What it means to be alive ...

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”
 

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

As long as we have feelings, we are considered "alive". Even feelings long deeply buried and past. We can still feel although the intensity of that feeling will not be as stronger now as it was then. The grief, the sadness, the happiness, the excitement ..... So, we keep them in our minds. And certain experiences, incidents, meetings, unexpected turn of events .... act as triggers to this part of the mind. It is so private that there is no password or entry to anybody else but us. When life is not treating us right or we feel victimised or so down and at the lowest point of our lives ..... we return to this sanctuary of preserved feelings, lost opportunities and lost possibilities to keep alive. We search through the stacks of memory cards for the specific feeling as of this particular time. The saddest part is when one day.... we are so overwhelmed by this feeling that we become immerse in it, live in it, and thus.... we become so lost in it that we reject the life now. We refuse to accept reality. Hence, we have a case where one cannot draw the line between reality and memory.

The question is  -  what if there are no feelings left? Where even the memory of it is gone. Nothingness. Meaningless. Numbness. Dead?