Grappling with Death and the Afterlife

My mother grew up in a family of 14 children in southern Illinois where physical abuse from her mother was a common occurrence. Sadly, that parenting model followed my mother into her own family of seven children.

One afternoon late in my teenage years another one of those uncontrollable moments presented itself. That was it. I wrapped my arms around what few clothes I possessed, pushed past my mother standing with her arms crossed on the front porch, threw what I owned into the trunk of my car, and drove off with tears trickling down my cheeks.

Three years passed without further contact with my mother, and then one day the phone rang at work. Events at home required that I return home. In a very short time, my mother was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and would require care in the final weeks of her life.

I sat with my mother in her hospital room as she suffered and cried out, “I just want to go home.” Mother was a religious person and home to her meant heaven. I held her hand on the day that she slipped into a coma and she breathed in and out, in and out.

And then she let out her last breath and entered her life after death. She was finally home.

We spend much of our time in American culture focused on life and perhaps too little time, until death draws nigh, tending to the soul that transcends life and death.

Carl Jung, the well regarded Swiss psychiatrist who had a near death experience (NDE), wrote that…