Ok, I can offer a few quotes here from writers (including many French) that, I hope, may be able to comfort you or try to enlighten us better. The simplified answer is that death puts an end to our earthly suffering and peace of soul awaits us. And from a biological point of view, we die without even knowing it because our brain does not have time to realize it.
By Pascal:
“Men having been unable to cure death, misery, ignorance, they decided, to make themselves happy, not to think about it. / There are only three kinds of people: some who serve God having found him, others who seek him having not found him, others who live without seeking him or having found him. The first ones are reasonable and happy, the latter are mad and unhappy. Those in the middle are unhappy and reasonable.”
By Chateaubriand:
“For if men who believe in Providence agree on the main leaders of their doctrine, those on the contrary who deny the Creator never cease to argue about the bases of their nothingness. They have an abyss before them; to fill it, all they need is the bottom stone, but they don’t know where to get it. / Religion prevents dryness of the soul.”
By Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“Flee those who, under the pretext of explaining nature, sow distressing doctrines in the hearts of men, and whose apparent skepticism is a hundred times more affirmative and more dogmatic than the decided tone of their adversaries. Under the haughty pretext that they alone are enlightened, true, in good faith, they imperiously submit us to their sharp decisions, and claim to give us, for the true principles of things, the unintelligible systems that they have constructed in their imagination. Moreover, overthrowing, destroying, trampling under foot everything that men respect, they take away from the afflicted the last consolation of their misery, from the powerful and the rich the only restraint of their passions; they extract from the depths of their hearts remorse for their crime, the hope of virtue, and still boast of being benefactors of the human race. Never, they say, is the truth harmful to men: I believe it like them; and this is, in my opinion, a great proof that what they teach is not the truth.”
By TolstoĂŻ:
“Man is a weak, miserable animal until the light of God shines in his heart. / Our fleshly remains raise an impenetrable veil between us and the Lord. Let us therefore confine ourselves to studying the sublime principles which our divine Savior has left us for our conduct here below; let us try to conform to them and follow them, convince ourselves that the less we give rise to our weak human spirit, the more it is pleasing to God, who rejects all knowledge that does not come from Him; that the less we seek to delve into what He has been pleased to conceal from our knowledge, the sooner He will grant us the discovery of it through His divine spirit.”
By Dostoyevsky:
“Never expect reward for the good you do, because your part is already good enough in this world: you will know the true joy of the soul, which is only granted to the righteous.”
By Thomas More:
“The soul is immortal: God who is good created it to be happy. After death, rewards crown virtue, tortures torment crime.”
By Madame de Staël:
“The Supreme Being abandoned the world to the wicked, and […] he reserved the immortality of the soul only for the righteous: the wicked will have had a few years of pleasure, the virtuous hearts long sorrows, but the prosperity of some will end in nothingness, and the adversity of others prepares them for eternal felicity.”
By St. Augustin:
“It is better to fight vice than to let it dominate without a fight. Better to leave war with the hope of eternal peace than captivity without any concern for deliverance. Certainly we desire the end of this war, and the flame of divine love carries us towards this immutable order of peace and stability which will restore to higher realities their pre-eminence over lower ones. But if (God forbid) the hope of such good were only a dream, we should still prefer the eternal tears of this interior duel to an unresisting capitulation to the tyranny of our passions. / For, without you, what am I to myself, if not a guide leading to the abyss?”
By Matthieu Ricard:
“In the eyes of a Westerner, who is much more individualistic, everything that disturbs, threatens and ultimately destroys the individual is felt as an absolute tragedy because the individual constitutes a world of his own. In the East, where a more holistic vision of the world prevails and where greater importance is given to the relationships between all beings and to the belief in a continuum of consciousness that takes birth again, death is not an annihilation, but a passage.”
That was it for the litany of quotes.
