‘Death is nothing to us,’ he says, ‘since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’ You might fear a painful dying process. You might dread the pain of losing others to death; our focus here is not on the terrible pain of grief. But fearing being dead yourself makes no sense. Death spells the end of the experiencing subject, and thus the end of any capacity for experiencing the state we fear. Or as Einstein put it: ‘The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident to one who’s dead.’
