Ooo I'm glad you made this thread!
Periodically I'll wake up in a panic at 3 am and become suddenly, viscerally aware of my own mortality. I feel like in regular daily life, it never really truly sinks in past a certain extent. Whereas when I'm in an in-between state (when I have a high fever, when I'm half-asleep, or having a depersonalization/derealization episode, during which my 'self' feels basically nonexistent and my body faraway) I feel my eventual death more acutely, if that makes any sense. As opposed to simply accepting it and pondering it on an intellectual level. I suspect that the closest one could come to understanding it would be via drug-induced ego death or.. I don't know, meditating in a sensory deprivation tank or something (which I for one would love to do.)
But, anyway, for me it never sank in until my childhood best friend's mom died of brain cancer when we were 13 years old. I adored her, and it took a good few months before her death truly hit me. Before that, it felt like a dream; right after she died everything felt very quiet and faraway and I was more numbed than anything-- her death/death in general still didn't feel real.
Oh, and when I briefly worked at a nursing home I was constantly surrounded by death; death is just in the air in those places (even though no one actually died while I worked there, some of them were close to death. There was this one lady who was so, so sweet; she spoke in a high-pitched raspy voice, and always needed us to rearrange her pillows and stuffed animals 50 times per night while she smiled serenely.) So that occasionally gave me a decent amount of existential unease but not always in a bad way.
Strangely, when my grandmother died I didn't really feel anything, which sounds horrible but there you go. I was more upset when another friend's parent died, because when I'd seen him last, he kept asking me questions about death and god while he chain-smoked in the garage as if he knew on some level he would die soon, and it was heartbreaking to remember it.
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