Before my beloved died we believed we would still be consciously connected after her death. If ever there was a bond which could transcend the curtain descending between us, we were certain that it would be the great love we had for one another.

After she died, I never heard from her again. Part of me died with her, and part of her remained with me, yet her ghost and the lovely shades and memories left behind have offered little solace in the profound loss of her presence in this life.

Whether it comes as the result of profound bereavement, or one’s own impending death, or in simple contemplation seeking the truth and reality of human existence, a definitive answer to the perennial and primal question of life after death has eluded humanity. Our objective regard of the far country beyond death is obscured by powerful and complex innate perspectives embedded within our biological nature, and then projected outward to form our perceived reality. We see what we are, and when we look for what is, for what is beyond what we are, our consciousness encounters veils, curtains and walls created by what we are.

The unsolved question of history, sought by consciousness down through the ages of humanity, is whether or not consciousness can exist beyond its own continuum. We can not assert an answer to the question. Many have done so, yet their assertions have been marred by speculations relying on ambivalent possibility, imaginative or visceral fancy, and belief – all elements present in the continuum of consciousness, yet absent in the universe which we regard from inside our own cognitive bubble and translate into terms of our own. Sentience beholds that which exists outside its own continuum, yet it translates that vision into its own meaning. Meaning is the intrinsic signifier defining consciousness itself.

The conditions which shape our consciousness, and simultaneously limit it, are our neurological complexity and our embedded biological evolutionary mandate to survive. A certain measure of obfuscation appears in our line of sight as a result of these conditions when we attempt to look at death without ascribing to it qualities and characteristics which give it meaning to us. Like everything else consciousness encounters, a translation is made. In our regard of death the returns have been, to say the least, contradictory, confused, complex, and often fraught with hopes and dreams which have become stories and then myths and then beliefs.

The information we gather about what death is confronts us with a formidable, complex structure of cultural ideas and evolutionary biological mandates. When we begin to assess this information in order to form our own conclusions it soon becomes clear that humanity has not so much given death a proper objective regard; it has instead given a great deal of attention to how it regards death. Hope and desire, fearing what death might mean, rise to counteract that fear, insisting that the dead beloved one lives, that the self will never die, that all the instances of ending which are embodied everywhere in the continuum of life and the universe are not what they seem to be.

Humanity has proven that it can see what is without being befuddled by such bias. Science can look at the motion of the stars, the birth and death of galaxies, the nature of matter and other phenomena, and in the resultant translation by human consciousness a matrix of understanding can be constructed which is consistent, coherent and reliable.

Trees fall and crumble into dust; stars implode and planets die; those with us die and are with us no more, we hear their voices only in our minds, and never do we hear from them again. Oblivion presents itself as fact and yet our hope, our desire, is that it is not so.

Is there life after death, an afterlife? The word itself reveals our bias. Afterlife – it is a word which skips blithely over the fact of death and the evidence of oblivion into another life, a reflection of our profound and innate hope and desire to be alive, and even more so that our dead beloved lives, and is not gone from this universe.

I place my hope in the fact that what we know is not all there is to know; that perhaps there are continuums which our consciousness continues to live within, intact and vibrantly alive, which we cannot know of while here in this one.

I place my hope in the observation that life tends to rise to ever higher levels of organization, and that the life energy of which we all consist is not, here, at the highest level which exists; that the energy which has produced us moves our consciousness, intact, to another plane.

I place my hope in the desire I have that my beloved is still alive, that the one with whom I found love and peace and fulfillment and realized the highest potential of this continuum, might even now be, and forevermore will be – alive.

Yet now I release all those hopes and fears in the stark clarity of my own realization of what death truly is, and find comfort in this quote from Alan Lightman’s novel, Mr. g:

“At the moment of her death, there were 3,​147,​740,​103,​497,​276,​498,​750,​208,​327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.

“In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.

“Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone….“

She said there would be more after this life, that she could sense it waiting: no end, just more. She was right.