Light a candle. Watch the flame for a while. Feel its heat, then blow it out. Watch the smoke drift away. Look at the blackened wick.
That is birth, life, death, and non-existence. If you re-light the candle, that’s a new life; the original flame exists only in memory.
Now consider where the flame went. Energy cannot be destroyed — only changed. When you blew out the candle, its heat spread outward, diffusing into the room. It didn’t vanish from existence; it became part of everything around you.
The same happens when someone dies. Metabolism stops, and the electrical energy that powered thought, feeling and memory disperses as heat. That’s why the body grows cold. What remains is memory — the echo of a life in the thoughts, words, and deeds that outlast it, for a while.
Importantly, there is no “black void.” Like the candle flame, a dead person becomes diffuse — merging with the Everything, re-entering the cycles of nature. Becoming, in the truest and most poetic sense, seawater and snow, sunlight and rain, earth and air — forever part of the whole.
The individual is gone, like the flame, but we can remember, mourn, and celebrate them. And that, I think, is an excellent reason to live as fully and meaningfully as we can, while we can.