You & I {inbetween sky high & deep down low}~~~~~~

And
what does
it mean to say, "I was?"
The second question is more difficult,
because death, time, and past tense are not equivalent, despite the use of the past tense as a euphemism.

In any lifeworld, unless we want to drain any possible meaning from the word death, we must agree that there are qua-lities we associate with living people and not with the dead, whether or not participating in first person conversation is among them.

Wishing to avoid the well-known grammatical conundrums exposed by analytical philosophy, I (ML) do not want to discuss the ontology of "having been" at length, any more than I want to be bogged down in the ontology of "I am not." However, from a purely grammatical point of view, the statement, "I was" is true for the living as well as the dead, because if the statement "she is" implies life, the the statement, "she is dead" cannot be parsed.

Moreover, when we refer to the dead in the past tense, we mean that they were alive in the past, not that they themselves remain I the past, like temporal lost luggage or whatever else that might mean. The discussion ultimately returns to the ancient difficulty of com-prehending how a person can be born, live, & then die, continuing to exist among us as a dead person about whom we still experience relationship, feelings, memories, and other forms of lasting material and spiritual influence.

So before we try to understand the ontological status of an entirely extinct humanity, let us first consider the more normal condition of those who have been dead long enough that no one alive remembers them personally and no one speaks to them
(or says kaddish for them)!

Mor
considers his
father 'levend' al
was hij al 5 maanden voor mijn geboorte doodgeschoten
& ook mijn moeder maakt nog 'levend' deel van mij uit ook al is ze
20 jaar geleden gestorven: wat mij betreft staan de grenzen tussen levend & dood
'op losse schroeven' zoals nu dus ook eigenlijk
de meeste andere zaken - 't is maar net
hoe je 't ervaart, wat je ermee doet
& wat daar de 'gevolgen'
(& oorzaken
van zijn)
...