Your whole life you are working and learning. It all starts in preschool, learning to speak and hear basic sounds as words, shades of the world turn into colors, loops and spirals turn into your name, and splashes of pinks and greens turn into artwork that will be treasured forever. You learn what life is, who is around you. You learn your whole life in a matter of hours per day. And then you go to grade school. You learn numbers and your name, the “necessary” elements of life. Then middle school, high school, college. Straight from college comes work. And you work until you retire and die. Your death is the end of you. You aren’t revived, ready to start fresh. You’re just…gone. There’s no thoughts for you anymore. Only the living world will remember you. You lose all the numbers and equations, you lose the colors, the spirals and loops, the beautiful artwork hung in the halls of your childhood home. You lose the day you tripped and busted open your knee, the day you held your baby brother for the first time, the day you held a sailboat’s wheel plunging into warm waves, you lose the day you finally get to hug and love your older brother, you lose the day he leaves for college, the day you met your true love, the day you walked down the aisle, the day you looked into your baby daughter’s eyes, the day she left for college. You lose everything you have ever learned, you have lost your life. So when a stranger tells your daughter “I’m sorry for your loss” they have no idea what she has lost, or what you have lost. You have left an empty hole in her heart, and dragged the memories with it. So why spend your whole life learning, when you know you will lose it?