Does truth of emptiness imply that nothing existent ever ends? Can emptiness be understood as a conservation law? In other words, is it true that to posit a true end to any existent is to necessarily presuppose that it truly existed before it ended? Another way of saying it, to posit that with death and the break up of the body that a person truly ended is to presuppose that the person truly existed in the body beforehand?

Doesn't viewing the true destruction of a chariot presuppose that the chariot truly existed in the first place?

Doesn't viewing the true destruction of the body presuppose that the body truly existed in the first place?

Can an illusion ever truly end? Or does illusion necessarily give birth to subsequent moments of new illusion?

To my understanding a person is an impermanent ever changing phenomenon. That the person is like an illusion that continues from moment to moment in this life. If that is so, then how is death different? Doesn't supposing a true end for an illusion-like phenomenon necessarily imply that someone has mistaken the illusion for something real? Is this one consequence of the equation emptiness === form?
Like the first verse of Nagarjuna's Madhyamikakarika, Prasangika refute the four extremes of production. Nagarjuna says:


  Neither from itself nor from another, nor from both, nor without a
  cause, does anything whatever, anywhere arise.


What is produced is not truly produced (in the sense that it is not inherently produced), and what ceases does not truly cease (in the sense that it does not inherently cease). There is (conventional) production from another, but not inherent (or true) production from another... and there is no production from itself, be it truly/ultimately or conventionality.

You say:


  To my understanding a person is an impermanent ever changing
  phenomenon. That the person is like an illusion that continues from
  moment to moment in this life. If that is so, then how is death
  different?


It's a great question. Death is different in that the mental continuum separates from the body. There is no such separation before death (except in rare cases of powa etc.) That is how death is different from the constant changes that occur in life. Even though no aggregate stays the same from one moment to the next, there is usually no such separation (of the mind stream from the body) before death.

In addition, since the aggregates belong to the same continuum, we can impute the same name on them although they have changed. It is what we do when we look a picture of us at age 10 and say "Look! It's me when I was ten."