The fear of 'death-itself' arises out of the fear of void-experience; it's the fear of perceiving and being aware of the nothingness after dying. It's not that we fear that there will be nothing; rationality is lost with fear. Peter Watts puts it best when he writes in his book Blindsight, "'People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines[...] we're feeling machines that happen to think.'" Many-a-philosopher argue that death is the 'same as before you were born (phenomenologically),' so why should one be afraid of death-itself?(^1) This misses the picture of how people understand death-itself, and what they actually fear: death-consciousness.