Grave Questions

On Friday afternoon, Irena and I went to a funeral. It was in the huge cemetery, on the edge of VT. The funeral was for the father of Ivelina, a friend of ours. We did not know the father well, but we felt that we had to go along and support Ivelina, her husband John and her daughter, Lizzie. The experience was pretty gruesome, rather scary and disturbing, to say the least. 

For a start, the cemetery is vast, such a large area covered by graves and stone memorials. Bulgarian coffins are usually open, so you can see the face of the dead person. The service, all in Bulgarian, did not take very long and then we came up to the coffin and placed flowers inside, next to the corpse. Next we all walked behind the hearse to the grave. There was a big pile of earth and two beams across the grave, with the coffin on top. Then the gravediggers took away the beams and lowered the coffin with two ropes. We all walked up to the grave and threw in a lump of earth. My lump of earth made a hollow thump when it hit the coffin.

Someone once said that death is the ultimate statistic. A funeral must make you ask some big questions, such as “What is death? Do we all just fall asleep and not wake up?” We all have life, consciousness, spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it. So what happens to that life? Where does it go? Is it like an electric light, that simply stops shining when you turn off the switch? Is life itself an illusion and we do not see it for what it really is, namely a series biological and chemical reactions? If that is what life is, then perhaps all thought, all morality and all human achievement is meaningless, worthless and irrelevant.

Lots of people say to themselves, “Well, there are no answers to these questions and so we might as well get on with life now. What is going to happen will happen and so there is not much point in worrying or even thinking about it.” 

But what happened before we are born? Well, I cannot remember anything before the age of five or six and I certainly cannot remember anything before I was born. It's just blank. Therefore you could argue that there must be no life after death, as there was no life before life. This means that the spirit or soul or consciousness is not eternal and to think that it does carry on is just wishful thinking, like whistling in the dark. 

On the other hand, if it is all a lie and the grave ends everything, then why do so many religions insist that life does continue after our physical death? Maybe we did exist, in some shape or form, before our physical birth and we just don't remember that experience. My dear wife often reminds me of things that happened ten or maybe twenty years ago and I have no recollection of them at all! Does my lack of any memory mean that they did not happen?