This post concerns some fundamental themes in God’s creation of Adam and Eve (including rabbinic traditions of Eden), sin and repentance, and death. I want to focus specifically on the final hours of a person’s life in this existence and what immediately lies beyond the veil as far as we mortals can know.

The familiar funeral term “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” does not come from the Bible as such, but from the Anglican Book of Common prayer. However, God does say to Adam in Genesis 3:19 “. . .for dust you are and to dust you will return.” So, where do ashes fit in? The theme of ashes is particularly developed in the book of Job, where it symbolizes repentance, humility and mortality. We recently observed Ash Wednesday, and in Catholic and some liturgical Protestant denominations, crosses in ash were applied to the foreheads of parishioners.

Witness to death

Before my late wife died, I had an overly-rosy picture in my mind of a believer’s death. God’s child would lie in bed at home or in a hospital, breathing with some difficulty, and then a smile would appear on her face as she stared at the corner of the room, as if she saw an angel. She would take one last breath and sigh contentedly before the monitor would signal that her heart had stopped. But this was not my late wife’s experience.

Her death took three months in the intensive care unit of a regional hospital (including a month in an LTAC-Long Term Acute Care facility) with a two week break in a skilled nursing facility halfway through her stay. Since her lungs could not deliver the oxygen her brain needed, she would hallucinate. For example, she called the nurses one evening to ask why they would not bring my wife her babies (She believed she had just given birth to twins: Elizabeth and Michael. I cried when I heard that.) These children existed only in her dying mind.

Her blood pressure during those ninety days was typically 30/18, sometimes a few millimeters of mercury higher, sometimes even lower. Doctors and nurses at several facilities told me they had never seen anyone with numbers that low. The Levophed they pumped in around the clock at the maximum possible dose to try to raise her blood pressure slowly and permanently turned her fingers black. Her fingers were checked daily for gangrene. On top of that, she was beginning her third year of dialysis, and every three days she needed to be hooked up for a four-hour dialysis treatment. But she resisted, often because of anoxic paranoia. On one occasion they placed her bed near a utility sink for a dialysis treatment. She caught a whiff of bleach and thought they were going to poison her. Sometimes, they could not perform dialysis because of her low blood pressure or the presence of cardiac arrythmias. These occur when the heart does not receive enough oxygen. She would have conversations with her dead sister, or spout quotes from Emerson (she taught literature in college.) She would see a word such as “Covidien” on some hospital equipment, focus on it, shouting it out loudly. Our one son was a fireman and visited her at night, once wearing a shirt that said “Sherman Fire Department” or something like that. She started yelling “Sherman” over and over before switching to the word “Fire.” When she started yelling “Fire” at 11:30 p.m., the staff came running. One time, she asked me very mysteriously to phone our daughter and say “peaches and cream.” Nothing else. Apparently, that was coded message which made no sense to me (or our daughter.). Once she said “Hell is a long way down.” On another occasion, she said to me angrily “I’m dying. Do something, damn it!”

Our pastor visited quite faithfully and whenever I called. He spoke with her if she was lucid, and on her behalf if she was not. The last time he gave her communion, she was able to take the wine, but the wafer remained on her tongue until he removed it, lest it prove to be a hazard I suppose.

One of our three children, or our daughter-in-law or I stayed with her around the clock for those last three months, so she was never alone. I had arguments with the attending physician about whether she was mentally competent to consent to a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order, and a nurse who wanted to train a nursing student on how insert a nasogastric tube. After four futile attempts causing my wife pain and distress on each attempt, I told the nurse to stop it. The student could practice on her (the nurse) if it was that important. But I quickly apologized to both.

Three days before she died, she wanted the blinds in her room open so that she could see the sun. When she died around 1:00 p.m. on January 29, 2018 she was unconscious. The suction bottle had pumped 400 or so milliliters of bile and blood from her stomach so far that shift. There was no smile on her lips when she breathed her last, and if there were angels present, none of us saw them. The cause of death was pulmonary hypentension and multi-organ failure. But that’s only because there was not enough room on the death certificate to list the systemic hypotension, congestive heart failure, sepsis, circulatory collapse, renal failure, and other issues that together pulled her down.

Famous last words

I have no doubt that my wife had saving faith. But the transition from life-to-death was a struggle for her and many others as well I suppose. Tell me that someone’s faith would make dying in a car crash painless as the person lies mangled underneath the frame of the car. Tell me that someone who has lived a saintly life who is flying on a plane, moments from disaster doesn’t struggle with fear or panic. And there is no common thread in the last words of people. Some are sensible and others sheer nonsense, to wit:

• Emily Dickinson said: “I must go in, for the fog is rising.”
• Michael Landon said to the family and friends who gathered at his death bed: “You’re right. It’s time. I love you all.”
• Princess Diana was heard by one attending paramedic to have said before losing consciousness: “My God, what’s happened?”
• Julius Caesar to his stepson Brutus who stabbed him: “You, too, my child?!”
• John Lennon’s last words were: “I’m shot. I’m shot.”
• Franklin Roosevelt who died of a stroke: “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.”
• George Floyd: “Man, I can’t breathe.“
• Betty White, most likely addressed to her late husband Allen Ludden: “Allen.”
• Virginia Woolf to her husband Leonard in a suicide note: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.“
• Amy Winehouse who died of alcohol intoxication: “I don’t want to die.“
• Confederate General Stonewall Jackson: “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.“
• Wolfgang Mozart: “I feel something that is not of this earth.“

Rabbinic traditions

The Jews had a tradition that every soul that would ever live was formed at Creation. Many protestant denominations share this belief as well, because if God were creating souls even today, they would be necessarily corrupted by the presence of evil and sin following the Fall. Rabbis believed that there was a repository (gul) of unborn souls waiting to be assigned to a person, and over time the number of remaining souls dwindles. The soul had a knowledge and awareness before conception which was wiped from its memory prior to birth. When God called a soul to leave its spiritual state and enter a fetus, the soul resisted, knowing that it would face a lifetime of pain and suffering on earth. But it obediently entered the fetus. Year later, however, it often decided that it actually enjoyed life depending on the circumstances, and it resisted the idea of leaving the body to return to it’s original state.

To some, human life was a perfect union: “The soul of man comes from heaven; his body, from earth.”  Today, it is popular to say that our bodies are made from stardust and elements left over from the Big Bang. That is a romanticized spin on it, but there is some truth to it.

Near Death Experiences (NDE’s)

There are now hundreds of thousands of interviews with people who have had near death experiences. I knew one person myself. He was clinically dead for two minutes during a laminectomy on his spine, but typed a manuscript eighty pages long of his experiences during those one hundred and twenty seconds. These are experiences that occur after one’s heart has stopped beating. Not everyone, of course, has them. Obviously, most occur in a hospital setting where the heart can be restarted else, we would not know of them. But these experiences are subjective to the patient and they occur when the brain is being starved for oxygen. Thus, it is possible that they are hallucinatory and not real. On the other hand, there is a common denominator to all experiences.

Life After Life

Dr. Raymond Moody was the first to write about NDE’s. A forensic psychiatrist by education and training, he teamed up with another psychiatrist named Dr. George Ritchie who, himself, had a NDE. However, like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who focused on death and dying and wound up side-tracked practicing necromancy, Moody’s research took him on a pilgrimage deeper and deeper involving regression and other psychic phenomenon. That, in and of itself, does not discredit his work on NDE’s, however. Others have picked up on his research and NDE’s are no longer considered to be “fringe” experiences. In some real sense they are healing opportunities for a person.

The classical common denominators of an NDE include a feeling of being out of your body once your heart stops. You hear what is spoken by the crash team or surgical team, you observe each of the procedures, feeling completely detached from your body, often while floating elsewhere in the room. At some point, you encounter what is described as a dark tunnel through which you must pass. Eventually–if your experience continues long enough–you encounter a brilliant light on the far side of the tunnel, and often see deceased relatives or some divine being. At this point, you understand that you will be returned to this life. There is often a sense of regret at having to return.

Not everyone, though, has a blissful experience. Some patients have a very disturbing, almost terrorizing experience. Most people who have had an NDE find this experience to be life changing for the better, however. Yet, again, this is nonetheless a very subjective experience and it might be easily explained or dismissed. We know that hearing is the last of the senses to shut down, so it would not be unusual to recall some information relayed immediately after clinical death. There is also the question of whether a person’s experiences confirm their expectations. Christians generally see a figure they believe is Jesus or Christ-like. But do Muslims see Allah or Mohammed? Do Buddhists see Buddha? There is just not enough information available. NDE’s are not something to trust your salvation to.

Current research

Science over the past century has made great strides in understanding the nature of the universe (including human consciousness which many researchers now believe is somehow “connected” to time and space.) The use of sophisticated mathematical modeling, data from space-based telescopes and instruments a million miles from Earth or more and research at facilities such as CERN in Switzerland are adding to our knowledge daily. Some of this research deals with the field of quantum mechanics, the hypothetical existence of additional dimensions, the behavior of particles, the polar possibilities of determinism to the exclusion of free will and so on. In fact, it’s clear (at least to me) that there is a strong case for the existence and agency of God when one studies the ramifications of the new physics and of consciousness. As just one example, the late Erwin Schrödinger explained that there is no absolute reality unless and until it is observed. He didn’t use these exact terms, though this was his conclusion. But if Schrödinger was correct and nothing occurs until it is observed, then who observed the Big Bang if not God?

Adam and Eve

Genesis 2:7 describes the final act of creation when God created Adam and Eve. The account reads:

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

The man was called “Adam,” which is also a pronoun and used to signify “humanity” as well the historical person. Subsequent to Adam’s creation, God created woman to be a partner for Adam. Some people wonder how we know all this (including what happened) before there were people. The answer is that according to tradition among Jews and Christians, the author was Moses. He is considered to be the author of the first five books of the Bible, and we know that he spent countless hours on Mt Sinai receiving the law. Plus, there is an indication (e.g. Genesis 5:1) that parts of the beginning of humanity were present in documents as well as oral traditions. Obviously, the details were provided by supernatural revelation, much like the Apostle Paul received (Galatians 1:12) during his three years in Arabia immediately following his conversion to Christianity.

In I Corinthians 15:53 Paul describes death. He writes:

For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies.”

Elsewhere in I Corinthians (15:42) St Paul speaks of a dead person (corpse), whether buried or not and how it perishes. Flesh decomposes, bones decay and eventually a century later if not sooner, you have a pile of dust. Even Egyptian mummies which have been carefully embalmed disintegrate into dust when exposed to the air after many, many centuries in their sarcophagus. But this dust and presumably the particles of ash (the very atoms of either) become the building blocks for a new, improved, immortal person at the time of the resurrection. Most, though not all Christians believe that after a person dies, their soul immediately goes to Heaven. Seventh Day Adventists believe that the soul sleeps until the resurrection. There is no place in Christianity for reincarnation. Catholics believe in purgatory, an intermediate state between Earth and Heaven where a sort of cleansing of the saved soul takes place. This notion is not based solidly on Scripture, however.

Afterword

If we trust God and believe in Jesus, we need not fear death.  John Newton, the famous ex-slave trader wrote that “God saves dying grace for a dying hour.”  It takes a certain measure of courage to face death, and the fact that we flinch now at the thought does not mean we won’t have the courage to face death as death approaches.  “What about those who don’t believe in Jesus or who never heard of Him?  What happens to them?”  That is a good question and worthy of a post of its own in the near future.  Stay tuned.