What about "death"?

[anvi]

The deaths of others bother me of course.  One loses people one cherishes, of others whom one does not know but are valuable nonetheless, die, and that's always difficult.  My own death does not bother me in one respect but in another it does.  I'm not really afraid of being dead itself, since, as Andrew notes above, the complete lack of awareness or existence didn't bother me before I was born, so I don't anticipate it bothering me after I die--so to speak.  In another respect, my own death does bother me.  Apart from the process, which may be painful and prolonged or not--who knows?--what gets me about it the most is that it is just the end of all possible experiences, all joys and attachments and loves and new encounters with the world and all that.  Everything is closed off, whether it's resolved or not, and what may be new or renewed is made forever impossible.  That's what gets to me about the starkness of my own death.  Other people may regard it differently, of course.  But I don't believe in any afterlife, and it happens to all of us, so I can only accept it anyway.   It only underscores the importance of making life as good as one can while one is alive.

[anvi]

I've been thinking of the notion of "reincarnation" lately.  I have to teach about theories of rebirth a lot, for one, but I also read a lot about science.  It seems to me that, even if the ancients may have been wrong about rebirth, either in the "Hindu"/Jaina sense of a soul being incarnated in a series of bodies or in the Buddhist version of the karmic legacy causing future births despite the fact that there is no such thing as a soul, there is one sense in which the idea may be, in a specifically different way, plausible.  The elements, the molecules that make up our bodies have been around for eons.  A fairly large number of the atoms and molecular structures making up my body have been components of the bodies of many living beings before me.  They recycle through the environment as the result of various kinds of transport, consumption, absorption and reabsorption, ect.  When I die, in one way or another, many of these atoms and molecules will help to constitute the bodies of new living beings in future generations.  It is not any soul or any karmically derivative persona that survives my death, but many of my physical constituents will reside in the bodies of living beings again.  (This is closer to, though certainly not identical with, the Buddhist notion of rebirth than the others.)  This particular construal of "life after death" is surely not the one that ancient and modern religions enshrine in their hopes.  But the notion that individual death is not an absolute end of what we really are is not radically wrong.  It's just that what survives of us are physical components that can inhabit living bodies again.  That may not be what we want, what we dream of, out of eternity.  But it's not nothing either. 

[anvi]

it reminds me, actually, of the old Zen saw about the two monks standing at the edge of the world.  One monk is looking at everything going on there and weeping.  The second monk asks: "why do you weep?"  The first says: "look at that terrible place!  They're all eating each other."  "Oh," the second monk says, "don't feel so bad.  They're feeding each other."