Reply #184: Whenever I have surgery and am put under, and then awakened sometime later,

[tblue37]

with absolutely no sense or awareness during my "out" time, I think that must be what death is like.

On the one hand, it is comforting to think I will not suffer for eternity in some way, even if only in the sense of being conscious and not able to do anything--the way the ancient Greeks imagined the afterlife was for the "strengthless dead," sort of like be a conscious nothing in an eternal waiting room.

Yet on the other it makes me deeply sad to think of just being--gone. Absolutely and forever not there.

I think it was Mark Twain who said he had been dead for billions of years before being born and it had done him no harm, so he wasn't worried about being dead after he actually died.

I agree with that, in a sense, but while I am still here, it makes me sad to think of absolutely not being here.