Why Religion? by Elaine Pagels

Author:Elaine Pagels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Life after Death

David Pagels’s second birthday, with Elaine, Sarah, and Emily Raboteau and her family, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Do you believe in life after death?”

“Yes, of course—but not my life after my death.”

Recalling Heinz’s answer when someone had asked him that question, I thought, So that’s what we’re living now—life after death.

But how to go on? Questions kept recurring: Where do they go? How can someone so intensely alive suddenly be gone? What happens? Where are they? Somewhere, or nowhere? Flashes of insight would vanish, like water falling through my fingers, leaving only hints, guesses—and hopes. On the day Mark died, I’d been astonished to have the clear impression that after he initially departed from his failing body, he’d been invisibly present with us in a room down the hall, then had returned to his body when his heart started beating again, only to stop when his heart and lungs failed to circulate oxygen. Moments later, back in the room where his lifeless body lay, I felt that somehow I’d seen precisely where he had ascended to the ceiling in a swirl of silver energy and departed. And what had happened three days after Heinz died, when he’d seemed to answer my unspoken question? Both experiences were completely contrary to what I expected, yet both felt vividly real—neither, as I’d been taught to believe, simply illusions, or instinctive denial of death’s finality.

More than six months after Heinz died, another surprise. I opened the top drawer of my bureau, looking for the comic picture of Superman emblazoned on a cover of Time magazine, titled “Superman at Fifty!,” which I’d hidden there a year earlier to use on the invitations for the party I’d secretly planned for his fiftieth birthday. He never made it to fifty, though; that would have happened this February. Next to that picture, I’d placed the watch and belt that mountain rescue volunteers recovered from his body in July. Turning over his watch, I was astonished—not that it had stopped, but that it hadn’t stopped soon after he died. Instead, the watch’s timer showed that it had stopped one day before I was looking at it, on February 19—on the day that would have been his fiftieth birthday.

Could this be coincidence? Of course it could; I cannot draw any clear inferences from such incidents, although they’d shaken what once I’d taken for granted: the rationalism of those who insist that death is nothing but disintegration. As one anthropologist observes, when we confront the unknown, any interpretation is provisional, necessarily incomplete. Still, those experiences left with me the sense that when I come near death, I’ll likely be hoping to see the two of them, as the song says, welcoming me to join them “across the shining river.” At other times, though, I expect nothing more than a blank sky.

Meanwhile, there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters.

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