> I am pretty sure Yalom can be ruled out a source : I learned about the saying around that time, and sure his writing couldn't have reached me so quick. He wi

> I am pretty sure Yalom can be ruled out a source : I learned about the saying around that time, and sure his writing couldn't have reached me so quick. He will have said it multiple times in his career e.g. Love's Executioner (1989) - I (perhaps misleadingly) quoted a later book that let me chase the source. As an existential philosopher/psychologist writing self-help books about death I can imagine he might be the modern populariser because people struggling with death/mortality might reach for his books. They contain many ideas/aphorisms about death intended to help. Irvin D. Yalom - Love's Executioner (1989) > You know, there is no one alive now who was grown-up when I was a child. So I, as a child, am dead. Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead—when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that old person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?