Materialists welcome the "I am just temporarily alive and then I am fertilizer" theory because they are afraid.

Yes, they are just as afraid as the folks who fear death. Being nothing is comforting in much the same way as heaven is. No pain, no responsibilities, non-existence.

It's a "hell" of a lot tougher, I'm afraid than either of these options. If you go into death clueless or expecting pearly gates or pitchforks, you will be completely lost.

There are hundreds of millions of these materialists loitering around cemetaries, mortuaries and churches, trying to find out where they are and how to get back to what they know or what they expected. They function via frequency relationship at this point, but are mostly clueless as to how to get around or what is what. They loiter around their old family and haunt everything they have relationship with.

Your friend, after she died, most likely went to a place where they can make contact with folks in their sleep-state. The so-called "dead" are nothing of the kind. They are actually more enabled in many ways without a body than with one, and this is especially true if they have some development under their belt. She could have contacted hundreds of others she knew that same night - in but a split second.

Depending upon their development they can do a lot more than that. They can attend classes, teach classes, travel anywhere they can relate to via frequency relationship. They can set up their next round, pick out their next parents, review where they are at and what they still need to overcome to move on to better learning grounds.

The continuity of all energy is self evident - it only changes form.

But this knowledge comes via both experience and development and cannot be forced upon those not yet ready for it. Billions are born, live, die and are reborn again much like drones - or automatons - with almost no conscious input into the process at all.

When the learn the ropes they wont have to be the kid of their former executioner, or in a race they despised, marry their former boss, etcetera - they will learn how to overcome bias, hate and fear - intuitively.