"Like every other emotion, fear is irrational; it is not subject to calculation and cannot be entered into philosophical equations. And whether or not you fear death has nothing to do with what some philosopher thinks is rational or irrational. Epicurus ingenuously believed that you could "accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us." While some people can short-circuit their jitters about speaking in public by repeatedly putting them­ selves in situations where they must do so, no mortal can practice overcoming the fear of death in this or any other manner. (This note need not be read beyond this point, the point having been made.) Rationality is irrelevant to our being afraid or not afraid of anything. Those who say that rationality has or can have any relevance in this regard do not know what they are talking about, perhaps most of all when they are talking about the fear of death. One reason among many for this fear is that we are perfectly capable of visualizing what it is like to be a stiff just like any other stiff we have witnessed in repose while loved ones wept and mere acquaintances checked their watches because they had places to go and people to see who had not been embalmed. This "being-towards-being-a-stiff," as the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger might say, is an unpleasant prospect, if only in our imaginations. Another ugly prospect, and one we will be around to experience, is the How and When of our dying. That philosophy is useless in tackling these ultimate issues is a sufficient, although not a necessary, reason for not bothering with philosophy . . . except possibly to distract or sublimate our consciousness with reference to the How and When of our dying. This fact goes without saying, which is why we do not often say anything about it. When we do say something about it, we say that dying is part of life and let it go at that. Naturally, nothing dictates that we need to fear dying, or nothing that we know of. There are many, many things that nothing dictates we need to fear, and the fact that few people are fearful of these things makes the point. Nothing dictates that we should fear becoming paralyzed be­low our necks. Nothing dictates we should fear having our legs am­putated because they, or some other part of our bodies, might be damaged in a vehicular misadventure. Nothing dictates we should fear having horrible nightmares before we go to sleep or that we should fear waking up with an irritating speck in one of our eyes. Nothing dictates that we should fear going mad or becoming so de­pressed we want to kill ourselves. Nothing dictates that we should fear bearing children with cystic fibrosis or some other congenital disease. Nothing dictates that parents should have the least fear that their child might be abducted by a psychopath and tortured to death or that they should fear their child may grow up to be a psy­chopath who abducts children and tortures them for his pleasure because that is the kind of individual his psychology dictates he must be. Obviously and absolutely, nothing dictates that we need fear these contretemps or millions of others like them. If anything did dictate our fearing these things, why would we go on living? The answer is that if it were dictated that we should fear the mil­lions of horrors that may befall us, we would go on living because we already exist. And as long as we exist, there will be a noisy klatch of philosophers haranguing us with reasons why nothing dic­tates we should fear death and why everything dictates that we should go on living."