How? I'm only 27 but every time I try to tackle this problem raw panic prevents any reasonable thinking.
I've instead adopted a "when it happens I won't know" mindset and continue to work towards extracting maximum enjoyment from life.
When I was in third grade, one of my brothers was murdered. I felt all the panic of mortality, and intense, visceral grief -- etc that you might imagine. A few years after that, a cousin was stabbed to death. I didn't know him much, and I figured that was the reason why his funeral felt much easier.
My grandmother died in 2007, she was the sweetest lady you'd ever meet. It was even "easier" than the cousin's funeral.
In 2009, an uncle died. In 2010, an aunt. Another aunt died in 2013.
Another one of my brothers always used to say that he never wanted a funeral. When he died October 2016, some family threw him a funeral anyways. I felt like I was doing his memory a solid by not going. At an earlier stage in my life, when I was more self important -- I would have been livid at the family who threw a funeral for someone who didn't want one in life. Now I know stuff like that just doesn't matter.
The pain of losing a loved one has changed from an acute stabbing sensation in my kidneys to somber waves that roll over me, then recede. Getting better at coping with the deaths of those you love helps you come to terms with your own mortality.
Basically, don't worry about it.
Dig the grave and let me lie:
And I laid me down with a will.
If I ever fall feet first into a wood-chipper, I'll probably panic and try to find a way out. The instinct to survive is still there. The existential dread is just gone.
When you get a certain age, you know you will be dead in the time it took you to be born and graduate from college. Your window is rapidly closing. What are you going to do with the last 20-40 years? You might not be able to do much because you are stuck working, making someone else rich. You may very well be bound to that job because of health care costs.
When you are young, you may realize this will eventually happen, but you won't really understand it until you are in that situation. It's some heavy shit. People thinking about this sort of thing is probably why humans invented religion and spirituality.
When we're young, we're preoccupied with if something is right, or wrong - but there is a third answer to this question; "it doesn't matter"
Mark Twain said, “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.”
This won’t be a popular view here, but lately I’ve begun to think that consciousness isn’t the kind of thing that can end. I used to think death was just inconceivable, but now I wonder if it’s fundamentally incoherent. I think one could make a phenomenological argument for the immortality of the pure self/ego (Husserl said some interesting things about this), but I won’t get into that here.
Either way, don’t worry about things you will never experience. :)
If to "be" is to be conscious, then you can't "be" unconscious.
You won’t experience what happens after you die, but you will certainly experience the process of dying.
Being dead doesn’t scare me. But the concept of the process of dying scares the crap out of me.
When you die, there is nothing afterwards. We keep picturing this dark void, or ourselves floating in outer space, watching longingly as the world keeps going without us. We wonder what people will think of us. We wonder if it was worth it. We worry if we'll feel regret.
None of that happens--at least for some people. You can think of it like you just go to sleep, but no dreams. Just pure nothingness, and no sense of time, not sense of anything. You can imbdue this moment with terror if you want, but you can just as easily think of it as peace, final, eternal, lasting peace. Release from the struggle of book reports, bills, shouting matches, the constant biological drives, unsatisfactory lunch meat, the whole mofo.
Now, you can build it up to whatever you want. You can just as easily build it up to a moment of eternal terror when you regret the entire past and the lack of a future, and live forever in your worst moments being amplified and stretched to fill the universe.
There's actually no way of knowing which it is. But you get to choose how you think about it during your life. A life filled with dread and fear of this last moment is going to be sour, whereas a life filled with a slightly curious trust that everything will be fine will be much more enjoyable.
Death is such an intrinsic part of life that it makes no sense that it'd be a horror. It'd be a cosmic joke on all of us if it were. Knowing one person that has died well--old, without regrets, satisfied with loved ones, and not in pain is an existence proof that it doesn't have to be this way.
Personally I want to try to live one of those lives that ends in peace and without regretting or hating at the end, just a lot of nice memories coming back as my brain winds down and releases one monster rush of endorphins.
I don't really fear death. I'd rather my death not be painful, but I'll take what comes. It's part of the experience of living.
As for what exists once the body is gone ... one planet at a time!
I think it comes pretty naturally. At some point you realize that your body has seen its best days and goes downhill. I used to do a lot of sport and it took me a while in my 40s to get used to the thought that I simply can't do things anymore like in my 20s. Now I try to maintain what I have but I know I can only slow down the decline. And this is OK.
if you're scared of death (and honestly i can't say that i ever have been to the point where i couldn't think deeply about it) just think of things in this objectively correct way: you've already been dead for the majority of the history of the universe, and it really wasn't so bad.
tell me, what was your life like in the year 14?
you have no recollection of it, obviously. it was oblivion; the idea of you did not even exist yet. you felt nothing. it's exactly the same situation as your life in the year 2952.
you already know how it feels. it is, in fact, the sensation that you have "experienced" infinitely more than any other. life tricks us into thinking that its sensations are the only thing, and it's nice to play along. but eventually you'll return to the peace of the familiar.
PS: while i haven't had the chance to dabble, i hear that many people find taking magic mushrooms and experiencing ego death is a good way to shed your fear.
Deyr fé, deyja frændur, deyr sjálfur ið sama; en orðstír deyr aldregi hveim er sér góðan getur."
Cattle die, kinsmen die you yourself die; One thing now that never dies the fame of a dead man’s deeds.
Eventually you get used to the thought and it stops being scary.
Being busy helps, so you don't have time to think about it.
And have faith that (natural) death is a slippery slope --as you age you'll lose the mental faculties to fear death, and you're physical pain will increase until you welcome death or morphine. Since you won't fear it then, there's no need to fear it now. Just go enjoy.