My father taught me one last lesson.
I believe you can not truly understand life until you have actually seen, with your own eyes, someone die before your eyes.
This ideally gives you a sense of proportion.
Short of threshold experiences like: loosing your virginity, Satori / Nirvana / Enlightenment, and dying oneself, seeing life pass from someone in front of your eyes makes you realise how massive the Universe is, and how utterly impotent and helpless you can be in the face of certain things.
To quote the late Jhon Balance, of COIL “Eros and Thanatos are almost twins…”
To fear death is to fear life, to fear life is to fear your own essence, all things perish, few things thrive. Learning to thrive involves learning not to fear extinction.