I'm at 27,000 feet in in a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. I spent the day at one of our proprietary schools, while they did assessment and stuff.

As I often do, when sitting on a plane waiting to take off, this time I wondered what would happen if the plane crashed. And, as always, I came right up against that barrier that I never break through: the thought of consciousness beyond death. I just can't imagine never being conscious after death. But that -- the persistence of consciousness and the inability to imagine beyond it -- is no proof that there is such a thing as life after death. I think that death is just that -- death. There's no reason to suppose otherwise, factually speaking. What life does a squirrel have after we shoot it off of our deck? What life does a dog have after a car hits it?

I'm not really concerned any more about the possibility of a plane crashing -- I have more or less come to accept it as a risk of living. But part of that acceptance comes from the idea that death is like sleep. That it is a final summation, and somehow brings a closure that the dying can recognize and accept.

And yet I think of all the mornings that I wake, and hit the snooze button. I choose to sleep longer because the moment of waking brings with it the feeling that sleep was restful and right. It is not the sleep itself that makes me feel this way; it is the waking. This is why I hit the snooze button as many as five times in a morning: I feel that each time I drift off, informed by the memory of the previous waking, I am returning to rest.

The difference, of course, is that with death there is no waking, and no sense of closure. Except among the living who remain. So what is there in death that actually brings closure for the dying? Nothing. Death is the great nothing.