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

Suggestions for Thought

"It is not surprising that husbands and wives seem so little part of one another. It is surprising that there is so much love as there is. For there is no food for it. What does it live upon - what nourishes it? Husbands and wives never seem to have anything to say to one another. What do they talk about? Not about any great religious, social, political questions or feelings. They talk about who shall come to dinner, who is to live in this lodge and who in that, about the improvement of the place, or when they shall go to London ... But any real communion between husband and wife - any descending into the depths of their being, and drawing out thence what they find and comparing it - do we ever dream of such a thing? Yes, we may dream of it during the season of 'passion', but we shall not find it afterwards. We even expect it to go off, and lay our account that it will. If the husband has, by chance, gone into the depths of his being, and found there anything unorthodox, he, oftenest, conceals it carefully from his wife, - he is afraid of 'unsettling her opinions'."

Cassandra (1852), Florence Nightingale - in: The Book of the Dead - Lives of the Justly Famous and the Undeservedly Obscure, John Lloyd & John Mitchinson

Has it really changed that much in 160 years?