YESTERDAY, while I was thinking of writing an article on death in anticipation of All Saints’ Day, fellow journalist Vicente “Danny Baby” Foz approached me with a bad news: Our common friend Gina – a winsome employee at the BIR regional office – had succumbed to her first cardiac arrest. I guess she was only in her late 30s. What an untimely departure!

Her passing reminds me of the movie Schmidt. In the title role, actor Jack Nicholson – a rich widower leaving alone after his only daughter marries – cries, “What if I die? It’s as if I have never lived at all!”

Yes, at certain times when we get sick or debilitated due to an accident, we realize that everything that lives dies. Plants, trees, animals, birds, fish, even amoeba and other germs die. Why should human beings be any different?

And then we heave a sigh, “Thank God there’s God. This is not the end of the road.”

However, if we’re a hundred percent sure there’s paradise up there, why is everybody so afraid to abandon life on earth? Most of my Christian friends are very afraid of death as if it’s something that should only happen to bad people, not to good Christians.

Hence we wonder why people who should be unafraid of death, since it is the gateway to life everlasting, are the very ones who struggle to stay alive, laying up treasure on earth. Nobody is rushing to get out to lay up treasure in heaven.

Why the fuss about fighting one’s time to go? What happens at death?

The Bible, affirming the above morbid thought of actor Jack Nicholson as Schmidt, says, “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).

In a sense, death is a homecoming because it brings us back to where we were in the beginning: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return” (Genesis 3:19).

While it was a part of the body, this dust was stamped with our personality. We speak of it as our body, though the elements which compose it are constantly changing and are entirely decomposed in death. As a matter of fact, each seven years or so the body has undergone an entire change. Yet it is the same body as far as we are aware. This continuous dying is a constant intimation of mortality.

If we believe in no God at all, that would truly be unsettling. We would be no better than plants, animals and germs.

But our humanity impels us to believe that death can be cheated. We bury our dead indeed with a good funeral that sends them off in style. In a sense, a person doesn’t really die until everyone who remembers him or her dies.

The intensity of our fear of death mirrors the degree of our uncertainty of life beyond the grave. Some Christians believe they would have to wait for Christ’s “second coming” before being resurrected unto eternity, either in heaven or in hell.

The thought of hell, which is generally viewed as perpetual torment in a lake of fire, should have been enough to deter Christians from killing, stealing and raping. But the failure of the Christian religion to reform society gives us doubt whether we really see Judgment Day as a reality.

Other Christians embrace the Platonic view of an immortal soul or ghost that “wanders” upon the body’s death. But if this were so, resurrection would be unthinkable.

Another religion, Hinduism, preaches the cycle of continuous reincarnation. Under the law of karma, the good would enjoy better rebirth; whereas, the bad could be reborn in the body of a non-human, say an insect. But I have yet to encounter a reincarnate who remembers who he was in previous life

Scientists contend that higher life forms live by the death of the lower ones. While plants can draw their food directly from the soil, animals cannot extract their food from the earth directly. They must live by the death of other animals or plants. The food we eat is eloquent on this point. It is only by dying that the seed we sow can sprout. And this imparted life is lost again when the grain is used as food. It’s an inescapable universal law.

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