On Love and the Death-Drive: (A short anthology from books by Freud)

That attitude (we have hitherto adopted toward death) was far from straightforward. To anyone who listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes nature a death, and must expect to pay the debt—in short, that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise. We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death on one side to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up; indeed, we even have a saying (in German) “to think of something as though it were death.” That is, as though it were our own death, of course. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are, in fact, present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytical school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious everyone of us is convinced of his own immortality…. Our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of the death-accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event. A number of simultaneous deaths strikes us as something extremely terrible. Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude—something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task. We suspend criticism of him, overlook his possible misdeeds declare that ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum.,’ and think it justifiable to set out all that is most favourable to his memory in the funeral oration and upon the tombstone. Consideration for the dead, who, after all, no longer need it,