"I'm not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens." Woody Allen. Interesting beginning and a hopeful ending.

I reached the final chapter of my philosophy book and guess what the last section dealt with. Two out of three chances. You most likely got it right on the first chance. "The permanent termination of existence." If that's the case, why should I write anything more?" Hang on.

It was in 1969 that I was able to attend one of the first lectures given by Elizabeth Kubler Ross who just happened to be recognized as the expert educator of the often talked about but never in depth studied "death." Her presentation, in a few short words, said that death came in a five-step process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Now these stages were/are not linear or even complete, but recognizable if one pays attention.

"But will ceasing to exist be a problem for us?" Good question. Hang on.

I begin our answer(s) by examining one of my most read Old Testament books, Ecclesiastes, written about the realities of life. Most folks remember the "Vanity, Vanity" which doesn't mean biblically vain, but does mean useless. Basically, the writer talks about all the stuff people endure to acquire during life that may seem necessary but is truly useless at death.

Going back to around 500BC, death was just a part of the circle of life. When we got to the 1880s-1950s, life was meaningless and absurd because all the stuff we possess has no value, to us, when we die. Of course, by the 2000s, one philosopher said that death is bad for most of us because we never collected as much stuff for us as we should have collected for us.

Moving along, Yale professor Shelly Kagan believes that death is an overall bad thing for the person who dies. He doesn't believe that we have souls but are rather like a computer. When our parts and mechanisms stop, we die.

For us, death is a blessing! Romans, "Christ died for the ungodly. God shows his love for us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. For I am certain that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God."

Allow me to extrapolate, predict, explain, my interpretation of parts of Paul's letter to the Corinthians, "What you bury is not the body which is to be. There are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies. Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. We shall be changed!"

My friends, I had to begin with death in order to praise God for life. Life is an experience. Death is an explanation.

Thanks, God!