Since my cancer diagnosis, I have lived intimately with thoughts of death. Cancer patients of all ages and stages, as well as people with other ruinous conditions, often experience “a double frame of mind,” as the polemicist Christopher Hitchens once put it. Laboring to survive in the present, we simultaneously imagine our future demise. Of course, feelings and beliefs about mortality range widely. But a number of thinkers have set out to help those who suspect that introspection about this state of mind may be the most important work we can undertake.

If you want to evaluate your own perspective on death, try filling in the Death Attitude Profile — Revised questionnaire developed by the psychologists Paul T.P. Wong, Gary T. Reker and Gina Gesser. A series of 32 propositions, the survey measures death anxiety: worries about self-loss, , missed opportunities, stolen moments, the prospect of your or your survivors’ suffering, the unknown. It also gauges death acceptance: satisfaction at having led a good life, at acknowledging a natural ending, at escaping physical pain or gaining a desirable afterlife or merging with the cosmos.

When my husband and I compared our responses to this test, what struck me was how complicated we all are. The prospect of my own death arouses more fright in me than his does in him, but he is more convinced than I that death is a grim experience. What, then, do the psychologists really tell us? After taking the quiz, the palliative care nurse Sallie Tisdale found her score was “all over the place, internally contradictory.”

To encourage people to ponder their own extinction, Ms. Tisdale, the author of “Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them),” recommends the Japanese film “After Life.” In a posthumous state, the dead in this movie pick a single memory in which to live forever. With delicacy, its director, Hirokazu Kore-eda, implicitly asks, what memory would you choose?