None of us want to believe we are mortal

None of us want to believe we are mortal. We live our lives as if we will be around forever. We can’t imagine our nonexistence and so we deny the possibility of our disappearance. Woody Allen said we claim we’re not afraid of death, but we just don’t want to be there when it happens and when we stubbornly persist and believing that we will somehow be the exception to the fate of all mankind.

— from The Landing (Death) · Hope, Not Fear by Rabbi Benjamin Blech

In the book

Most people will not even look at the gauge. None of us truly want to believe we are mortal; we fly along as though we will be airborne forever, because we cannot picture our own absence, and so we quietly deny that the descent is coming at all. We begin our approach to the ground from the very day we are born, and yet when we are finally reminded of where we are headed, we react with the same shock a man feels at the doctor's office — I once saw a coffin set out at the front of a synagogue to make exactly that point, and watched a whole room flinch. — The Landing (Death)

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