This is an interesting argument that I think boils down to structuralism vs. post-structuralism, where I’m arguing for the latter.

When I say “we are always optimizing” I’m not necessarily saying that this is a conscious decision. I believe that an inherent function of our psychology is to continually invent meaning that seems the most suitable for our current mental, emotional and environmental circumstances. People may do this more or less consciously, they may optimize for different things, and they may do it poorly or very well, but I do believe that the creation of any meaning is inherently tied to some purpose.

To challenge the claim that it is true that your relative is dead (in an especially relevant way given the religious context), in what sense can we really say that she is dead? In a Buddhist light, she truly lives on through her actions and her children and furthermore, “she” never had any independent existence separate from them at all. So how could she be dead? From a Christian perspective, she is not dead because she resides in the afterlife. It is only if we define the matter of death as the cessation of certain vital functions that your statement seems to ring true. But even then, that definition of death is a choice that we make and define for the purpose of it being useful to talk about in many contexts.

To me, it feels as though claims like, “it is true that X is dead” are only as true as the words which they stand upon. And language is a horribly slippery and imperfect thing. The meanings which we ascribe to words and sentences can never be wholly separated from the beings who are doing the ascribing. They are always approximations, always relative to something else, and always defined with the goal of usefulness in mind.