Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

The last gift a parent can give to children is to teach them, through example, how to face death with equanimity.

Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one's midlife crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on will alone. This comforting illusion may be shattered by some urgent irreversible experience ... None more potently confronts us with finiteness and contingency than the imminence of our own death.

To lose a parent or a lifelong friend is often to lose the past: the person who died may be the only other living witness to golden events of long ago. But to lose a child is to lose the future: what is lost is no less than one’s life project—what one lives for, how one projects oneself into the future, how one may hope to transcend death (indeed, one’s child becomes one’s immortality project).

Cand ne mor parintii, ne simtim intodeauna vulnerabili, pentru ca nu ne confruntam doar cu o pierdere, ci si cu propria moarte. Cand devenim orfani, intre noi si mormant nu mai sta nimeni.

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

But he gave no greater gift than the one he offered me shortly before he died, and it was a gift that answers for all time the question of whether it is rational or appropriate to strive for “ambitious” therapy in those who are terminally ill. When I visited him in the hospital he was so weak he could barely move, but he raised his head, squeezed my hand, and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you for saving my life.

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!