…but they don’t change a thing. The idea of dying makes me sad for simple pleasures I will no longer have. Yes, I’ve heard it: “No brain, no memories.” But I hope my own brain ticks along until it doesn’t. And until the last, I will be thinking of cold beer on a hot day, a crystal sky, a mockingbird at dawn; of whiskey before my fire, a Scottish lament, the loneliness of a cold and wet winter’s day; of black coffee and morning quiet, of the art on my walls, of lying in the dark with someone who knows my secrets…
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I have read a good deal of psychology and philosophy without discovering a single argument that claims that one SHOULDN’T be sad about personal extinction, unless of course you imagine living through a joyful eternity with the Lord of your life, Jesus Christ. What I HAVE found are reasons why one ought not to be rendered dysfunctional by anxiety and despair, emotionally crippled in the face of death’s inevitability—particularly if you have lived long enough to create your own meaning and have actually done so. And would all those simple pleasures you catalog have the same resonance if you had an assurance of their availability for the next trillion or quadrillion or quintilian years and more through all eternity, with no prospect of cessation? Those gratifications derive much of their appeal from the awareness—however repressed—that their very possibility will perish with the person who harbors them. From this perspective the certainty of annihilation elevates every experience, however pedestrian, to an intensity it could not otherwise have. That is precisely why Yalom says the best thing for anyone is a diagnosis of terminal illness followed by an improbable recovery. Actual death destroys but the thought of death saves.