As Wittgenstein remarked, we can easily get bewitched by language, thinking, just because we can form what seems to be a grammatically proper noun, that there must be something really corresponding to it as its referent.
— David Michael Kleinberg-Levin (private communication)

Language conventions can embody philosophical errors and trick us into deluding ourselves. The question that every child asks, "What will I feel after I'm dead?" sounds perfectly reasonable to most adults (who may even regard this as a "deep" question). It is not at least grammatically incorrect to talk about feeling things after we die, and even to imagine losing access to all sense data in a tomblike, paralyzed, agoraphobic state — hence the terror of "being dead". But a little thought reveals that when the "I" no longer exists, there is also no longer any possibility of experience, emotion, purpose, desire, suffering or need. As Epicurus said, "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."

Wits often complain that we're afraid of death because we can't "face it". Do you think it might be more accurate to say that we can't stop obsessing about it? The less we think about it, the healthier we seem to become. And the fact is, we know exactly what it's like to "not be". We lose consciousness — a state as phenomenologically indistinguishable from death as gravity is from inertia — at least once a day whenever we take a nap or fall asleep at night. It's not such a bad place after all. In fact it's no place, and no time.

When people express horror upon realizing that in the year 2500 they will only be a faint memory (if that), I ask them if the year 1500 was a particularly "bad" year for them. If they say, "Of course not," then I have them. I think the contrast between the way people hand-ring about their life after death and the way they never anguish about their life before birth is a dead give-away (pun intended).

We seem to have more of a problem with time than space. We find it hard to imagine a future in which we will not be at least voyeuristically engaged. Yet we never imagine that we simultaneously exist on other planets (most of us). But this is only because we have mobility within space, but no apparent mobility within time — unless you count recall and anticipation as forms of time travel.