I get what you mean, Ann, and I
still prefer to look at it differently. I think it's purely a cultural and religious bias or something. I was always taught that a person dies when his or her time on earth is definitely up, like a lamp runs out of wick, or oil, or air, or all of them. I was taught that although there is a chance to cheat death and your own destiny, karma usually wins out. If you die early due to your bad karma, then you it's likely you've paid for your past misdeeds and will live a longer life in your next birth.
Believing in reincarnation has its perks. You always have another life to live.
So dead people are pretty much in clover. But the person you lost will never walk among you again, so its the living who will grieve and feel robbed.
I don't know really. Perceptions of death, as my world cultures professor pointed out last semester, depends purely upon cultural idealogy. In my case I've been raised to view death as merely a stop-gap between lifetimes. When I was younger, I lived in a period of extreme violence in my country, so I found myself contemplating dying a lot. I discovered I wasn't afraid, but I thought it'd be a shame I might not have the same family in my next lifetime, but I'd probably meet up with them all at some point of the cycle of rebirths, so it was all a temporary thing really. In fact, the most disturbing possibility I came up with was that I might die without reading the seventh Harry Potter book, and wondered how I could get a message to my re-incarnated self to read the series at first convenience!
What can I say, I was a wierd kid!
Anyway, that's more or less the mindset I still have. I'm not afraid of dying itself, but I AM afraid of the grief it would cause and I AM afraid of losing somebody close to me. Such grief has always been more self-centred, in my experience.
But if I didn't believe in reincarnation, I suppose I might think the same way you do. When it comes to unverifiable theories about life, death and taxes, my philosophy has been that one theory is probably as good the other, and to just pick a theory and run with that.
So, this is an entirely new angle for me to wrap my head around and I must ponder this a bit before deciding what I'd feel about it.
You always leave me with food for thought, Ann.
