NB This post will be mostly stream-of-consciousness. Sorry if it seems disorganized.
As I may or may not have mentioned on the site before, one of my chief anxieties relating to death (along with not having lived a meaningful life) revolves around the concept of eternity. Whether I think about the possibility of an afterlife, or the lack thereof, I find that what terrifies me is really the fact that either life or death must last forever. Ultimately, people fear what they don't or can't understand, and I have no way of conceptualizing infinite time. I think this realization, that it's the eternal part of death, not being dead, that scares me, may have contributed to my rejection of Christianity after being raised Methodist. The concept of eternal life, of course, resolves the fear of being dead, but not of eternity. So I've been grappling with that for a couple years now.
Enter Doctor Who. A couple weeks ago I was watching S2E1, New Earth, in which (slight spoilers?) the last "true" human, Cassandra, shows up, and inhabits the bodies of a few people before agreeing that it may finally be time for her to die. At this point, the Doctor takes her back to the last time someone told her that she was beautiful, and she observes the moment before passing. This led me to realize something -- if we treat time like space, looking at it like there's a bunch of universes that all exist, and the reason they don't collide is that they're temporally separated, then it's sort of like everything always is as it is in this moment. Of course as a human, the first thing I did was try to apply this realization to my own situation, and I realized that I will exist exactly as I do in this moment, forever-- but only sort of. And for whatever reason, this realization, that we all have a kind of eternal life, didn't scare me at all. I found the idea of an everlasting now profoundly comforting.
Anyway, just wanted to share that. Feel free to comment with your thoughts ('cause I know you have them :))