dostoevsky knew that death cannot be defeated by logic.
If death is inevitable — how do you live with that? That is the question of meaning.