Death doesn’t go away when you pretend not to care about it. Here’s Bruce Charlton:

The existential fact is that if we are annihilated at death, then life (before death) is also annihilated. If existence is annihilated at any point, then all meaning and purpose, all happiness and suffering are annihilated at all points – and all of psychology is simply a delusion.

We all know that life is meaningful.  This is one of the basic, every day experiences that we all have.  Denying it would be like denying taste.  When we consider our experience of meaning, though, we soon realize that life likely has to continue after death.  Every day, life proves that life must go on.  It has to.  Otherwise,  our mortal existence “will be no more than a night in a second-class hotel.”  (Saint Theresa de Avila, by way of Muggeridge and Maxwell.) But That Hideous Strength insists that life doesn’t go on.  It has to, because it wants to believe that our actions don’t have long-term consequences, and therefore that meaning and morality are something we can make up ourselves.  At the same time, though, actions that can’t have long-term consequences aren’t meaningful.  Everyone knows this if they think about it.  Solution: we don’t think about it.  We don’t even let ourselves know that we are trying to ignore a problem.  We moderns are all walking past the graveyard steadfastly whistling Cage’s 4?33?. Elder Maxwell said that “the laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.”  When even yourself ceases to exist, that is true loneliness. Only believers can really grieve at a funeral, because only believers can truly face the fact of death.