Before pursuing further the analysis of Dasein as melancholic and the transcendental role that melancholia plays in Being and Time, we first need to examine Dasein's unique mode of temporality. Heidegger understands temporality in a way that is very different from both common conceptions of temporality and theoretical conceptions of temporality. Heidegger's task is thus twofold. The first task is a positive one in which he articulates Dasein's unique mode of temporality. In order to claim, though, that Dasein's unique mode of temporality is primordial, Heidegger's second task must be to show that both theoretical and everyday conceptions of temporality are derived from and grounded in this unique mode of temporality. Both tasks are in keeping with Heidegger's phenomenological method that what we most commonly say and do is a semblance that covers up the real phenomenon of temporality. An examination of the care structure reveals the starting point for Heidegger's conception of temporality.

Above we saw that Dasein's space, or its interpretation as care, is structured as possibility. We also examined death as that which makes this space of possibility possible. Death is Dasein's ownmost possibility, the impossibility of possibility. Dying is the way in which Dasein stretches ahead of itself into its possibilities.