Thing that people forget is, we all die, right? We all die and no matter what we do, the universe is going to go on, perfectly happy without us.

I know that things can’t stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?

To find out actually what takes place when you die you must
die. This isn't a joke. You must die - not physically but
psychologically, inwardly, die to the things you have cherished and
to the things you are bitter about. If you have died to one of your
pleasures, the smallest or the greatest, naturally, without any
enforcement or argument, then you will know what it means to die.
To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty
of its daily longing, pleasure; and agonies. Death is a renewal, a
mutation, in which thought does not function at all because thought
is old. When there is death there is something totally new. Freedom
from the known is death, and then you are living.

..but when one human creature dies a whole world of hope and memory and feeling dies with him. To be robbed of the dignity of a natural death is a terrible deprivation.

What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something that won’t ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but the loss is limitless.

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever — there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.

And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

I know, then, that after I die other bodies, other eyeings, will be born. But this is really the same thing as saying that after I die I will again awake as a baby — any baby, but only one — just as I did before but without remembering the previous trip. For anyone who argues that after death there will be nothingness forever is really saying that when he dies the universe will cease to be. But we know that it goes on after people die, and that because it does the eyeing it is really more my self than this particular body.

Death is here and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death - and we are death.

Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,

First our pleasures die - and then
Our hopes, and then our fears - and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust - and we die too.

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot -
Love itself would, did they not.

For a number of years he had lived, eaten, laughed, loved, hoped, like everyone else. And for him it was over, over for good. A life! A few days, and the nothing! You're born, you grow up, you're happy, you wait, then you die. Goodbye! Man or woman, you'll never return to this earth! And yet each of us bears within him the fierce, unrealizable longing for eternity, each of us is a kind of universe within the universe, and each of us soon vanishes completely into the dunghill of new organisms. Plants, animals, men, stars, worlds, everything quickens, then dies, in order to transform itself. And nothing ever returns, whether insect, man, or planet!

Death of a beloved flattens and dulls everything. Connections do not adhere so closely, and important events lose some of their glow.

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.