Home »  Browse News Briefs »  What comes after death?

If you're fiftysomething or older, the end may not be near, but you know it is coming.

You are going to die. Then what?

Will you go straight to the land of milk and honey? Or haunt old houses, talking through psychics to loved ones still alive?

These questions were considered in a recent survey of 1,000 people 50 and older by AARP The Magazine, the monthly publication of the American Association of Retired Persons -- with each person able to choose more than one belief.

Some results, featured in the September/October issue, were no surprise -- 94 percent believe in God, 86 percent believe in heaven, and 70 percent believe in hell.

But 24 percent believe in reincarnation, including a return to life on Earth; 64 percent believe in ghosts, with substantial numbers saying they've "felt a presence" or "had seen something" they thought was a spirit or ghost. Nearly half of the respondents said heaven and hell were "states of being," not actual places.

After having a near-death experience in 2005, Rachel Layton of Anderson, Ind., says she had no doubt about an afterlife.

"I know it with all my heart," says Layton, who runs a chapter of International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), a Connecticut-based support group.

Layton, 47, says she nearly died in a hospital room hemorrhaging from cervical problems. Afterward, she says, she began communicating mentally with a being in the form of a bright light and was overcome with feelings of love and well-being that convinced her of life after death.

"It's odd to describe it," she says in a phone interview, "but people can't understand how much peace you feel about dying. It's so much better on the other side."

Mike Cunningham, a psychologist and University of Louisville professor of communication, says there are several perspectives on the posthumous.

"The first is biological; we decompose. We are in a sense recycled; that's the physical body, and that's always been the case, independent of religious belief.

"The second is social. Our memories become entrusted in the hands of others. If we work in media, arts or politics, many people may continue to talk about us, evaluate our work. If we didn't work in the public realm, our memories are entrusted to close friends and relatives.

"The third is the spiritual, and I would say the nature of the spiritual varies. … In Christianity, we believe we have a soul that can go to heaven or hell. In certain Buddhist beliefs, your soul is reincarnated in another body, and you may have another shot at life until you get it right. In some New Age beliefs, you possess a soul that becomes one with the universe. Baby boomers have all three of these beliefs with their generation, as well as agnostic and atheistic perspectives."

The most common beliefs are regularly reflected in popular culture.

In the Kevin Brockmeier novel "The Brief History of the Dead" (2006, Pantheon), the recently departed awake in a teeming but efficiently run metro-paradise where inhabitants never age, enjoy a 70-year cycle of personal fulfillment they only dreamed of on Earth, then -- bam! They're dead for good.

The movie "The Sixth Sense" explored afterlife phenomena -- "I see dead people," the protagonist says -- and clairvoyants and mediums claim they can talk to the dead.

Louisville psychic Marilyn Gaddie says some of her clients have seen and communicated with the spirit world, adding, "I believe that when you die, if you go to the white light, the God energy, you then put yourself through a review of your life, which is all done in an instant, because time doesn't exist when you're not in the material body. Then I believe you go to what a lot of people call 'heaven energy.'

"Metaphysicians believe that ghosts are people who died and are afraid to go to the white light, that they've been taught so much about evil they're afraid to meet their maker, and that's what keeps them earthbound," Gaddie says.

"Hell, I feel, is the absence of God. I don't think it's a permanent thing. … I personally don't believe that God condemns any soul to everlasting punishment."

Scientifically speaking, there's no real proof of a heaven, hell, out-of-body transcendence after death or anything happening in particular.

"When we die, we're dead: Period," says Emmet F. Fields, a Louisville atheist and owner of Bank of Wisdom, a rare book collection.

"What did you expect? People ask me, 'Do you believe in God?' They think it's a big, giant ghost. But that can't possibly exist. I don't believe anyone has found any trace of a thing called a 'soul.' In geological time, our lifetime is a speck between two nothings. As far as where I'll spend eternity after I'm dead, I'll spend it the same place I did before I was born, and it didn't bother me one bit."

Yet many people do believe there's a dimension to the human beyond flesh and blood, a supernatural aspect commonly called a soul that's separate and distinct from our bodies.

The Rev. Richard Johnson, pastor of Mount Sinai Gospel Church in Louisville, says, "According to the Bible, if you believe in Jesus Christ, you will live forever. We're supposed to have a new body, a second body, and in heaven there will be no more dying, crying, no more pain, want, need a wheelchair, glasses, that kind of thing."

Religious believers take it on faith, which the Bible defines as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen."

"Invariably, those who have faith, whether it is called religious or spiritual, have an easier time with loss," wrote Studs Terkel in his 2002 book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." "They find solace in believing there is something after -- and they will in some way, in some form, meet and even merge with the departed ones. Nonbelievers have no such comfort."

source: