Epitaph written by Benjamin Franklin, sixty years before his death in 1790, aged eighty-four

"Death lies in wait for each of us, the full stop at the end of our story. All our strivings, our achievements, our catastrophes; the struggles with ourselves, our families and our bodies are suddenly, mysteriously, over. It is the one unavoidable fact of our lives, yet most of us prefer to ignore it. 
One of the oddest things abour our attitude to death is that most of us still don't think it is the end. In the International Social Survey Programme completed at the end of the century, almost 80 per cent of Americans claimed to believe in life after death. In Britain the figure was 56 per cent, and this was the same or higher in most European nations. Quite what form this life will take is unclear - in Ireland and Portugal more people believed in the existence of heaven than in life after death, which seems illogical - but despite the best efforts of militant atheists, the afterlife is an idea, however sketchy, that many of us refuse to let go.
This may have less to do with organised religion than the fact that most people, at some point in their lives, undergo a form of inexplicable experience that has traditionally been labelled 'spiritual' or 'religious'. These altered states, whether induced by drugs or meditation, intense emotional trauma or illness, all point us back to the mystery of consciousness itself. We don't know where consciousness comes from, how it works or why it appears to stop. The question of where 'we' go once our bodies cease to function continues to intrigue us."
Is That All There is - in: The Book of the Dead - Lives of the Justly Famous and the Undeservedly Obscure, John Lloyd & John Mitchinson