Oh, Isvari, your essay went like a dagger straight to my heart. I can barely imagine what it must feel like... Still, for the past 10 months, I've been living with a family member who is slowly, painfully, and certainly dying. And that's the closest I got to the hair-raising feeling of death coming to sweep everything. They say death is such a simple thing in nature that us, humans, like to complicate. I guess it takes feeling its breath down your neck to truly understand why we complicate it. As much as I loved your thoughts, I can't help but think that this extreme fear of dying after you've lived like a black hole is just another reflection of our insatiable desire to mean something in this world. Though the closer I look at death, the more I tend to believe we don't really mean anything.