While sitting near the top of a very tall tree

I think I was around ten years old when I finally understood what death meant. Someone in our family, I don't remember who, died. We all got dressed up and went to the funeral parlor, and we all lined up to look at the dead body of this relative. I remember thinking that it wasn't the person I knew anymore, but it looked like him, and that puzzled me. All the relatives were crying and consoling each other, and then we all sat down in a room that looked like a tiny church. Then a man, who didn't know the dead person, spoke wonderful things about him, even though what I had remembered overhearing about the dead man when he was alive, didn't seem like that at all.
For a long time afterward I thought about this, and then one day while I was sitting on a branch not far from the top of a very tall tree, it hit me; dead meant that you didn't exist anymore. It meant that if you had lived a bad life, you no longer had a chance to fix it, and because you couldn't, others tried very hard to remember you that way. I then looked down at the ground far below me, and I climbed down the tree with considerable more caution than I had used climbing up. Since that day I've had a fear of heights, and the older I get, the more pronounced that fear becomes.