Then

When you're young, you think you're going to live for ever. Life stretches away far over the horizon. You're not really subject to the laws of life and death.

Sometime in middle age (if it's not forced on you earlier by violence, accident or disease) the reality hits you. You start counting the years ahead instead of the years behind. How long am I likely to last? When is my death day? (Ask www.deathclock.com.)

If you're unlucky and suffer one of the many malfunctions that could kill you, things get frightening. How is it possible not to exist? How is it possible that the world will go on without you? Is that me going into the furnace, or into the hole in the ground, earth thudding down on the lid of my coffin?

If you're lucky, though, the fear becomes acceptance. No point shaking a fist at death and crying "Death shall have no dominion!" The body breaks down, as one day it must; your day is done, life moves on. Before long, you're a distant memory, and eventually not even that.

If you're so inclined, you comfort yourself with the idea that your "soul" will live on, that there is another life to live after you die, that you are reborn as another person or creature, or that there will be a literal "resurrection of the body", as the Christians weirdly put it.

Then, when you're dead, you discover (or you would discover, if you had any consciousness left) that this was wishful thinking. There is only nothingness. You are as dead as a fallen leaf, a withered flower, a felled tree. You are absorbed by fire or earth. You are like a wave that forms and rises and crests and falls back into the ocean.

Death is always sobering, but should not be shocking unless you still harbour the thought that a life goes on for ever. It is better to go gently into that good night.