When we die we are generally either burnt into a fine ash or we are buried and decompose. Either way our physical molecules are dispersed back into the universe to be recycled and resused to make something else. Our consciousness and self awareness are no more. We cease to exist. There is no soul that goes up into heaven or roams around the country side in the form of a ghost. Okay we do still exist but our existence is in the form of the most recent molecules that made up our bodies and those molecules get dispersed back into the universe. They are just not coordinated in this thing called a human, an organised mass of molecules interconnected.
I feel that your body is just the 'house' you inhabit while you're alive, and that once you die, the house serves no further purpose. Your legacy remains in the memories of the people you interacted with while still alive. Unless you've done something important enough to be preserved by history (Lincoln, Curie, Hitler, Babe Ruth....), the essence of who you were is lost within three or four generations....
Nice way of putting it.
As our bodies mature in the womb, there is some moment of epiphany that there is a sense of "self". The number of cells and specialization of a biochemical, biomechanical, and bio electric process that creates us as an individual, but still does not define us. It seems flawed to think that we just stop "being" when the body fails. This isn't fear of my mortality speaking. It seems wrong that the only remains of us is chemical compounds.
We are but dust.
I heard a pastor say that. He said, "Without God we are butt-dust." What's butt-dust? Is it contagious? Does God heal us of our butt-dust?