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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this has been my experience with a family friend who died of a brain tumor. Basically, once you're in hospice (in this case it was home hospice) and it's clear you're going to die, they just hook you up to the morphine drip that you can press yourself.

Obviously for many people it's still very scary - it is death after all. But the self-administered morphine drip has been around for ages and is relatively uncontroversial.

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> very scary - it is death after all.

Is it? As an atheist I welcome the nothing; no more worrying about filling out taxes and such. Being religious you really should be jumping for joy (although you cannot kill yourself probably), but how is death scary if you believe in something after?

Because it's hard to fully comprehend or feel complete certainty of what is going to happen.

It’s not the death that is scary, it’s the Judgement Day that’ll come after. Because you don’t know whether you did enough good stuff to go straight to heaven, or first have to suffer in hell to account for your sins. Not all of us believe in a religion that says you are already forgiven and you’ll go to heaven, because God sent himself down to Earth to become His own son to sacrifice Himself to Himself to convince Himself to forgive you.

I was raised with a particularly idiotic strain where you cannot repent or be forgiven; one mistake (however tiny) will be hell and that’s it. It is what made me an atheist at a young age (I think I was not even 10 when I decided it’s a bag of bull): it particularly exposes how weird religion is.

That's really a fringe belief indeed. Luckily there's no such thing in my religion.

Only on HN do we have to explain why death may be scary to some people. Sometimes I wonder if this place is populated by actual humans.

as an atheist who has been suicidal from around age 12, I'm not afraid of being dead, but actually causing my own death has been very difficult - it's not so much a logical fear as a mental block, it's like you're moving through very thick syrup trying to get the thing done, you're fighting a mental force that's holding you back, and eventually all the commitment and energy that you had invested in getting it done just seems to have dissipated and you just feel empty. I'm my case at least, the survival instinct has won every battle. unless of course we have quantum immortality, it would explain why I keep failing.

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