We usually speak of death as if it were the end of a thing. A person lives, and then that person dies. It sounds straightforward, almost tidy. But that clarity may be borrowed from an older picture of what a person is. If you are a substance - a distinct, enduring entity that inhabits a body - then death is the destruction of that entity. But if you are not a substance at all, and instead a pattern, the question becomes much stranger. What exactly dies when a pattern ends?