I hear a lot of terms being thrown around here like "being" and "non-being", "existence" and "non existence", "life" and "death".

Many agree that when you are dead you do not exist or you cease to exist.
I dont get it. From my perspective nothing that exists materially can ever cease to exist it can only be redefined as something else according to the conservation laws. Its not like the substance I am made of is going to just vaporise out of existence leaving a black hole vacuum of nothingness when I die. De-composition of a body to me is just the breaking up a jigsaw into its individual pieces.. those pieces (molecules) then go on to become part of the carbon or nitrogen cycle or whatever that underpins the ecosystem and will often be reconstructed into other living systems.

As for consciousness, whether it is intrinsic to the matter of the brain or to genetic code or something less attached that the brain can simply tunes into or channels, in either case with finite matter and energy recycling continuously on earth, consciousness is a phenomenon that can be re-applied or bestowed onto living systems again and again. Like a flame lighting another flame. So to me there is just existence.

True non-existence to me is a state we cannot perceive or understand. Because we live in a world of solely things that "do" or things that "are". Things that have a phenomenon or process or behaviour.
We can only ever understand non-existence according to something that does exist and that is obviously biased no? How does an interaction of things (conscious awareness through time) conceive of nothingness -of a quality with no interactions at all, no extractable information, no time, no sensation or quality. The only thing that can define nothingness is nothingness itself. Everything else is a something.

The closest thing I think we have to a place in the universe which is empty nothingness or non existence is a black hole. We only know it is there as a negative image contrasting the space around it. A point devoid of information that permits only one direction of flow.