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Suddenly Master Lai grew ill. Gasping and wheezing, he lay at the point of death. His wife and children gathered round in a circle and began to cry. Master Li, who had come to ask how he was, said, "Shoo! Get back! Don't disturb the process of change!"
Then he leaned against the doorway and talked to Master Lai. "How marvelous the [Tao] is! What is [it] going to make of you next? Where is [it] going to send you? Will [it] make you into a rat's liver? Will [it] make you into a bug's arm?"
Master Lai said, "A child, obeying his father and mother, goes wherever he is told, east or west, south or north. And the yin and yang - how much more are they to a man than father or mother! Now that they have brought me to the verge of death, if I should refuse to obey them, how perverse I would be! What fault is it of theirs? The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death. When a skilled smith is casting metal, if the metal should leap up and say, `I insist upon being made into a Mo-yeh!' he would surely regard it as very inauspicious metal indeed.
"Now, having had the audacity to take on human form once, if I should say, `I don't want to be anything but a man! Nothing but a man!', the [Tao] would surely regard me as a most inauspicious sort of person. So now I think of heaven and earth as a great furnace, and the [Tao] as a skilled smith. Where could [it] send me that would not be all right? I will go off to sleep peacefully, and then with a start I will wake up."
Chuang Tzu, translation by Burton Watson in which I took the liberty of replacing "Creator" with "Tao" so as to avoid confusion with the Abrahamic God as I know you mentioned being an atheist. (And because 'Creator' is often take in the sense of one whom creates as one whom creates a watch. The idea of Tao as a Creator is more akin to having children: You create them, but with no knowledge of what parts of yourself are going to be passed onto your offspring and they 'grow' and develop in their own manner, not according to that which you dictate.)
The idea here is not so much of worship of a deity and trusting that it will take care of you, but knowing that what will happen is what will happen. In life we are all accustomed to believing we should be this person or that person, we keep suffering in the pursuit of a happiness that we can never hold onto, that is always slipping between our fingers. We forget that we are what we are, that there's an intrinsic oneness with all of reality because simply what is is what is. So it is said in death we 'awaken' as we forget social convention, we forget responsibilities, we forget about all the wants and desires that were never fulfilled and instead simply are. We become beyond all happiness, beyond all sorrow. In this state of simplicity in which the self no longer exists, we are truly at rest in the sense there is no grasping and clinging to life and the things we desire or the conflict of trying to embrace the good and fight off the evil.
Scientifically we know the body will break down, decompose. Maybe those atoms and the materials which once made your body will become something else. Perhaps they shall go into a tree. Perhaps they shall become a rock over millenia. What happens to that which you considered the self in life is that which happens, there is nothing that it can become that wasn't meant to be.
The Taoist regards death as a transformation. There's infinite possibilities as to what one may become. They revel in that, they revel in the sense of change, they revel in the expansion of existence that is possible when the self and convention are forgotten.
Not sure if it's helpful at all, but it is the Taoist point of view on approaching death which is a type of reincarnation if you look at it right. In my own sense of paraphrasing: If one looks well upon their birth, for the same reason they should look well upon their death.
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