Can death hurt you?

Most of the time death is a rumor, something that happens to other people and to you only in principle. Then, some night at three in the morning, it isn't. The fear arrives whole, and no argument seems able to reach it. Epicurus thought the fear rested on a mistake. Harm needs someone to suffer it, he argued, and death is the end of the one who suffers, so you and your death never meet. His Roman follower Lucretius added the argument about the time before you were born. On their view the fear of death has no object, and the sensible thing is to set it down. Philip Larkin answered them in Aubade (1977), a poem about waking before dawn to the certainty of dying. He brushes the Epicurean argument aside: being unable to feel anything is not a comfort, he says, it is exactly the thing that terrifies. The philosopher Thomas Nagel had made a cooler version of the reply in 1970. Death is bad, he argued, not because it hurts but because of what it takes: all the life you would otherwise have had. Tolstoy put the problem where it actually lives. Ivan Ilyich, a judge dying slowly in middle age, had always accepted the textbook syllogism that all men are mortal and Caius is a man, so Caius is mortal. It had simply never seemed to apply to him, little Vanya, with his own mother and his own childhood. Knowing you will die, Tolstoy suggests, is easy. Believing it is something else. When you imagine not existing, what exactly is it that frightens you, if anything does?