Life after death (First of four parts)
The other day, I just learned through Facebook that a friend died. He was not just an acquaintance but someone close and dear to me, almost a relative (he’s an extended one, a relative of my relative). He opened one of the most successful and popular photo-studio uptown decades ago. I feel sad remembering that just months ago, I asked him to open a “manokan” (he also owns Aida’s, in Bacolod) and a “batchoyan” here in Cebu.
They say only two things are certain, death and taxes. All of us are resigned to the former, but this has been quite amplified in the nearly two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Someone wrote that social media in the last two years has been swamped by images of candles replacing profile pictures or cover photos and expressions of condolences. Numerically, the number of deaths due to COVID is really not that remarkable, as a percentage of the total. But it seems the way it has affected everybody made it ominous and larger than life. And we saw a lot of prominent names, too, some close friends, pass from this life.
In a way, the reality of death is one of those realizations that everybody experienced in the last two years. And together with it is the fear, not only for it happening to oneself but also to others you love – family, relatives, loved ones, friends, and others. My father passed early this year, not from COVID but from a lingering disease. But COVID permeates almost everything else because even the non-COVID sick and those who die by non-COVID-causes have to endure the difficulties of the protocols that the pandemic imposed on us.
But wait, the fear of death is a misplaced emotion, brought about by a failure in understanding what life all is about. Is death a terminal end or just a transition? Most people believe in life after death but fewer are concerned on the after part. Most of us are only concerned in this part of the timeline and not on the afterlife part. And fewer realize the relative difference in importance between the before and after and what we would have prioritized, knowing the immeasurable gap between the two. We are always conscious of, and preoccupied with, the present, we often forget the future. Let’s ask ourselves, how many times today have I/we thought about our lives after death and how we are preparing for it?
I think it was Francis Chan who often used the illustration of a 10-meter rope and measuring and marking one inch of one end. How does one inch of rope measure to 10 meters? Almost nothing! Our life on earth is like that compared to life after death in eternity. No, not even comparable to 10 meters. Not even 100 meters, 1 kilometer, or 1,000 kilometers can we compare 1 inch. We compare 70-80 years to endless eternity. But when we wake up, until we go to sleep, we squeeze all we can do for this life --the short, fleeting time we have. Maybe this pandemic is God’s simple way to remind us of the life we might have after this --and how we can prepare for it, too.