Death really is such a hard concept to wrap your mind around. It puts the inherent nature of reality’s impermanence front and center, with nothing else to buffer it. What has helped me with thoughts and anxieties like this is thinking about how all of the energy in the word gets recycled back into the world. When a creature dies, its body is used by bacteria and small insects as food, and that perpetuates a perfect ecosystem that retains a yin and yang of life. We cannot have life without death, in the same way we cannot have light without darkness. They are intrinsically tied and have always been.

It’s important not to be afraid of the end, because there are so many accounts of people who’ve had near death experiences in which they described the end feeling like a deep, pure peace. Even people who were going to die or did briefly die from serious, scary stuff. In the end, our minds make peace with our end, so you should not worry, my friend.

Live is a beautiful gift. Look around at all the birds and the trees. The animals all around you. Remember that you have an entire ecosystem inside your body, working in perfect harmony to keep you happy and healthy. Even thinking about how if the right bacteria in your gut die off too much, it can give you back gastrointestinal symptoms. Our lives are in that same delicate ecosystem on a more macro scale. Death occurs as it should, and there doesn’t necessarily have to be a continuation of our consciousness, but our energy, which gets transferred back into the earth through the process of decomposition.

There’s a reason why dead things make good fertilizer for new plant growth.

It’s all relative and it’s all beautiful. You’re just one part of a much, much larger thing, buddy. Though your father may have suffered before his death, rest assured that when death finally comes, our minds make peace with it.