I'm interested as to whay you think that your death is bound up with the big questions, like whether or not there's an afterlife.
I spent lots of time obssessing about my death, terrified about it. I could tell you a long story about the birth of my first child, and how I became terrified that I was going to just - pop my clogs! when s/he came out. I remember my therapist at the time saying to me, completely straightfaced - "Paul, I think you'll find that, statistically, it's the woman who's more at risk during childbirth".
Here's one of the things I learned in AA and I think it's a pretty universal principle. Pride ***** people up. "Pride" is a medieval word used to describe a particular "sin" - but my belief is that the medievals were just trying to describe some behaviours that they noticed had some things in common. "Pride" is a description of self-importance - or maybe better stated as "self-obsession". So there are people who have a terrifically overblown sense of themselves - whether of their "rightness" or their "wrongness". You know, they either think they're terrifically wonderful or they're terrifically awful. The problem is that they thnik "terrifically" about themselves - in fact to the point where they become isolated from other people because they're not able think past themselves. Grasping this particular truth is one of the many leaps that Bill Wilson made when, in his desperation, he was conceiving of the programme of recovery in AA. Pride, egotism, self-obsession, whatever you want to call it, is our problem.
This is a long winded route back to this - for each of us, our individual deaths are significant. But they're not significant. In the great scheme of things, they're not important at all really. But to us, they are of course of primary significance, since without them we don't have anything at all. So - we arrive at the first question of western philosophy - which is not, as so many seem to think, "what's the meaning of life?". Too cerebral - no, the first question of philosophy was "how shall we live?".
Your death, my death, anyone's death - is not significant. And yet it's monumentally significant. The first step in recovery is to gently pull our heads out of our own arses and ask "what next?". So - well done. You've arrived. Get over the afterlife BS. It's a jerk-off waste of time. You patronise religious people when you presume that they have it easy because they believe in an afterlife. They live and dream just like you - alone. Only difference is they may - may - have found more purpose in their life. Time for you to get over this and find out what you're meant to be doing between now and the day when it all ends. And I'll tell you this. I lived in drink for many years. But I also lived in fear, not least of all fear of death. Now I have what is described in the BB as an "appropriate level" of fear - in other words I suffer from fear when there's good reason to do so! Apart from that - no, hardly any fear on a day to day basis. Thinking about that - wow, what a gift it is not to live in fear all the time. So thanks for reminding me.