I’ve been thinking about death recently. The final move in this game called life. I’ve been thinking about what it is and why it is the way that it is and what happens afterward. I attended a funeral recently. It was not my first time attending one, but it was the first time that I was truly able to grasp any sort of understanding of death. Intellectually, I know that death is the first step into the great unknown, but after attending the funeral, it truly became the scariest thing to me. Death is the most harrowing experience because it is blind to the living. We know nothing definitively about what comes afterward. Despite this, it is also completely the most transformative thing.

Seeing a dead body created a whole myriad of feelings in me all at once, all bombarding me, constantly coming and going like I am standing in the middle of Grand Central Station at rush hour during holiday season. There is no time to process it all and that’s what makes it tricky- death is the ending of time. It is the ending of a timeline. But human beings need time to make sense of it, to mold and it and knead all its character traits into something recognizable. As I looked upon my deceased relative, I felt relief, confusion, awkwardness, acceptance, closure, regret, sadness, loss, curiosity, and strangely hope.

Whatever happens after death is the great unknown, the true final frontier. Us human beings may have religions and other spiritual/supernatural beliefs to offer some insight into what comes next, but at the end of the day, the only people who know for sure are the dead themselves. No one teaches us how to handle death and going to the funeral made me feel out-of-place. I teared up at a few parts but didn’t outright cry. I consoled people with hugs and embraces and back rubs, but didn’t need any of those myself. How does someone deal with something for which there is no answer? Everything humans know is based on extensive experience and research. How do I handle something for which the ones who experience it can never speak their truth? How do I handle something for which no in-depth, meticulous research can ever be done?

This may seem a bit weird, but when I go to funerals, I like to observe the body in detail while it is laying in the open casket. I inspect from the very top of the head to where the body meets the bottom lid of the casket. Analyzing how the body looks after the soul departed may be my way of getting some type of closure. My relative looked at peace, not an ounce of pain or anger or sadness or any other negative feeling or emotion present upon their face. Their weight and skin color had changed, indicating to me that they were already in a state of transition from life to death before actually dying. But what stuck out the most, surprisingly, were the hands. To put it bluntly, the hands looked dead. Despite the funeral home doing a wonderful job preparing the body for the viewing, I saw the absence of life in those hands. I saw the beginning of decay. I envisioned multiple Bible verses fulfill a prophecy in front of me, all leading to one conclusion: to dust we shall return. And despite how much American culture tries to hide obvious signs of death at a funeral, seeing my relative’s hands so listless and void and empty were a comfort to me. It’s official: they’re dead and not coming back. The cycle of life continues. Mother Nature reclaims the physical forms of all living things. And with that realization came an acceptance. My relative has moved onto another plane of existence never to return.

But of course I still felt a sense of sadness and regret. Should I have spoken more to them while they were alive? Should I have done more? Should I have had more conversations, given more hugs, or lent a listening ear? Or did I do enough? Did I make mistakes in my interactions with them? Was my perception of the relationship the same as theirs? I will never get a chance to answer these questions unfortunately. Like any event that unfolds, us humans learn the the most impactful lessons after the event has happened. I can only move on and hope that the interactions my relative and I had were enough. And then there is the confusion. How does someone just…die? They were here, active and living one day, and gone the next. How can life change so suddenly? I know intellectually that people fall gravely ill, accidents happen, or sometimes the destructive transgressions of others all lead to the great eternal, unchanging equalizer that is death. But emotionally, it is too bewildering to compute. Dying is a concrete misfortune of an abstract phase. How do I handle reconciling being alive and doing actions with one’s own body one day, with being dead and doing absolutely nothing with that same body the next? The permanence of death and quickness of change is perplexing. I’ve mentioned in a previous post how important routines are to us; we are all creatures of habit. Perhaps, understanding death is so hard because it is the ultimate disruptor to our attachment to routine. It stops us right in our tracks and forces us to confront it on its own terms. We never get a say. It happens and we are forced to react. And as a result, the confusion is here to stay.

As the saying goes, “With every end there is a new beginning.” That became particularly true during the funerary events. The feelings I mentioned above: relief, confusion, awkwardness, acceptance, closure, regret, sadness, loss, and curiosity all appeared to me upon seeing the body. But only one feeling came from the social gatherings and rituals and beliefs done to process the death: hope. For the first time in my life, I felt like I understood the importance of ritual and spirituality in coping with death. Gathering to support the immediate family, sharing stories, cooking food, etc were customs that I likened to writing a biographical novel. The story happened and now that the main character was gone and there was nothing more they could add to the plot, it was time to finish writing the book. Each chapter was a milestone; every page number was time on the clock; and every word was a pixel in the highly anticipated movie inspired by this very same book. We were not just gathering to comfort ourselves and provide support; we were making sure the finishing touches were put on this book to be placed on the shelves of the ever-expanding library of souls.

This is where religion comes in. I am a Christian, so I do strongly believe in the idea of an afterlife. And thank God I do. It’s an obvious fact, but knowing that one day everything that someone can feel, see, touch, hear, and smell will cease for that person is absolutely TERRIFYING. It is hard to believe that billions of years of the universe growing and expanding; billions of years of planets, stars, moons, asteroids, and comets forming; millions to billions of years of life evolving from simple single-celled organisms to complex multicellular organisms with billions of base pairs of DNA capable of simple tasks like walking to difficult tasks like building spaceships and everything in between and beyond, happened all for us to die and have nothing afterward? That thought terrifies me beyond belief. Like many people, I have been through my (un)fair share of religious-based toxicity and justified doubt/questioning, but everything I’ve learned and lived since then leads me back to the religious/spiritual idea that death is not the end. I cannot possibly fathom the idea of quite simply ceasing to exist. I believe in the concept of a soul and while I cannot find the right words to eloquently describe what a soul is, I feel in my heart that this entity does live on. The soul breathes an energy that emanates from the depths of the universe. It has seasons like the rotations and cycles of the planets around a sun. It can go from zero gravity to having gravity in a matter of seconds, like crossing between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. It ebbs and flows and transforms. And much like the universe since the beginning of time, it grows and grows. And just like the universe is projected to end, so too shall the soul ends…its journey. Christianity states that there will be a judgement day in which all souls from the beginning of time are brought before God to be judged and assigned a place in heaven or hell. No one knows when that day will be, but my deceased relative was Christian as well and therefore believed the same. The idea of the soul just continuing to live despite everything physical having a definitive end brought me a comfort like no other. It soothed me and gave me immense hope. I was able to send my relative off into the void knowing that their soul, their consciousness, their perception, their mind; would continue. Believing this enabled me to see this death as only a chapter, a milestone of sorts. No matter how difficult this chapter is for the friends, families, acquaintances of the deceased, it is a necessary step from which no one can escape and everyone must face. There is no end in sight, just letting go. A painful trek to an abruptly-constructed hope. I have peace and I hope my relative does too. I don’t think I would be able to handle funerals without this thought. The concept of death is too much for us as human beings to fully grasp. But this divine promise gives me hope. And I hope anyone reading this, no matter what the belief (or lack of belief), finds some hope. Because no matter what happens after we die, one thing is for sure, we never relive the life we are living. Death may be the scary ending of our timeline but it does not have to be the end. We can handle it. We will transform. We must make the most of our lives here on Earth and find purpose and meaning no matter what. Death is blind to the living, and that gives us all the more reason to keep writing our books of life.