Faced with the passing of someone we love, our hearts cry out in the passion of loneliness and are not comforted with easy answers. Our hearts tell us that we are meant to live, not to die. We are meant to express life ever more consummately. When someone fails to do this, we wonder why.

To understand the meaning of death, we mush understand the meaning of life. Looking at life, we see that all things change. But although all things change, nothing perishes.

If this is true in the world of things, how much more true it is in the world of mind! Soul has a substance of its own, no less permanent for being immaterial, no less real for being invisible. We cannot measure it with calipers or weigh it in a balance. We cannot feel it with our fingers or see it with our eyes. But it is there, substantial and real. It changes, but it will not perish.

Life does not begin with birth. It does not end with death. Life is an eternal process, an eternal progress. A visible form, an audible voice, an aggregation of organs, a network of ideas—we are more than these. These are the trappings of visibility. We are expressions of the spirit of life.

Eternity is not an alternation of life and nonlife. There is only life. The truth is that we cannot die, for we are life. Life is energy. Life is expression. It cannot end, because it is endless. We may change form and vanish from view, but we cannot cease to be. We cannot be separated from life. We cannot be less than life.

There is a unity beyond the unities of time and place and even thought, a unity that links us as one. Does not love link us with our friends, though they be on the other side of the earth? So those we love may pass beyond the reach of hands, but not outside the heart.

Exactly what is on the other side of death we do not know. But we may be sure that it is life. Life is on the other side of death as it is on this side.

Death is a door through which we pass into another room. It is a rest between two notes in an unfinished symphony. It is a page we turn to a new chapter in the book of life. It is not the end; it is a new beginning. It is not the fall of night; it is another dawn.


Back to top

Back to articles