At just 28 years old, I think about death quite often. It hits me at the most peculiar times. Never when there's plane turbulence, or, say, when I'm doing something dangerous — like that time I was zip lining in Mexico — sweating, hands trembling, but my mind? Totally clear. I think about death when I'm happy. Like the other day, I was driving around with my boyfriend and we were laughing so hard at something silly. Then, out of nowhere, I had this moment when I realized that one day the laughing and smiling and breathing could stop (the last part definitely will). One day, I will simply — poof! — cease to exist.
What scares me isn't so much how I'm going to die — it's more the fear of what will happen afterward. Will I go to Heaven? Will I be reincarnated? Will my spirit die with my body? I start feeling sick when I think about that last one. My heart pounds and I can actually feel the blood pumping through my veins.
I've been blessed with friends, family and a career that I love — one could argue that I'm in the prime of my life. And that's the problem: I could've said the same thing about my dad when he died. Granted he was older, 51 when he died in 2002, but he was happily married, had three (lovely, if I do say so myself) daughters and — poof! — he ceased to exist. Leading up to that time, I didn't know the extent of my father's illness. He had gotten cancer two years prior, but me being so young (I was about 11 at the time), and my parents being so brave, there was little discussion about it besides words of comfort from my mom or dad after something traumatic happened — like when ambulances arrived at our house in the middle of the night to take him to the hospital. Thinking back on their strength, especially my mother's, during that time is awe-inspiring.
Although my mother says he wasn't afraid to die (he was just "sad because he was going to miss us"), I have no idea what happened to him the moment after he took his last breath. He doesn't visit me in dreams or move objects around the house letting me know he is watching. And yet again, I start to notice a pattern in the way my fear works: It's all about the unknown. It's hard not to think: What happened to my father? What will happen to me?
So, to help put my own mind at ease and to calm the nerves of anyone else out there wondering, I spoke with people from different religious backgrounds to get their take on death and the afterlife.
Growing up Catholic, I thought it would be good to first check in with the faith that raised me. I know that when someone dies, it could take as long as a week for the body to be buried. Some Christians opt for one or two days of viewing the body, known as a wake. It's here that the family comes together to pray for the deceased. A funeral mass may or may not take place, but either way, the body is usually buried (some families go down the path of cremation). But I needed to know more about what happens next.
It's important to know that there are many Christian denominations and interpretations of the Bible vary, but when it comes to death, there is a common belief that comes strictly from the resurrection of Jesus. To break it down in the simplest way possible, Christians believe that on Good Friday, or the Friday before Easter, Jesus died. On the third day, a.k.a. Easter, he rose from the dead. During his time on Earth, he shared his spirit with his disciples, and then he was taken into Heaven. "As believers, we think a similar thing is going to happen to us," says James Cappabianca, Associate Director of Development at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
Cappabianca says that reason comes from the doctrine of incarnation, which teaches that Jesus is fully divine and fully human. Christians trust that God is like humans in all ways, including in death. "That's why the resurrection is so powerful and beautiful to believers — we can connect to God because of the hope that we can be raised up, made perfect in the fullness of love and goodness, like (and with) Jesus himself," says Cappabianca.
But when it comes to our resurrection, there's no specifics about how or when it will happen. "The how or the when of our resurrection is in God's hands," Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's presiding bishop, told me. "I think of it this way: When I was a little girl my parents would take my brothers and me to the drive-in movies. We would fall asleep in the back seat of the car. When we got home, our parents would carry us up to bed. When we woke up, we were safe in our own beds. We had no awareness of how long we had been asleep, nor of how we had arrived, but we knew we were home."
So, what does "home" look like? Well, the notion of white robes and a golden gate could be accurate, but it's still a mystery. Being afraid of that mystery is natural, but Cappabianca says it's important to remember what's to come. "I think as a believer — and I wholeheartedly believe this — that at the moment of death, I will feel some sense of peace in knowing that it's just a different stage of my life. And I hope that in the last moment of my bodily life, I remember that this stage is going to be so beautiful and so perfect and so filled with love.
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