Death - The Begining

To cherish life to the fullest one has to die, at least once. One certainty of life is death, I cannot think of another. With every breath I take I move one step closer to my end. This is no new phenomenon, this movement began with the first gasp of air I took as a newborn. I wonder what will happen of me with death - will that be the end or will it mark another beginning? What I claim to be me was never me, the body is only a transient form of all the food, water & air assimilated through the process of eating, drinking & breathing. In the beginning there was nothing, even the single cell that I took form from was created from the non-living. So am I to believe that I am just a transformed form of the food I have eaten in my life? If my body is the creation of the non-living food then that (the body) cannot be me. What am I - am I just a projection created by some chemical reactions taking place in the brain, so with the cessation of these reactions in the brain with death will I too cease to exist? That leads to another interesting question - when was I born? I do not remember ever being a zygote, I do not remember anything from my period of infancy, was it that the brain chemistry had to attain a certain level of criticality for me (the consciousness) to take form? If death is the non-existence of consciousness then I emerged out of something very dead; out of the non-conscious emerged consciousness.
Why do I fear death if I have never known it? Does this fear not represent a resentment to the ultimate truth to life - or is it the truth, is there more to death than an end or is it the beginning?