The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

He had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. You did not have to like it because you understood it. He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had stopped.

From “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway touches the subject of death  “He could beat anything, he thought because, no thing could hurt him if he did not care. All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain.” My father was afraid of death, but he was more afraid of pain. Years before he died, he asked me whether he would have to endure pain to pass away.  Perhaps he thought I had the gift of clairvoyance. He suffered but not from pain.  In my upcoming book, which deals with the afterlife, I write: “I figure that dying has to feel like diving into the cold waters on a sunny beach. You slowly wade farther and farther into the sea, and the water gets higher and higher until it reaches your groin where the sensation sends shivers through your entire body, and then you jump into the water and everything turns fresh and comfortable, and there is no more cold.”  Of course, we all fear death. Woody Allen expresses this feeling with his witty sense of humor: “I am not afraid of dying … I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”