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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Death comes as the end Accept the inevitable By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 795 words Publication date: September 3, 2006 Five years ago my 48 year old ex partner Antony, his current partner Chris and I met for dinner. Antony had a headache and was feeling tired. As usual, Antony, a prize-winning chef, ordered. Halfway through the discussion with the waitress, he snapped his fingers in annoyance. There was a word he couldn't remember, in English or his native Cantonese. A very common word. In the end he gave up and ordered something else. Two days later, Chris called me. Antony was behaving strangely and giving illogical answers to questions. We took him to hospital. As days passed, a malignant tumor on his brain was detected, radiotherapy began, drugs were prescribed and an unexpected infection appeared. Antony's normally placid mood descended into anger and confusion. When it became clear that nothing could resolve the physical and mental anguish, he decided to stop treatment. It took three days for the drugs to work their way out of his system. He became calm, but the cancer was spreading rapidly. As he lay in his hospice bed, he slept more and said and did less. His once sharp mind became less capable of thought or reaction. There came a time when he saw visitors and smiled and whispered their name. Then he no longer smiled. He slipped into a coma and, nine weeks after that restaurant meal, died. Let us suppose for a moment that Christians are right. That somewhere Antony is either beaming broadly as he sings God’s praises or screaming in agony as devils torture him. At what point in the continuum of life and death did his spirit, his soul, his personality, call it what you will, pass from this world to the next? In the final ten days when you could see his mind shutting down, where was the Antony we had known and loved? Was half of him already in the next world? As he dozed, surrounded by family and close friends, was part of him already plucking a harp or feeling the first flames of hell? Or did his whole spirit still lurk behind his closed eyes? Unable to express itself, muffled by the tumor, was it packing for the journey ahead? And if so, when did it finally leave? As his last breath faded, when his heart stopped beating or during the fifteen or so minutes that doctors tell us the brain still shows some sign of activity? Or had his brain died before his heart and lungs? We want there to be an afterlife. We want those who die young to be compensated in the next world. We want to spend eternity with those we have liked and loved. If a parent or older sibling died before we knew them, we feel we are owed time with them. And the mean-spirited amongst us want to see their enemies suffer. From their seat beside God they look forward to looking down on the fornicators and thieves and heretics – and of course atheists – so that they can smugly say “We told you so”. It was perhaps inevitable that our remote ancestors, when a falling log converted a being full of life into an entity as lifeless as the earth on which he lay, came to the conclusion that whatever had animated their companion had not been extinguished, but simply leapt to another plane of existence. But we have had millennia to observe and reflect on death. It is clear, despite the thousands of charlatans who claim to speak to the deceased (whose saccharin message is always the same) and the tens of thousands of preachers whose livelihood depends on our credulity, that death indeed comes as the end. The Christian notion of the afterlife is patently absurd. Slightly more credible is the Buddhist concept of reincarnation. In the version proposed by Christian-turned-Buddhist writer Alan Watts, our personalities do not remain distinct when we die but join a universal consciousness, from which they separate, but with only the vaguest, if any, memories of their previous lives, to be reborn again. Nice idea, but it too fades upon examination. Whichever version of the afterlife you examine, they all reflect wishful thinking rather than reality. Whether rapid, as in an explosion, or long and lingering, as in Antony’s case, death is a final, irredeemable shut down of the personality, never to be revived. All death is a tragedy. I will never again see Antony or my father or other friends and family. At times I weep for their loss of life and my loss of their companionship. But death is also inevitable and it is awareness and acceptance of death that tempers our humanity. The greatest tragedy is not death itself, but the illusion that many of us cling to, that death can be overcome.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |