Will be 80 in a month. Life and death aren't what you seem to be making of them - life good, death bad and life conscious, death some sort of garbage can.

Life and death are more alike than you seem to take them to be. Consciousness - awareness - is not a function of biological life and it is not something that is held as a private individual attribute.

In your particular situation you might find it interesting to watch a lot of videos and read a few books about the near-death experience. Many of the stories are well told and very convincing.

Consciousness survives death. The biological body dies of course. Well - it transforms. It can no longer walk or speak or eat or look into your eyes. Those things are biological. Consciousness is not biological.

You are in a good space to investigate these things for yourself. Don't rely on what other people tell you. Consciousness is yours. The surest way to find out its real nature is to examine your own consciousness.

Finding what consciousness is and is not will give you great courage for the rest of your life.

All our bodies come and go. How can that be wrong? Consciousness is very different.