Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do
not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate
identity--but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity
depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our
name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit
cards. . . It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for
our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of
who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person
we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all
the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have
tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however
boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this
stranger on our own?
-Sogyal Rinpoche, /The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying/
