Jean Baudrillard (the French philosopher known for his concept of "simulacra") explores this uneasiness towards death in modern society in his magnum opus "Symbolic Exchange and Death" (recommend reading the whole chapter, it is essentially his defining work):
"Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death, to ward off the ambivalence of death in the interests of life as value, and time
as the general equivalent. The elimination of death is our phantasm, and ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and immortality; for
science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation.
No other culture had this distinctive opposition of life and death in the interests of life as positivity: life as accumulation, death as due payment.
No other culture had this impasse: as soon as the ambivalence of life and death and the symbolic reversibility of death comes to an end, we enter into a process of accumulation of life as value; but by the same token, we also enter the field of the equivalent production of death. So life-become-value is constantly perverted by the equivalent death. Death, at the same instant, becomes the object of a perverse desire. Desire invests the very separation
of life and death."
"Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death, to ward off the ambivalence of death in the interests of life as value, and time as the general equivalent. The elimination of death is our phantasm, and ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and immortality; for science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation.
No other culture had this distinctive opposition of life and death in the interests of life as positivity: life as accumulation, death as due payment.
No other culture had this impasse: as soon as the ambivalence of life and death and the symbolic reversibility of death comes to an end, we enter into a process of accumulation of life as value; but by the same token, we also enter the field of the equivalent production of death. So life-become-value is constantly perverted by the equivalent death. Death, at the same instant, becomes the object of a perverse desire. Desire invests the very separation of life and death."