I have always loved the famous Hamlet soliloquy ‘To Be or Not to Be’. At some point I memorized it, though I must refresh it periodically or it slips away. I have even written a song that addresses the same question.
The question ‘To Be or Not To Be’ postulates the possibility of suicide in the face of the myriad ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. The same theme and question come up in the Goethe classic The Sufferings of Young Werther (Die Leiden des Jungen Werther). The question of whether suicide is justified when a person is tortured by mental anguish, physical infirmities or sickness of the soul is one many poets and scholars have wrestled with over the centuries.
But in this essay, I am not posing the question of whether suicide is an acceptable escape from misery. Fortunately, I am not facing that dilemma. I am more interested in the corollary questions that Shakespeare introduces in those famous stanzas. What will one find in that ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns’? Indeed, ‘what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil’? I am intrigued by death itself and what it will mean for us, if anything.
Most of our religions and spiritual allegiances assure us that we have an immortal soul that continues to exist after physical death. This is one of the main consolations of being a person of faith. It is very disconcerting for most people to imagine that they will cease to exist after death. And I would dare to hypothesize that even the most cavalier atheist is displaying a bit of false bravado when he or she claims to have no fear of the finality of death.
Attempting to visualize or conceptualize an existence of any form after death leads one to a series of questions that border on the absurd. What form of being will we be? Will there be a physical form? If so, what age would we be? Would we have the same personality and the same history or memory? Would we meet family and friends? Will our pets accompany us? What would we do on a daily basis once the harp playing and singing gets old? Would we tire of milk and honey?
The ‘opiate of the masses’ school of thought on death portrays heaven as an idyllic place that will compensate for the pain and suffering that occurred on planet earth. This is understandably a powerful and compelling story for the heartbroken and miserable. This is the idea that heaven will replace the brutal world with a loving, compassionate place and an eternal life of good things.
Every mother who has lost a child, every husband whose wife has died young of breast cancer, every person whose loved ones have been brutally taken from them by crime, disease or war; every slave, every victim of abuse, every hapless, luckless denizen of this cruelly arbitrary world, deserves such a recompense.
But the imagery doesn’t hang together well and breaks down under any real scrutiny. Would the mother who lost an infant child meet that child as an infant or an adult? Would she have the opportunity to see that child grow up? What if her own mother had died when she was a teenager? Would she be a teenager again in the eyes of her mother? What about the billions of children who died in childbirth and never experienced life at all? How will they be compensated? Will they meet their parents for the first time and somehow go through a full life with them? It seems like it would be better to give them another go at life, which brings up the new complication of reincarnation!
Another big question is how the whole eternity thing works. If heaven is an eternal dwelling, would we perceive time? What purpose would time have? How does the space-time continuum fit into this? All of these details quickly become self-contradictory and the whole enterprise becomes acutely unimaginable.
Moreover, the idea of a ‘perfect’ place with everything one needs to be happy also has its challenges. A brief look at the ultra-rich who should be living the ideal life on earth is strong evidence that too much of a good thing is ultimately kind of bad!
Still, there are some indications that a post-death experience awaits us. Countless near-death episodes have been recounted with tales of passageways leading to luminous, wonderful places, of powerful feelings of peace and contentment, of seeing deceased loved ones and so on. There are even scientific studies and institutions that have catalogued these experiences and are attempting to understand them more fully.
I want to believe that I will continue to exist after death. It would make it easier to die, and that certainly appears to be one of the main benefits of a belief in the afterlife. Dying is a solo gig for the most part. No one is sharing the experience. One is all by oneself. And very few people seem all that eager to let go of life and embark on that journey. Most of us would ‘rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of’, or perhaps even worse, to nothing at all.
There is enough mystery in the world to make one hesitant to hold fast to either skepticism or unquestioning belief. I know enough of quantum physics and cosmology to see that all is not what it appears to be. I may write whimsically about death but in the end, I respect and echo the earnestness with which most human beings approach the end of their days. My own speculation and hope are that my spirit does somehow continue to exist, and that in some ethereal way we attain new levels of consciousness, love and compassion. There is no logical or rational way to imagine it, so I will simply hope for the best.
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