In my experience, there are two groups of Christians with regard to death.
In one group, you have the folks who believe that after they die, God will look at their lives and, according to some heuristic criterion (may vary from denomination to denomination) will decide whether to send them to Heaven or to Hell. These are the people who hope they're going to Heaven when they die.
In the other group, you have the folks who believe that there's some kind of a choice one can make during one's life that will force God--bound by the promises he has made--to make the Heaven/Hell decision in a predetermined way. These people know they're going to Heaven when they die.
If you get a guy from each of these groups and get them talking about death and the afterlife, you'll have an entertaining time. The folks from the first group think the folks from the second group are blasphemously arrogant, and the folks from the second group think the folks from the first group are taking an inconceivable risk.
My objective is not to declare which group is right and which group is wrong (although I'm solidly in the second group, myself) but simply to say that it makes sense for the folks from the first group to be a bit nervous about death, since it forever eliminates any further chances to influence God in the direction they want him to decide, while it doesn't make as much sense for folks in the second group to be nervous about death unless they're procrastinating the big choice.
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." --Lysander Spooner, 1867
