The new year can help you understand death more deeply. By viewing death through the new year you may more easily inculcate that death is not a final dissolution, but is synonymous with all that a new year means to you: beginnings, birth, new life, new opportunities.
I am not speaking merely about physical death, but also 'death' in day-to-day terms: relationships breaking up, events terminating, careers coming to a grinding halt and any loss, ending, or change.
By understanding physical death in the macrocosm you can better deal with its representations in the microcosm of day-to-day life. Spiritual knowledge is about using the macrocosm to understand and enhance the microcosm. Knowledge is about you, and it must change your state of consciousness or it is meaningless.
Through death you will know that there is no death. It becomes the doorway to eternal life and growth. If 'death' exists at all it is in stagnation, inertia and fear. The endings, losses and changes that you feared because they implied 'death' to you, are instead opportunities for growth. Ironically, it is your very resistance or fear of this extension of self that is true 'death'.
Death is in your conditioning; in your reluctance or refusal to move on, accept change, expand or experiment. Having turned 'death' of the macrocosm on its head so to say, it dramatically changes your view of 'deaths' in the microcosm; and you are motivated to overcome fear, reduce stagnation and resistance.
Brahma the creator, looking at suffering humanity, wondered where he had gone wrong. Saraswati explains to him that 'death', through its constant opportunity for new life and eternal growth, is what will allow his creation to be infinitely joyous. Convinced, he creates the maiden 'Mrityu' to confer death periodically to all on earth.