There are two sentiments I would mention towards death: the sentiment of fear and that of sympathy. The fear is for oneself, and the sympathy for whoever has died, being respectively fragile and virtuous.

The fear for death makes death near, by association with sufferings that could bring an end to life, like fatal illness or accidents. Too often these experiences have not entirely arisen, but the apprehension comes from undue conjecture. A man with a benign tumor would suspect cancer, and a man who has seen the death of the same age would think of dying young. These experiences have lead to the fragility of life.

The sympathy for death, the other way around, discovers the bright side of death by witness, to whether the young or old, intimate or distanced, and even kind or evil. It reflects a respecting attitude of life and the goodness cherished inside a man’s tenderness, along the way to his own mortality that has finally no remorse and regret. These reflections, so far as they are possible, have lead to the virtue of life.