Does contemplating death dissolve the fear, or does it just stop us arguing about it?
In the Theravāda tradition we practise maraṇasati, mindfulness of death. Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification gives it a full treatment among the recollections, and there is a sutta where monks tell the Buddha how they practise it, hoping to live for a day and a night, or for one meal. He praises only those who recollect death across the span of a single mouthful or a single breath.
I've practised it for twelve years. I want to be honest about what it has and hasn't done.
The philosophical treatments of death I've read here, Epicurus, Nagel, Williams, ask whether death is bad. The Buddhist analysis doesn't answer that question. It relocates it. Fear of death is one form of craving for permanence; the remedy is not an argument but a practice that weakens the craving. Al-Ghazālī's remembrance of death works similarly, as a discipline rather than a solution.
But here is my worry. When people tell me the practice has made them unafraid of death, I sometimes suspect it has done something smaller: it has made the question boring. They've thought "this body will die" so many thousands of times that it has lost its sting the way any repeated word does. Is that liberation, or habituation?
People who sit with the dying, and anyone with a practice of their own, religious or Stoic or none: what have you seen?