...to ask what happens when you die?

[TeaAndAMarmiteSandwhich]

... or more accurately, what you think happens?

I really really don't want to die (a good thing I guess! As I wasn't too bothered either way as a moody teen, but now I love life most of the time and want to hang around).

It's comforting to think there's a heaven, but I don't believe there is (and I'd probably get bored if I had to stay there for EVER). But when u die - is that it? Game over ? I'm not too keen on that idea either.

What do you think happens? and what would you like to think happens?

You stop breathing . End of everything.

I agree, @Jakeyboy1. I think it sounds utterly horrendous.

I believe a few things.
Maybe we move on to a parallel world.
Maybe our body just dies and the memories and knowledge (goes back into the universe) and becomes something/someone’s else.
There are two neuroscientists who I’ve forgotten the names of but their work basically says the information inside the tubules of your brain can ot just disappear. It cannot die and therefore must go somewhere. Beyond interesting I always think.

I don’t believe in a God but I do believe in life after death and in angels and ghosts.

I think that’s it, too. Just as before you were born. I think we ‘live on’ in the kindnesses we did and memories. I say to dd if nobody died, there would be no room for new babies. I was in hospital once with a very old lady who denied treatment for a urinary infection. The staff were fantastic and talked her through the implications of that and she came to her own independent decision that she’d had enough. She wasn’t sad particularly and the staff in hospital were just fabulous at end of life care. It was a profoundly moving and thought provoking hospital stay! The lady on the other side of me was the same age and adamant she had not had enough at all, and was battling on with grace and humour. And lovely earrings!

Decomposition. My DNA will live on so long as my decendants do. Im quite content with that, I find it comforting in a cycle of life/insignificant in the universe way. This is enough for me.

Ive never found the heaven idea particularly comforting. Are our caveman anscestors still looking down on us? I doubt it..

Ooh yes -mitochondrial dna. So interesting!!! And such a link to past generations.

This is something I have been discussing a lot with my 4yo recently, as a close relative is sadly very close to death.

My DS seems very taken with the idea of reincarnation, and says that he and I will die and come back and be together for ever.

I believe that people have souls, as opposed to just life. But what they actually are is problematic of course. Essence of life? The idea of seeing everyone again after death is an appealing one though of course, and ‘soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase’ makes me think of an army of loved ones waiting. I think it is more likely that death is just The End though, as a machine stops.

I was very taken by Philip Pullman’s daemons and dust. Part of you being outside your body, then going back to dust

I just hope I die at a good age peacefully in my sleep.

Being dead is, I think easy. It is as it was before you were conceived and a million years of not existing is as nothing.
The act of dying, like birth is the hard bit.

I hope there is 'something' and that that something is nice.
I can't imagine my little toddler DS being old and dying and then just not being.

I like the website 'bigquestionsonline', I recently read an interesting essay about quantom physics providing 'evidence' for the possibility of God (I think, a lot of it went above my head)

In a funny way I do think anything is possible - so much about life and the universe is mind blowing, the vastness of space, the things that have been invented - it seems wrong somehow that amongst all this miraculous stuff life just ends and that's that. Although overall that is still what I think happens!

Im terrified of dying i think its become a actual phobia. Reading this thread hoping to make some sense of my thoughts.

If it's like going under a general, then it's just like the light is switched off.

I found that hard to deal with when waking from a recent surgery. That it was just instant.

Who we are, our soul if you want to call it that, our personalities, our likes, dislikes, who we love, are all electromagnetic neuron reactions. All that is tangible is the current. Electricity conducts and will perpetuate. I find the stories of children who have "lived before" fascinating even if I remain strictly agnostic. The multi dimensions of String theory have parallels to reincarnation and the idea of the unknowable multifaceted Brahma. The two are worth exploring.

I often wonder if lost souls are those who love too much, who are stuck in a dimension unable to let go, to perpetuate, to conduct, so remain as a shadow, and, if all we are is energy, do we remain so in another's memory of us which is again only electromagnetic neuron transmissions?

I read somewhere that Elon Musk has a theory that we're akin to computer simulations which is along similar lines.

There are two neuroscientists who I’ve forgotten the names of but their work basically says the information inside the tubules of your brain can not just disappear. It cannot die and therefore must go somewhere. Beyond interesting I always think.

Thank you Verbena37 for posting that. I find it comforting and interesting.

I think you feel exactly the same as you did before you were born. You come from nothing and you go to nothing and the fun bit is what you do with your multi-billion to one chance of life in the middle.

Christmasmum this has really cheered me up, thanks!

Trinity having done pretty much dead and GA, yes, absence of anything was the same. No sense of anything.

Eulogy by a physicist.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen.

That ^

I will go to glory

Having watched my grandmother and my parents all suffer and die horrible deaths, I imagine that nothingness is a comforting thought for people dealing with that. Their deaths were a relief to all of us around them, and I know that my father was begging for assistance for weeks prior to his death. (He had MND, and it was awful. Just fucking awful.)

Dying doesn’t worry me, it’s the being old, years in a care home with dementia or very lonely as everyone you’ve known dies off

I worried a lot about dying when I was a young child.

Now I find I’m not so concerned for my own death, I’ve had a few GA’s and I imagine (if I’m lucky) it will be something like that.

But I am absolutely terrified of my dc or parents deaths, morbidly so. I would say it’s causing a great deal of debilitating anxiety and stress.

Yes, it is the manner of my death I fear rather than being dead.

My best friend “died” before she actually died. She was adamant there was nothing there. No lights no angels just nothing.

I can accept that it’s exactly like before you existed, unfortunately having no lived you know more in the exit.

This will sound strange, but when I was a child of about 9 or so I was walking through a field in my wellies. As I walked l heard a different sort of crunch and and stopped to investigate. It was a wee mouse skeleton. I remember feeling sad for its family that a mother/father/sister/brother was left to rot and dry in the sun. But I also realised as I checked my boot tread for caught bones how little it mattered to me.

I don't know what if anything happens after death, I firmly believe that when you're gone, that's it, blackness and nothingness. But, I also know that what matters are the people who care in life, now, because life is one big ol' kid in wellington boots stamping over your bones without really giving a shit.

Cherry thought there, Rascal forgive me if I don’t share that particular insight with dd just yet!

because life is one big ol' kid in wellington boots stamping over your bones without really giving a shit.

To you maybe, but not to anyone else......