Maria Popova at Brain Pickings:
Know as we might what actually happens when we die, we spend our lives trembling at the fact of our finitude, trying to wrest from it some greater poetic truth — something that slakes the soul’s thirst for meaning. Even the spiritual materialists among us are haunted by incomprehension at the cessation of consciousness — how can this entire carnival of wonder just, one day, melt into nothingness? And what, in the end, does it all mean, will it all have meant?
These questions come alive in the 1908 book An Indian Study of Love and Death (public library | public domain) by the Irish teacher and activist Margaret Elizabeth Noble (October 18, 1867–October 13, 1911), christened Sister Nivedita by Swami Vivekananda after she emigrated to Calcutta when she was twenty-one to begin devoting her life to India and the sacred search for meaning.
more here.