Belief in the afterlife waning, looking for alternative perspectives

Hey all. For me, these last couple of months have been extremely rough, to say the least. I've undergone a dramatic lifestyle change that I'm experiencing for the first time. There's been a LOT of death in the family, with multiple family friends dying of cancer (one at the shocking age of 22) in addition to the health of my grandmother, grandfather, and dog deteriorating faster than I had originally expected. Needless to say, death has been on my mind for a while now to the point where I can no longer healthily deal with the existential dread of it. To feel better about my situation I've gone down the rabbit hole of research regarding "the afterlife", hoping for anything to make me feel better. Still, every piece of information I receive either seems sketchy or implausible.

As much as I want to believe that NDEs might be evidence of something waiting for us after death, I just can't shake the idea that we're nothing but our brains, and once that disappears so do we along with our memories, motives, and sense of being. Nothing is more terrifying to me than nonexistence, and the more I'm told that death will "just be like before you were born" the worse and worse my dread becomes. It's gotten so bad to the point where I've avoided studying just so that I can distract myself from the constant stream of dread in my mind. I'm confused and scared, and the resources found within the subreddit collection of information either don't make sense or are too niche to convince me entirely. What convinced you of the afterlife? How does it make sense to you?