[https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity]

The topic of our fate after death is a touchy subject, but nevertheless the error of anticipating nothingness needs rectifying. This misconception is so widespread and so psychologically debilitating for those facing death (all of us, sooner or later) it is worth a careful look at the faulty, rather subliminal logic which persuades us that dying leads us into ‘the void.’ Here, again, is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in the view: It is to reify nothingness–make it a positive condition or quality (e.g., of ‘blackness’)–and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.

As I tried to make clear above, subjectivities—centers of awareness—don’t have beginnings and endings for themselves, rather they simply find themselves in the world. From their perspective, it’s as if they have always been present, always here; as if the various worlds evoked by consciousness were always ‘in place.’ Of course we know that they are not always in place from an objective standpoint, but their own non-being is never an experienced actuality for them. This fact, along with the fact that other subjectivities succeed us after we die, suggests an alternative to the intuition of impending nothingness in the face of death.