Scenarios

Intelligent beings create scenarios; they are writers and editors of their fate: history, present, and future.
The "self" is created as a character to portray the entity which is perceived to be ephemeral, the being which was born and which will die, the being which has a definite beginning and end in time. This definiteness helps to make the delineation of the "self" richer and more robust in our scenarios.

Then there is the being which does not pass in and out of existence. That is a being much harder to grasp, because it is hard to write about it: its passions seem bloodless, its lusts seem as insubstantial as the fog of warm breath on a cold day.
But that is mainly a problem with the way we write, the "formula" we use to create our scripts.

So how do people who are aware of this deal with it?
Some people use the method of supernatural beings, such as angels: the eternal is portrayed as a "self" which although resembling the "self" of individual men  and women, is somehow more & less than humanity; more in "spirit" and less in "body".
These "spiritual selves" are no longer bound to suffering ( although in some accounts-e.g., Paradise Lost and accounts of eternal retribution-they are still suffering) and are often free from death. They are often poor characters, because the very dynamics of defining character - suffering, desire, etc. - are forbidden in our description of them.

We tend to believe our scripts. Since the "self" has been used by us to be a multi-faceted character that has a definite end in time, we tend to think that if our sense of "self" disappears, we have arrived at death, and we experience all the emotions that ensue. Fear usually drags us back to our sense of "reality" where the "self" - comme Boudou sauve des eaux... newly saved from drowning in the sea of selflessness - coughs and spits the feeling of nothingness from its lungs.

The fullness of God is greater than the fullness of "self". The mere fact that we in our capacity as scriptwriters tend to empty it is merely a demonstration that we have not put away the childrens' books and accepted our responsibility to create in a mature way.
God is not joy. God is not suffering.
Joy and Suffering are a Duality, a state of tension between two opposing forces.
If we go beyond this state of tension, we do not obliterate Joy nor Suffering, but we incorporate them.
What does it mean to "incorporate"?
As Christians, we have spent 2,000 years dealing with the notion of "incorporation": taking the body of God into ourselves, and we have not come to a definitive answer. Nor have we - in the realm of actions - demonstrated that we have a firm grasp on making the Morality of our God an integral part of our lives.

So I shall answer this last question when I feel like doing it.