The thought and image of something is most likely scarier than the thing itself.
One of the greatest forms of hardship we must endure is the courage to suffer. Feeling things that harm us is painful, but we are responsible for enduring it.
If you feel pain, you can dramatically cut down on its effects by either connecting it to hope in the future or completely disregarding the future altogether.
If death had no consequences, nothing would be serious, which is why most religious people who sincerely believe their afterlife stories have a great sense of humor.
Everyone’s fear of death is why the topic is typically inappropriate in modern polite society, and also why thoughts like suicidal tendencies make people generally feel uncomfortable.
We all must reconcile how to live our lives without fear, given how much death and pain we’re invariably going to experience. Releasing the fear is a difficult lifelong process, but is profoundly worth it.
The healthcare industry (and law enforcement, to a more abstracted degree) concerns itself constantly with death and pain management, so they have an unusual perspective compared to the rest of society.
Since fear is a feeling, it’s fundamentally comparative. Therefore, being gripped by fear can be easily resolved by addressing a much larger fear (e.g., of death), which makes the other fears trivial by comparison.