death is nothing, the mere absence of experience. It’s no worse than sleep. Moreover, death is a release from all pain, a boundary beyond which our sufferings cannot go. It returns us to that state of peacefulness in which we lay before we were even born. I was dead for countless eons before my birth, and it did not vex me then. I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care—as the Epicureans say.
