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Not coincidentally, in William Osler's classic medical textbook of 1892, he recommended opium as the one great help for some diseases (words for Karl Marx to chew on), and that may be especially true now that our sense of the transcendent is diminished. The man who gave us "the death of God" also wrote The Birth of Tragedy; a sense of eternity is much less cold and abstract if linked to a sense of divinity.
Yet none of this helps us in the here and now. And thinking about death is useful only if it makes us concentrate on life. All of us, after all, are dying every moment, and, as Montaigne wryly remarked, "the goal of our career is death." The otherworld is relevant only in the shadow it casts on this one; or, as Thoreau implied upon leaving the woods, he didn't want to die feeling he hadn't lived.
Many of us -- this writer included -- have been lucky enough never to have had to face death close up, even in a loved one; it remains as remote to us as the other great challenges of Hunger and Poverty and War. Of course we have our dress rehearsals all the time: for as much as every death is a separation, every separation is a little death, and one that may be even harder because it is protracted and reversible. Yet still we would do well to recall that at least a fifth of all Americans die without warning (and the onset of fatal disease is equally unexpected): suddenly there is a knock on the door, a telephone ringing, a messenger in black.
There is nothing any of us can do about death, and there is no virtue in dwelling on it or trying to penetrate its mystery. In any case, philosophy is famously helpless before a toothache. But there may be some good in coming to death at least as well prepared as we go to our vacations, our driving tests or our weddings. If I were to die tomorrow, as the old saw has it, what would I wish to have done today? Or, as the Tibetan author Sogyal Rinpoche says, "If you're having problems with a friend, pretend he's dying -- you may even love him." Especially good advice if that friend happens to be yourself.