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Meditations on death are a means of purifying the mind in order to gain a crucial revelation of the meaning and significance of life and death.
As such, death meditations have been regarded as an indispensable element in a wide array of cultures: the Egyptian and Indian, the Chinese and Japanese, the Hellenic and Roman, the Hebrew and Islamic, in both their ancient and modern forms.
Because of death’s general unfathomableness and the dread and terror it inspires in most people, the conquest of death, or deathlessness, has a central place in the teachings of all religions.
Unless this fear and terror is replaced by comfort and hope, a tranquil mind state is impossible.
The unwillingness to think of death is itself a kind of death, for the poignancy of life is inseparable from the knowledge of its inevitable decay.
Death meditations may strike some as a morbid preoccupation, a falling in love with death rather than with life. Yet the deep acceptance of death as the teacher of life divests these reflections of any macabre quality.
The purpose of death meditations is to instill in the meditator the confidence to walk unafraid with the ever-present prospect of death, for one never knows when it may come and take us.
The denial of death, so common in our culture, inevitably strengthens the fear of it and underscores what Socrates said about the unexamined life not being worth living. Actually, pondering and meditating on death is part of the religious practices of every major tradition.
(Philip Kapleau, The Zen of Living and Dying: A Practical and Spiritual Guide)