I find it interesting that a guy who wrote so frequently on death would have struggled in the way that you just described. It seems as though perhaps the core motivation for him struggling was that maybe he was quite afraid of death. At some level, he made a principal point of his philosophic system to practice for death,. As though it's your grandest test as a moral soul is how you meet death. He even described life as a journey toward death that all our lives were learning how to die.