All that I am now, all the things I do and could do, will change. It may be a part of life, but it is the end of living.
Your love to them should be a source of power to accept all of them. Your love to life should empower you to embrace death.
Your love to them should be a source of power to accept all of them. Your love to life should empower you to embrace death.
By your logic, I shouldn't care for my partner when they're ill, or lend a friend money if they need it, or teach a child a skill; their illness, their poverty, their ignorance, are all "part of them", and I should just embrace it rather than trying to change it.
I can play with phrasing too - go tell your loved one "I am happy that you're going to die. I welcome it, and I want it to happen. I wish you would die tomorrow". Report back. Do they feel loved?
> Do you think you can love them that way?
I genuinely think that anyone who embraces someone else's death, except in the case of relief from a painful incurable illness, does _not_ fully love them. They're protecting their own feelings - avoiding their grief - by lying to themselves that death is somehow good or noble or pure, simply because it's natural. There are _plenty_ of things that are "natural" that we all agree we're better off without. Or do you want to catch smallpox or be eaten by a tiger because it's natural?
(And don't for one second think, because death provides relief from pain, that it's good. That just means that incurable pain is _worse_. Getting stabbed in the face is worse than getting stabbed in the hand, but neither is to be welcomed)
Life without children (and grandchildren) wouldn't be worth living.
...then those of us who have at least half a brain would be overjoyed at the opportunity to enjoy one another's arts, personalities, minds, and bodies; to explore everywhere we wanted to go, including realms of thought; to create, to play, to live.
* You can love something while recognizing that there have to be reasons that it should end _and still disliking that fact_. Someone who loves chocolate fudge cake does not have to be happy about the fact that they cannot eat that and only that forever. They can begrudgingly accept the necessity of sometimes-not-eating-chocolate-cake, but that doesn't imply that they _want_ to not be able to eat it all the time.
* Having children is _not_ incompatible with living forever. Our hypothetical individual could be the only infinite-lifespan person among the population, free to continue living and experiencing and forming new relationships while the planet continues with an otherwise-unaffected level of population.
* But, hey, you know what, we're _already_ living in fantasy land by hypothesizing infinite lifespan already - why _does_ it have to be "obvious" that overpopulation and resource exhaustion are necessary outcomes of an immortal unaging population? I hereby declare that the same magic mystery sci-fi bullshit that caused immortality _also_ gave us reliable interstellar transportation and settlement, and quantum expansion wibbly-wobbly pocket universes. Oh, and world hunger is solved too. Bam, done. You still gonna tell me that I have to love the idea of death?
There are reasons to accept, in our current society and with our current level of technology, that a finite lifespan is a necessary constraint to prevent further privation - but if "a begrudging acceptance of necessity" is synonymous to "love" in your vocabulary, then I feel deeply sorry for you. Just because rational sensible mature adults recognize that there are _currently_ reasons why humans _have_ to have finite lifespans for societal reasons, or just because death is currently a "fact" of life, doesn't mean we are beholden to celebrate that fact. To use the word "love" about death is _deeply_ offensive. Death is the antithesis of love.