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BY HERBERT VEGO
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ONE MOVIE I can’t forget is About Schmidt (shown in 2002), where American actor Jack Nicholson – playing the role of a retired actuary, an aging widower who loses his only daughter to a husband – laments, “Relatively soon, I will die. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too, it will be as though I never existed.”
It reminded me of a somewhat contrary statement I had heard as a child in the 1950s while walking with my great grandpa Catalino to the grave of his wife Felipa. There we met another old man, to whom he said, “Better to have lived and died than not to have lived at all.”
Let’s face it: At certain times when we get sick or encounter an accident, we grapple with the undeniable idea that everything that lives dies, only to later on sigh, “Thank God there’s God. This is not the end of the road.”
If there’s paradise up there, why is everybody so afraid to abandon the earth? It’s as if death is something that should only happen to bad people, not to good Christians.
Ironically, people who should approach death as gateway to afterlife are the same ones who struggle to stay alive, laying up treasure on earth.
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 nothing” (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).
We speak of this dust as our body, though the elements that compose it are constantly changing and are entirely decomposed in death. Each seven years or so, the body has undergone an entire change. Yet it is the same body we are aware of. 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 and animals, even germs. But our humanity impels us to believe that death can be cheated.
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.
Catholic Christians embrace the Platonic view of an immortal soul or ghost that “wanders” after death.
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. This is hard to believe because no “reincarnate” remembers his previous life.
Scientists contend that higher life forms live by the death of the lower. 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. It is only by dying that the seed sown can sprout into life. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
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