@AshLeigh – I sorry to hear of your friend’s passing. I hope no one else was injured badly.
I don’t recall ever having that adolescent sense of immortality. I had older relatives die when I was a kid; and pets, too. A mother in our neighborhood – not much older than my parents – also died when we were pretty young.
The night before my 12th birthday, I prayed to the god I was raised to believe in to take me – I was miserable and didn’t want to live another day… when I woke up was when I lost my belief in a ‘merciful god’. I think the loss of belief in a deity and afterlife is when I started getting freaked out by the thought of ceasing to exist. It haunted my in my late teens and early twenties, when I would have difficulty going to sleep because of fear of the void. It still hits me once in a while.
In my mid-forties, I still don’t believe in a deity or afterlife, but I have a sense of something greater than us in the universe. I have overcome the demons of an abusive childhood and found happiness, and finally learned what it feels like to be loved unconditionally. So now I am a little more at ease that my future will be short, and that any day could be my last; yet I am hopeful to get a bit of time to enjoy life now that it is actually enjoyable, before the wear-and-tear of not having cared about myself for so long limits me.