And death shall have no dominion

Coming face to face with death for the first time in my life, I noticed a couple things.

Whether or not you believe in a soul, heaven, or God, there is something that goes missing as soon as a person dies. The body is a shell, a holding case, for something, someone. The thing that was in there is gone. The shell is dead. But where does the thing that was in there go? What evidence do we have that it has died as well? There was a presence there and that presence is now gone.

Now I know, the doctors, logicians, and scientists will say to me that because the heart stopped and the body died, the thing that was acting within that body can no longer act. Ok I can agree with that. But I don't believe that the thing(I'll call it soul for now), I don't believe the soul is something that is operating only on the operations of the physical shell, ie - the brain, heart, and all the other variables.

Maybe that's it. Maybe all they are are variables. But the constant is the soul. The constant is of course effected by what the variable is and how they behave. But there is a certain amount of independence, of fight, in the soul. Which leads me to my next observation.

There is an instinct to rail against death. The people around the dying person and the person themselves do all they can to not die. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But my point is that there is something inside of us that goes against what the body is doing when the body is sick.

Some say that death is a natural outcome of life. Well then why does it feel so unnatural, so wrong? Why does it hurt so much? Why is immortality so attractive? I think it's because death isn't the way things were meant to be. That when someone dies we recognize how broken things are. But in order for something to be broken, there has to have been somethingthat was right at one time right? The fact that everything sometimes feels broken gives me hope that somewhere out there is wholeness.