Livre d'Or

I'm an atheist and it makes sense to me to be much more concerned with suffering (including that of the people who knew the dead person) than the death itself. Like siderea, I think that terrible things happening is a natural phenomenon, however, there's so much human intervention around those terrible things that there are many things to be angry and grief-stricken about. Nearly dying from cancer doesn't loom so much in my mind as the terrible medical treatment that turned an easily curable problem into a major problem; people not believing I was sick hurt more than having to face death. I work with a lot of elderly people and it's only furthered my sense that suffering (whether through disease, decline or just loneliness) is worse than death itself; which is why we should concentrate resources on quality of life rather than just staving off death. Working with elderly and disabled people also makes me very wary of the assisted suicide debate - in the vast majority of cases it would be so much easier and cheaper to kill people than to take small steps to genuinely ease their suffering. (In a few cases, such as people with certain progressive degenerative diseases, this doesn't hold, and I would fully support their right to assisted suicide if their cases could somehow be separated from the others.)