"His death does not separate us.  My death will not bring us together again.  That is how things are.  It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long."
     Spoken like the atheist she, Simone Beauvoir, author of the ground breaking feminist tract Second Sex, all her life purported to be.  Thinking about her life long companion, extentialist Jean Paul Sartre, after he passed away in March of 1980, Beauvoir makes clear her feelings about the terminality of existence.  If we put her words into the vernacular, along with a little paraphrasing, we might say, "It's been fun, but now it's over."
     True enough.  But if I am to insist that life has any meaning, any meaning at all, I find it difficult to face its end with equanimity.  If life has meaning, how can it be so in an impersonal universe?  How I, a personal being, claim to be so if my origins are impersonal?
     And how can Beauvoir speak so strongly about her life with Sartre if they both agree that, in the end, life means nothing?
     However we see God, it seems that, on balance, we are far wiser to consider that he is life's end and life is not, and that life is more than a disconnected subjective experience.      Life's mystery, and wonder, is that it must be birth, yes, but it must be resurrection, too.
     Otherwise, we're ultimately nothing at all.