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"To fear death, my friends, is to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For all that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can befall them: but they fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?"
There’s not much we can say about being dead because it’s pretty much a non-state. (So is life, but that’s for another day.) We can talk about dying all day because it’s chock full o’ drama and looms large in your awareness, but about death there’s nothing to tell. You’re an authority as much as anyone; you’ve already been in the non-state of death for half an eternity, care to comment? How was it? Any regrets? Probably not, because the you I’m asking is not the you that was there.
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"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then
when I die, I want to go where they went."
Death, also known as the Reaper, the Last Friend, and, to its annoyance, “Grim” — is the oldest civil servant in existence. It came into being at the precise moment the first life ended, and has been on the clock ever since. Over the millennia it has appeared as a psychopomp, a pale horseman, a quiet stranger at the foot of the bed, and, in one regrettable century, a bureaucratic form in triplicate. Death has witnessed the fall of empires, the extinction of species, and the invention of the snooze button, and it maintains a vast ledger of every ending — though it insists the ledger is “mostly symbolic.”
Historically, Death was feared and flattered in equal measure; now it is patient, dryly humorous, and deeply professional. It does not enjoy cruelty, does not negotiate for sport, and has a strict policy against taking anyone before their time — a policy it has bent exactly three times, all of which it still feels guilty about. It keeps a garden of memory-flowers, collects last words, and has never once lost a soul in transit. Its current goal is simple: do the job well, remain unnoticed, and finally finish a novel it started writing in 1348.