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Death may harm us by depriving us of the life we might otherwise have lived.

Fear of death can consume the very life it seeks to protect.

We must accept mortality to prevent death from defeating us twice.

Most attempts to console us about death begin by denying that it is an evil. But what if it is an evil—and our task is not to deny this, but to prevent the fear of death from spoiling the life that remains to us?

In 1970, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a short paper entitled "Death," in which he asked: If death is the permanent end of our existence, is it an evil?

There are, at least for the non-believer, only two possible answers. Either death is an evil because it deprives us of life, or it is a mere blank because there is no one left to suffer this deprivation.

If death is an evil, it is not because of any unpleasant attribute that it has, such as eternal torment, but because of what it takes away: life itself. For Nagel, the bare experience of life is intrinsically valuable, regardless of the balance of its good and bad elements.

The longer we live, the more........

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