What Happens When We Die?
The question of what happens when we die has been an obsession of mine. I remember when at age six it hit me that not only was I going to one day disappear but also all the people I cared about. This led to a lot of sleepless nights and an increased interest in religion. In my teens, another round of insomnia and nightmares began after seeing a lifeless body (suicide) floating down the river Lee in Cork.
Death terrified me, and I desperately sought some reassurance. My own Christian religion didn’t provide me with the answers I sought – only more questions. I realized that faith and wishful thinking is not the same as absolute proof, and I was looking for certainty. This is probably what drove my teenage interest in meditation, Buddhism and Daoism. Then I found alcohol, and it was so effective at numbing my fear of death that I would have periods where I would be suicidal.
In my twenties, I trained to be a nurse, and this brought me into much more contact with dying and death. I even spent a bit of time in palliative care where on some shifts we could have up to four people passing in a matter of hours. I spent a lot of time thinking about my own death and how best to prepare for it (it seemed to me that most people were woefully unprepared for this one eventuality in life that appears to be inevitable).
For most of my adult life, I would have described myself as an atheist with Taoist/Buddhist sympathies. I suspected that death was just like turning off a light switch – no more Paul. But, I also realized that this was a belief that I could never prove to any degree of certainty. You see, even before I became aware of the implications of death as a young child, I was bothered by the fact that the adults seemed to just assume that this was all real. For some reason, life appeared dreamlike to me even though when I mentioned this, the adults quickly shut me down – I learned to stop asking that question but it never went away.
There is no shortage of people out there who claim to know what happens when we die. We get to choose from beliefs that promise annihilation to those that promise an eternity in paradise. I suspect that the one we choose will say more about our personality and cultural conditioning then it will about what is True. There is no person on this planet (living now or any time in history) that I would trust enough to accept their opinion as fact. I also realize that my personality is biased towards certain answers, so I wouldn’t trust them either. I also would not trust the sense of certainty as I have a long history of being certain about things that weren’t real.
Instead of finding an answer to what happens when we die, I found stillness. This dissolved the question completely, and I have no more concerns in that regard. I experience Paul like a character in a dream, so the question of what happens to him when he dies is the same for me as what happens to my dream characters when I wake up in the morning. I’ve even had dreams where it appeared like Paul was a character that I had dreamed about in that dream.
Instead of answers, I found peace. The kind of peace that is not dependent on the answering of impossible questions. The kind of absolute peace that is not dependent on beliefs, opinions of certainties. I don’t know what happens when I die. I don’t even know if the question makes any sense because it is based on too many assumptions about what life is and what we are.
