What Happens After Death?
This is a question that people have been trying to answer since the beginning of mankind. The ancient Egyptians were master craftsmen when it came to death; they had a book called ‘The Book of Death and the Book of Life’. Recently, I was watching one of those semi-independent documentaries about death on YouTube, called ‘The Undertaking’ by Frontline PBS with poet, essayist, and undertaker, Thomas Lynch. In the documentary, the undertaker interviews families about someone who is about to die. As heartbreaking as it is, one of those people about to die was a one-year-old who had a syndrome known as CDC, or Cri-du-Chat (cat’s cry).
CDC is a chromosomal condition, as almost all syndromes are, that is a result of someone missing chromosome 5. Humans have 46 total chromosomes and the two that everyone knows are X and Y, which determine our sex at birth. Not only did the undertaker interview the family, but the camera crew interviewed the young parents as well. The mother said that there is nothing that she can do to completely prepare herself for this loss, but she was comforted by speaking with the undertaker and making some arrangements for the funeral. The father was also saying that even though their son couldn’t move at all, he followed them with his eyes back and forth, and filled the room with the biggest energy.
This story made me realize that in my opinion, most children and adults with syndromes or special needs have bigger energies than most other people. Wikipedia’s definition of special needs is “in clinical diagnostic and functional development, special needs (or additional needs) refers to individuals who require assistance for disabilities that may be medical, mental, or psychological.” If you think about it, taking the ‘clinical diagnostic’ part out, we all have special needs because we all have something different or special about us. I have always found catholicism to be hypocritical because devout Catholics supposedly believe that the more a person suffers, the closer to Jesus they are. If that’s the case, then people with syndromes or learning differences should be closer to Jesus than anybody else; but those groups are constantly ridiculed and unsupported by mainstream society.
As I was watching this film, I got distracted by my guild of genealogy, since I’m working on a book about the colonial immigrants that came to America. I was thinking about the documentary and genealogy at the same time, and I wanted to know the exact definition of a pilgrim. According to Wikipedia, “A pilgrim is a traveler (literally one who has come from afar) who is on a journey to a holy place”. It goes on to say “Typically, this is a physical journey (often on foot) to some place of special significance to the adherent of a particular religious belief system. In the spiritual literature of Christianity, the concept of pilgrim and pilgrimage may refer to the experience of life in the world (considered as a period of exile) or to the inner path of the spiritual aspirant from a state of wretchedness to a state of beatitude”. If you take Christianity out of it in general, then when we die we all become pilgrims.
Here is the link to the YouTube documentary.