Inevitably, you see that it is coming your way too. Yet, being no less in love with life than any other conscious creature, your own death may seem completely out of order—it was never part of the deal. Tom Nagel has said it well: “Observed from without, human beings obviously have a natural lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred years. A man’s sense of his own experience, on the other hand, does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so tolerable in the past… . Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods.”
You signed up to be there indefinitely. And maybe nothing hits you harder than the realization that one day you will not be able to. Here is an excerpt from an interview with the novelist Philip Roth. “‘You said you’re afraid of dying. You’re 72. What are you afraid of ?’ He looks at me. ‘Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it.’
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
