ways i’ve found comfort in death recently (i hope you can too)

i’m 19 and around april i woke up to the fact death is real and it’s coming for me, which as i’m sure many of you know has been harrowing to say the least, and i am a woman of science and logic which means most ‘comforting’ advice has not helped at all. i’ve never posted on reddit before but this sub really helped me know that i’m not alone so i thought i’d share some things i’ve been thinking about that bring me some comfort in the hope somebody else can draw comfort from them.

1- whilst the whole ‘death happens to everyone it is a natural part of life’ initially brought me the opposite of comfort, thinking about my loved ones dying has actually made me more okay with death- much like seeing your parents jump off a tree as a kid to prove it’s okay, your parents and your loved ones will die too, along with everyone else- we are all in this together. whatever there is after death, even if there is nothing, it is not as if you are doing it alone- everyone you have ever and will ever love will die, and even if you are not aware of their presence you will know on your deathbed you are joining them and it’s that little bit less scary because they are doing it too. i picture it like sleeping next to someone you love.

2- the argument that death being the same as before birth (aka oblivion) is flawed. i personally find oblivion the hardest part to accept and really hope for any kind of life after death and this was a big argument against it, but really to see life after death one has to see consciousness as separate from the body. this is therefore not disproved by the pre-birth argument as the thing that leads us to believe it was oblivion is that we remember nothing- however, the neural structures that provide what we call memory had not matured yet and therefore no memory does not equate to no experience. we also have no memory of early life, but we know it cannot have been oblivion because babies are clearly conscious. the way i see it is this- consciousness is still adapting to a vessel in early life, which is why babies find everything so unpleasant because they all of a sudden have to eat and feel pain etc. to me this suggests that whatever life there is after death will have no kind of memory, as this relies on a brain to format, but this argument does not suggest oblivion.

3- the buddhist idea of impermanence- we can all agree, nihilists and skeptics alike, that impermanence is a fact of life. absolutely everything changes state, nothing is the same forever, everything comes to an end and a new beginning- if this is true of life, why not death? if life is destined to change into death, surely death will inevitably turn back into life, or into something else. if we can create life by having children, then non-existence isn’t as unreachable as it seems. (if it even exists, see point 2)

4- i find the idea of creating art really comforting, as even when i am gone pieces of my soul and who i have been in this life will remain and even if they get absolutely no attention and are forgotten even if one person reads for example this post and feels comforted and connected to me then i have left a part of myself to influence the world even when i have moved on, which i think is really beautiful.

I hope this was able to help someone, please add to it or point out if any of my logic is flawed! i’m currently studying psychology and am really considering some kind of transcendental psychology as a specialism to dedicate my life to finding some kind of psycho-philosophical answers, if such a thing is possible, so i’m not afraid of being proven wrong as it’ll just push me towards being more right :)