On Death and How to Stay Dead

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely be the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.- Steve Jobs “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.” - Bertrand Russell What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the excision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally. - Will Durant “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain This is, perhaps, the essence of atheistic grief and also the essence of atheistic hope. To understand that death is the end of existence and that it is inevitable, but to live as if it is not. To refuse to be resigned to death even as we refuse to deny its permanence - we must nevertheless care for all that is not yet dead on our planet. At any rate, after my own death, if I shall have to be with God in hell, or to be with the Devil in heaven, or to be with Jesus and his disciples like my grade school and high school teachers in La Salle, like Bro. Eduardo Manalo of Iglesia Ni Cristo, Bro. Mike Velarde of El Shaddai, Bro. Eddie Villanueva of Jesus is Lord Church, or Pastor Apollo Quiboloy of the Restorationist Christian Church, etc in Purgatoy, I say - no way, Jose. Over my dead body. I'd rather stay buried in the cemetery with my precious books forever and ever till the end of time and space.- Poch Suzara