Is death inside or outside of life? Within or without?

Is death the last chapter, or the infinite after?

I realise this sounds like a complete waffle of a question, and for we secular souls it is certainly unanswerable in any concrete sense, but still I like to think about what death is.

There is the mechanics of death, the cessation of all vital functions of the body including the heartbeat, brain activity (including the brain stem), and breathing, and then there is the meaning of death. As ever I am more interested in meaning, and given that all of deaths meaning belongs to the living I can’t help but think that death only occurs in life.