Who Am I Really?

Jacob's Ladder _ William Blake

A rented apartment changes it's character with each new occupant: there are plants, furniture, perhaps new carpets on the floors and fresh paint on the walls. Even the aura of the space changes. Maybe an old tenant was a bitter old drunk... or a young woman on her way to a successful career typed her resume there... It could have been a couple in a sour relationship with the walls echoing arguments and despair and, at another time, a quiet and happy spinster enjoying a life full of grace. Oh, if the walls could talk. Am I as transient as the furniture or the people passing through the span of time?
When I think about what I think of as "I" and where I was before my birth, I become aware that "I" wasn't here before and most likely won't be here after. But, the apartment stands for a period of time and then, it too passes away.
"Everything changes... everything passes... things appear... and things disappear... but after everything appears and disappears... being and extinction both transcended... still the basic emptiness and silence abides, and that is blissful peace"... says the Buddhist prayer. Is there comfort in that?
People who say they know better claim there is a continuum after we pass away. Do you feel comforted at funerary memorials where a minister, who never knew the deceased, proclaims the departed has passed on to a better place? Really? Who knows for sure.
If death happens to everybody, and I am one of you, then why do I fear death? I get old, if I am lucky and beat the odds, I might live for seventy... eighty... maybe even ninety years. This IS the better place and if I treat it as such the end is not so frightening for me. It just isn't all that important to me then.