The Importance of Friendship

I'm not so much worried about what will happen to me after I die. What I'm worried about is leaving my loved ones and that seems like it should be something Epicure should take really seriously because famously he was very emphatic about the value of friendship. Lucretius for example imagines someone saying well it's as if when I've died I'll be hanging around watching them get on with their lives without me around. He thinks there's something sort of self-contradictory about that thought. You're imagining yourself being there but being absent. If that's the sense in which you think you're going to miss your loved ones then he thinks you've failed to grasp