The group of retired septuagenarians (plus a few octogenarians) having coffee at the Serrramonte Mall is evidently getting fewer in number. Every now and then we hear a friend is either in the hospital or at Duggan's Funeral Parlor, or already awaiting final funeral/ burial or crematory services at the Skylawn, Cypress, Holy Cross, or some other cemetery in our area. This is the reason why our late colleague Nick Dazig called the mall "The Departure Area". In fact, he declared that each of us now has his "boarding pass" and that we are merely waiting for our final call.
The realization that our allotted time in this dimension will indeed have to come to an end compels us to re-focus and review the "map" to our next "destination", if any. Is there in fact a "next" place, an afterlife, or is man's earthly life all there is, that death equals nothingness, oblivion, no heaven, no hell, just absolute Zero? The traditional Christian believer bestowed with the gift of faith will have no problem wrestling with and resolving this issue to his satisfaction. Those who are just a "tic" away from being agnostics or skeptics need a more solid foundation than what was "force-fed" to pre-adult minds in catechetical/religious classes.
Let me try with the basic scientific fact that matter and energy are but two sides of the same coin. All matter is actually energy that to our human senses has become solidified, perceivable, palpable, measurable. But matter/energy cannot be destroyed. What then in a human being who is both made of matter and energy can be destroyed? I maintain - only his physical human form, his material constituents, except his components in the subatomic level. When a human being dies, his body decomposes, turns to dust, so we assume nothing of him is left. He is dead and gone.But note that at the subatomic or quantum level his quarks, gluons, leptons, all his subatomic particles,being indestructible, must continue to subsist. Knowledgeable scientists say there are trillions and trillions of these subatomic particles in one drop of blood. This fact supports my own theory that Christ's crucifixion released an inexhaustible supply of His quanta (the particles that made up His flesh and blood as a "True Man") in order to provide the divine spark to any and all of us, including future generations, if we but accept Him into our lives and follow His final injunction to love one another as He loved us. Insofar as we ordinary human beings are concerned and as earlier contended, our subatomic components also cannot be destroyed. These particles, in my view, must still carry or contain all the data or information pertaining to and/or derived from the deceased individual to which said particles were previously linked, including all the errors, mistakes, misdeeds he committed in his lifetime. Although a person has just died and/or has been dead for sometime, many paranormal happenings involving or caused by the deceased have been reported. Several books on out-of-body and near-death experiences have been published confirming a persons's continuing self- awareness despite the fact that he was in coma and/or physically unconscious. How can a brain-dead person or fully anesthetized patient remember floating above his bed and looking down at his own physical body being operated on by the surgeon and other hospital staff, unless there was a part of him that actually observed what was going on? Let us not be timid nor embarrassed to concede that human beings do have indestructible souls. I have a fanciful but quite believable theory:- When we were young and we fell deeply in love with that flirtatious classmate in high school or in college, we thought she was our soul mate and we kept dreaming of her, thinking we could not live without her. More often than not, we later discover to our dismay that she is just another imperfect human being like all of us. But we do have soul mates. I have a soul mate and that is my own incorporeal/deathless soul which is bonded to my material/mortal body. The former has to go somewhere when my body dies. I believe when I die, my disembodied soul ( who in my mind is untouched by the passage of time and still retains my youthful image) must go back to where it originally came from--the spiritual domain. In this regard, I have to concede that there must be a First Cause, a Creator who made us and the whole universe, for nothing can come out of nothing. And since it is also my instinct, my intuition, and my intellect that tell me God is Just, I have to agree (and expect) that my poor soul would, after my demise, be dealt with accordingly...(nevertheless, O GOD, HAVE MERCY!)
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