I think death is, gratefully, final. It’s no different from the state that we were in before we were conceived. Even though life is very short—I’m fond of pointing out to people that the average human life is less than 1,000 months long, which is a good reason for not wasting time if one can help it—that fact provides a definite and useful terminus ad quem. It means that the things that you want to achieve must be achieved here. You must work: “work while you have light,” as the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Henri-Frederic Amiel said. But it also means that in the end there will be a wonderful rest from it all. You will survive in the way science tells us, which is that our constituents return to the elements, and become part of nature, and remain permanently part of nature, because that, after all, is what the conservation-of-energy law tells us. We’re not going to disappear entirely—in the form of the bits that we’re made of.

—A. C. Grayling
Interview in Philosophy Bites