Not connecting to sqlite db from node with process.exit()

In my project , I have the following in index.js:

const sqlite3 = require('sqlite3').verbose();
// open the database
const db = new sqlite3.Database('./test.db', sqlite3.OPEN_READWRITE, (err) => {
if (err) {
    console.error(err.message);
}
console.log('Connected to the database.');
});
console.log('here');
db.close((err) => {
if (err) {
    console.error(err.message);
}
console.log('Close the database connection.');
});
process.exit();

sqlite.js:

function create_table(db, json) {

  // hard coding is cheating, mostly... make it dynamic!

  db.serialize( () => {
    db.run('create table if not exists '
          + 'data1 ('
          + 'id numeric primary key, '
          + 'userid numeric, '
          + 'title text, '
          + 'completed text)');

    db.run('delete from data1'); //or drop the table first..
  })
}

module.exports = {
  create_table
};  

When I run this at the command line

node index.js

I see just 'here' in the console and no new table is added to the test db. What am I doing wrong?

EDIT:

I realized that the process.exit() function is somehow preventing completion of the connection (I'm using this to test a block of code at beginning of a file with the effect of a 'break' in other languages)