It is tough to lose those that are dear to you, but it’s no use to live in fear and grief when it’s yet to happen.

What helps me face the reality of death is the thought that mortality is an absolutely necessary component of evolution. Natural selection happens through death. Selection means: some live to procreate, some don’t. Disease, scarecity and even violent death (predation) are a vital part of the forces that make life possible. All the previous generations of hominids, of primates, of mammals, of vertebrates, of the strange deep-sea creatures that came before, they all had to die for the next shape of life to be possible. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t died in their millions and billions. And we inherited their fragility like we inherited their bones and skin and brains.

So now it is our turn to live and to die. You can’t have one without the other. They are the same thing.