That it is nothingness is a belief based on an outside POV of other people dying and not coming back. They surely leave what seems like a bunch of emptiness when they die. It's a belief someone made up.
On the other hand thousands of people have flatlined in both heart and brain and have been revived to report experiences. Personally, I've had out-of-body experiences that have shown me that my consciousness is much bigger and not trapped in the body. Existence is an amazingly, unlimited, creative, and vast thing. And when you think about it, there really is no objective universe, only a bunch of consciousnesses having unique subjective experiences, each one not knowing what the other's experience is like. You can't separate yourself from subjectivity. The only witness of the so-called objective universe is the subjective experience. If all subjective experience is extinguished at death, then the universe will cease to exist when earth is destroyed by the sun (if there is no life elsewhere). There will be no one to witness it (or create it)— making yours and everyone else's lives completely meaningless, despite our intuition and experience that this is not so, and that love and creativity runs real deep.
When you die, you'll be out of your body, and will most likely have an experience that is colored by your beliefs, like the bardos in Tibetan culture. You might even have an experience of nothingness if you believe in it enough. Guides will be available to help you re-acclimate to the after-death environment and help you out of bardo-like traps. It will probably be like the dreamworld, but like a lucid dream, or like the lucidity out-of-body-experiences, both in which your intense thoughts materialize rather quickly (the body you're in can fly, walk through walls, and change form. Creativity will still be part of your being. But again, more like the dream world in that you can hallucinate landscapes and all sorts of things. You can't escape your creativity.
People think there was nothingness before they were born because the memories of it aren't contained in the brain. I don't remember anything from the first two years of my life (most don't), but it doesn't mean I didn't exist until I my first long-term memory was formed in my third year. Somewhere in an unconscious portion of our soul, we remember it all.
Crazy stuff, I know. But believe me when I say that when you go within and explore your consciousness, there's no end to it. To just say "life is meaningless, and when you die, you're extinguished" is a sign of a lazy mind that has no clue about, or is afraid, to go within. What you find in there is impossible to prove to another., but you surely can express it creatively, and share anyway.