[Above, a lousy picture taken this evening in a cemetery in Gammelstad, close to Lulea, in Norrbotten, Sweden. Sorry for the bad quality... Yet the landscape with all those small lights was really inspiring.]
But death is a natural phenomenon, and we must not be scared of it. Being scared of it was what condemned humanity to millennia of superstition and illogical beliefs, and eventually subjugation by weaponizing religious predicaments. We are growing out of that illusion, with difficulty but steadily. So how should we think about the demise of ourselves, or our beloved ones? How can we accept to fall out of existence?
My own answer is that we have to realize we are only interpreters in a dramedy that was written for us. Our body is not ours, and our trajectory in spacetime is not one we chose or that we have any way of changing. All we know today about the universe and its physical laws indicates that free will is an illusion. So if that is true, we should just sit back and enjoy. Learning to accept what we cannot modify is the key.
I can also imagine that such a thought might inspire one to take one's own life. For who would fardels bear - to grunt and sweat under a weary life - if they knew there is no hope to steer their life according to their will? On the other hand, the serenity that you get by realizing you are only an actor in a play, makes it sound it advantageous to get the bright side of it - just be curious and see where the story goes.
Another consideration concerns ethical behavior. If you knew for sure you cannot decide your own actions, you might feel the urge to do something extreme, just to see how it feels. After all, it would never be your decision in the first place, but something already written in a 4-dimensional crystal that initial conditions of the universe and deterministic physical laws have laid down as the stage wherein our existences unfold, mere trajectories already drawn in the tissue of spacetime. So you might just as well go out and, say, rob a bank, buy a flamethrower and burn down the city, or vote for Trump.
Perhaps there is a logic in the impossibility to prove the absence of free will, after all. In his very nice book "Our Mathematical Universe" Max Tegmark touches on this topic, and he goes as far as to imagine an experiment with which we could test the matter experimentally. As this involves putting a loaded gun to your head and pulling the trigger repeatedly, perhaps it is a bit impractical. So we are stuck with having to stick with our own beliefs. You keep your own gods, I will keep my idea of how reality unfolds in this universe. We'll both be fine.
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