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After Death
What happens next?
I’ve always been fascinated by death and what happens next. Not in a gruesome slasher movie kind of way or anything like that. I actually hate slasher flicks. I’m not terribly interested in the physical process so much at all. Actually, the physical process frightens me somewhat because of the possibility of pain and suffering. It would be wonderful if everyone was guaranteed a quiet, gentle death, preferably in their sleep, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen that way. I’m interested in the spiritual side of things.
“You see? Death comes to us all,” Isabella of France says in the movie Braveheart as Edward I lays dying. Although most of the movie is highly dramatized fiction (so…many…liberties), that is a true statement. Death does come to us all. And we’re afraid of it, for the most part. We’re afraid of the pain, of life ending as we know it, and the uncertainty of what comes next.
My mother, understandably, thought I was a morbid child because I constantly read books or watched movies where people died, especially if there was mention of an afterlife. She didn’t understand why I gravitated toward those instead of stories with happy endings. Just like many things we’re drawn to as humans, I could never explain why. I was always just transfixed by the idea of souls slipping from this world to whatever happens next and what that next might be.
