I grew up a block away from a railroad and there was a freight train that went by most mornings between 1 and 3 o'clock.  When I went to college and then came back, the train suddenly started waking me up, but up until then I had been so used to it that I'd never even heard it.  There is this phenomenon that exists whereby some things become so familiar to you that they become virtually invisible, almost imperceptible.

That's how I think about death now.  I've been afraid of it so long I couldn't help but think about it all the time, and now that the pandemic is here, it's been at the forefront of my mind even more than usual.  I think of death as a constant companion.  We shrink away from the word, consider it so exotic and ineffable.  The great existential mystery.  It's not.  Death is more real and more natural to us than life, by far. 

If death is off and life is on, you were off for the entirety of time until you got turned on and then you'll stay on for 0-100 years or so and then you'll turn off again and be off for the rest of time.  I used to think that was tragic too, but it isn't.  I saw Sadhguru say in an interview once that your body is just like some dirt you borrowed from the earth and when your life ends you have to give it back.  In the meantime, life is like a window screen and death is like everything on either side of that screen.

Your body and your mind are just a filter against which material reality continually registers causing you to have an experience of that reality.  What that filter mostly does is create the illusion of duality in order to force you to distinguish yourself from your surroundings and to categorize the stimuli in your environment.  This thing is not that thing, this is another thing, that's something else.  

Consciousness is ok sometimes, but mostly it's exhausting because it makes us play the never-ending, (well, losing) game of classifying objects, feelings, and experiences into neat little rows and columns.  That's the screen doing that.  Chopping up reality into little boxes.  Breaking up a single beam of light into a grid-like shape shining on the opposite wall.  

The waking mind is mostly a nuisance because it works overtime trying to justify itself.  It separates you from the world around you and tells you how special and unique you are.  In doing so it surely sets into motion every pathology, physical and psychological, that exists among human beings.  

A lot of the busywork it does involves convincing you that death is terrible and unfamiliar and The Worst Thing.  But take a look at what's really going on.  Every night you lie in bed and allow your consciousness to dissolve and it feels wonderful.  Once in a while you become so engrossed in doing something or perceiving something that you feel your ego melt away and it feels wonderful.  Sometimes you achieve such perfect communion with another human being that time stops and you experience a nourishing, blissful stillness and it feels wonderful.  

Those are times when the screen goes up and death creeps into our living experience and those are some of the best times in life!  I don't know if any part of individual consciousness persists after death.  I suspect not, but sometimes I don't just suspect not, I HOPE not.  My best guess for what happens when we die is that you'll feel the bodily tension relaxing and letting go and, just like when falling asleep, you'll feel your consciousness fading, blending with your surroundings.  Probably the dying brain puts on a little show for you and you get to see all your dead loved ones again which will be nice, and then--asleep, no pain, so separation, complete unity, no constant grinding of the mind or muscles.  The ultimate healing.