"I don't know how to describe how horrifying the concept of "never having existed" was to me. There are a few science fiction stories - one of Anderson's shorts, Card's Timewatch, maybe some others - that touch on it, but none of them really capture the feeling for me."

Perhaps it's a little akin to the feeling I get when contemplating the Big Bang and other like "how did the Universe start" theories. The thought that there was nothing before and will be nothing after is like a kind of erasure. It's a lack of existence that is frightening to me. I can foresee *my* death in my Universe. But not the death of the Universe...