non-existence

That is perhaps the hardest pill to swallow. I can deal with the sadness, the regrets - they mean that there once was someone, someone who occupied my thoughts. But as Kurt Vonnegut says in Mother Night:

"There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead you're dead."

So all my thoughts can't benefit anyone. I might as well forget. 

And another one - for the survivors:

"I was like almost everybody who came through the war. ... Every job was a job to do, and no job was any better or any worse than any other."