Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.
Humans will die like all living things do, but we have the added burden of knowing that we will.
Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face - to worry about how to die - distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.
When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.
We must be born with an intuition of mortality.
As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
