Apart from other considerations, language makes a marvellously comfortable nest for the mind, far downier than anything the rude empirical world can provide. In a famous passage, Montaigne speaks feelingly of ignorance as a soft and pleasant pillow on which to rest a prudent head, but he had never seen a Marxist cradled in the arms of what he pleased to call the dialectic.
…In our own day, it’s a particular function of language to shield us as best it can from the intolerable glare of Nothing and Nonbeing…As atmospheric gasses soften the otherwise intolerable rays of the sun, so the gasses of language protect the psyche from what it can’t bear to contemplate steadily. The threat of naked vision is a fearful one.
— Robert Adams, Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side
It may be a distinction with only a slight difference, but I don’t think our incessant chattering provides a distraction from death per se. I think it’s probably more painful to consider how frivolously we use the time we know we have.