midas,
You cannot have been to observant of the wilderness, forest, plains or tundra, wild life is always alert to the dangers of death, the lacks get quickly selected out of the gene pool. It is true consciousness cannot imagine not being conscious, but then, the dead cannot imagine being conscious.
The harshest fact of life is perhaps that life lives on life, we stay in being by consuming the lives of other beings. In other words, all life is food for the continuation of life, symbolically, the snake in a circle consuming his own tail, that is life's cycle. Knowledge of which popular culture and religion manage to ignore.
Life after death, if you are not talking of the following generation is pure fantasy, comfort for the faint of heart. It is a tuff reality to deal with, and I have no idea what makes the difference between people like myself who do not feel they can avoid the obvious, and those who tripout on these fantasies of no substance.