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I can't pinpoint a 'Eureka' moment, but I think was vaguely aware from at least age 6-7. I remember nearly drowning when i was 8 in a swimming pool...I guess in Sunday school we were told about heaven and whatnot, yet the prospect of death was still frightening. Weirdly, at the same time I imagined death as an endless sleep, yet other times I thought I'd just go to heaven, kids can believe two different things at once...
Coma, age 7. Woke up in a hospital, realized how the simple things in life matter, and ya only have one life to live. A very existential period in my life.
Plus, losing loved ones helps me to realize how delicate and fragile life is, how impermanent we are, and how we all play small part of the whole in the scope of things in life, however insignificant our experiences may be still worth while just to be able to experience life in itself-
"We are spiritual being having a human experience" -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The starting point was when my grandma died at age 14. I slowly became aware and sometime after that I got panic attacks in which case I was really aware then.
I don't think there was a, one single, moment. It was several events over the years that led to a final accumulated weight of realization.
I had tetanus at 16, which in those days was a terrifying bogeyman. An uncle had died of it, and the other patient in the hospital when I had it, died. But the impression wore off.
At age forty I became ill with a disease for which there was no cure, and no dependable pattern of treatment. It was usually fatal, and whether that was sooner or later was a crap shoot. I hung on, and responded adequately to the treatment available for years studded with acute episodes; however, I was warned that I was just lucky.
In my late forties I decided to do volunteer for work with people who had been diagnosed with AIDS, some I took care of physically until the moment they died, for others I was simply a kind of special visitor. They all died, one after the other over a period of several years, falling like a line of dominoes.
This experience really brought home to nest a sense of my own mortality.
At age 4 or 5 I had a very high very sick and remember floating in the room above myself and watching people working on me. Above me was a very bright light like a sun and I was drifting higher towards it. At some point I felt a tug down and then a drag back to my body. The next thing I remember is openning my eyes and being in horrible pain.
Within the next year my great grandmother dies and then my great uncle died and then my grandfather died .
I'm 60 now and retired, I put together a list of all the people that have died in my life and the list is longer then the people that I know now that are still alive.
I have always considered myself mortal and know that life is very easy destroy.
At age 5 I remember being very bothered by AIDS, and my own mortality.
Soon after I turned 14 my paternal grandpa died prematurely, right before his retirement and pension kicked in. I wasn't too close to him, though.
When I was 15 I got in an ATV accident that required a night's hospitalization and was accompanied by a loss of consciousness. I guess then constituted a turning point.
At age 20 my father died. I had just started college and rather than making me aware of my mortality, it rather taught me to avoid the mistakes he made.
At age 23 I was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I had to go through 2 rounds of chemotherapy (one when I was 23-24 and one when I was 25-26), and one course of radiation therapy (coinciding with my 27th birthday).
Probably around age 5 or 6. My favorite uncle committed suicide. He and his family had just been at our house for a usual Saturday night get-together. They left and around 30 minutes later, his son called and asked to speak to my mother. I (being 5 or 6) insisted on knowing what he wanted. He said "My father died". I gave my mother the phone; he explained to her what happened and she told all of us.
I'm not sure exactly when, but I remember back when I was been six and eight years old, I saw a graveyard from my school-bus window when I was going on a field trip with my class. I think that some of the grave stones were even visible enough for me to see the names and/or the years/dates on them. Anyway, seeing that graveyard and these grave stones literally scared the daylights out of me. I then deluded myself into believing that I and my parents would live forever, but then, as I grew older, I began looking at death much more realistically and began to look at other options, such as cryogenic preservation.
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