I’m sure I’m not the only person who has fantasized about how I would react in a moment of crisis — rush into the burning building, shove the unsuspecting child away from the onrushing car, change the channel before the cliffhanger is spoiled.

I suspect I’m in a smaller cohort who wonders how I’d really react — split-second action or soiled drawers.

I reflect on those this morning because I’ve been wanting to write about dying, and no matter what opinions I espouse, I have no idea how I will react when my time comes. OK, so I’ve acknowledged that.

But I don’t think I’m going to be scared, which I suspect would put me in a smaller cohort still.

We, of course, know nothing about what death is like. I have some opinions, but I entertain them only upon the bedrock understanding that I don’t know, that no one knows. Could be the pearly gates, could be hellfire, could be oblivion. Good, bad, neither.

So why is it so universally regarded as something to be feared?

I never contemplated my demise much as a younger person, but I’ve long been a reader of obituaries — not out of morbid reflection, but for their chronicles of life — and it’s impossible not to notice that people my age and younger appear every couple of days. Every day, I get closer to the age when other casual obituary readers would no longer muse, “Wow, that’s pretty young!” I may be there already.

Having a wife and child — especially having begun so late; I was 52 when he was born — does recalibrate how I regard the end. I would indeed be sad to leave them, and to see them deprived of whatever companionship, comfort, and guidance I could have provided. I’m not ignorant that for most people I know who lost a parent at a young age, it wasn’t a boon.

But the forward part of death — what happens to me when I leave what I know behind — is separate from that, for me. I don’t have a definitive picture of what to expect, but the concept in Albert Brooks’s “Defending Your Life” has stuck with me as a possible scenario. In it, there is no heaven or hell, but there is a way station after which we move on to the next level of existence or return to this one to try again. It posits that overcoming fear is the standard that determines our next act, which seems to have wisdom, for me.

Again, I have no idea how I will react, whether on a death bed or as I veer into an oncoming bus, as Brooks’ character does. But after 25 years of practicing acceptance, however imperfectly, it’s starting to feel comfortable. And besides, we are guaranteed to die, every single one of us, and it would require a very bleak outlook to think that everyone’s existence ends on the ultimate downer.

So what do you think?