Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

The line frames mortality in a deliberately paradoxical way: life, with all its difficulties, is still “pleasant,” and death—imagined as an absence of sensation and struggle—can be conceived as “peaceful.” What truly provokes fear and anguish is the in‑between: the process of dying, the uncertainty, pain, loss of control, and the emotional turmoil of separation. The epigram’s wit lies in shifting attention from death as an abstract endpoint to the lived experience of transition, suggesting that much of our dread is not metaphysical but practical and psychological. It also implies a stoic, secular consolation: if suffering can be reduced in the transition, the idea of death itself becomes less terrifying.