Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this perplexing question. I'm an agnostic atheist, and I find great comfort in Mark Twain's thoughts on death. He wrote: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." He probably wrote "millions" and not "billions" of years, because deep time postdates his era. But I love it as he'd have written it today'

One other note. What medical science calls "clinical death" is not death, but a deep dream-space of some kind. The brain is very much alive, and it apparently makes up stories. Highly religious people often dream of going to their afterlife, but each religion sees an afterlife consistent with their religion. Real death occurs when the last brain cell dies, and there is no credible evidence anyone has ever returned from that death.