Dealing with Death as an Atheist

[Pyrrho]

... I don't remotely buy into the platitude that death gives life meaning. ...

I very much agree with you on that.  I think that that platitude is nonsensical.  I think that life has no inherent meaning, and would not regardless of whether a being were mortal or immortal.  I recommend trying to live a life as pleasantly as reasonably possible, while causing as little unpleasantness for others as reasonably possible.  But I would not call that a "meaning" for life.  Life has no purpose.  So one might as well make the best of it that one can.


But I differ from you in that I have no fear of death, and am not at all upset that I will die.  Just like I am not upset that I was not alive 200 years ago.  I very much agree with Epicurus:


Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html


Once you are dead, you will no longer care about this, or about anything else.  You will never experience anything bad, ever again.  Suffering only happens during your life.