It is always a puzzle to picture what comes after death. Some people say that imagining myself "gone" is too hard or even impossible. Many pictures of events post-death seem too static to me. Our bodies and our thinking depend on processes of refreshment. Eating, sleeping, being awake - many conditions and activities require rest, periods of variety and being given new supplies. Any description of wonderful, delightful, marvelous, happy conditions or activities that attempts to show permanence seems wrong, not human, unnatural to me.
In my graduate school psychology courses, the first one was psychophysics, about body and perceptive processes: how our vision, our hearing and other processes work. I was impressed at how vision and other perception processes require refreshing, sometimes at very high rates.
When I see the deteriorating body of a dead rabbit or squirrel in the woods, I think I am looking at a model of what is in my future. I realize I consider myself far too wonderful to simply rot away but however tight and strong my coffin may be, I am confident that if you take a peek inside in 1000 years after my death, there will be very little left of me. I am interested in some groups focusing on the memory of a person. To some, if there is no attention by any human to my history, loveable personality, thought, comments, there is a deeper condition to fear, postpone, counter than the absence of flesh.
Another picture of somehow continuing on is sometimes focused on reproduction. Maybe as long as some of my descendants are alive, part of my precious self continues.
