Is Contemplating Life After Death Wasted Time?

Deb Eternal

Aug 29

3 min read

I read something today that asked a deceptively simple question: Is contemplating life after death wasted time?

It stayed with me.

Perhaps because death has seemed unusually visible lately. We hear that an actor has died, or a singer whose voice has been somewhere in the background of our lives. We watch the reactions that follow — memories shared, old performances replayed, interviews rediscovered, people remarking that they cannot believe someone is gone.

And for a little while, we remember that one day we will be too.

An empty chair beside a softly lit window with an open book nearby. — Perhaps thinking about death is sometimes simply another way of noticing life.

Is Contemplating Life After Death Wasted Time?

There are people who would probably say yes.

We cannot know with certainty what happens after death. Depending on what you believe, there may be heaven, another existence, another consciousness, reincarnation, a return to something greater than ourselves — or simply nothing at all.

Human beings have been asking the question for thousands of years and we still haven't produced an answer everyone can agree upon.

So perhaps all that wondering really is wasted time.

Except I don't think wondering is necessarily about finding the answer.

Sometimes the value of a question lies in what it makes us notice.

If I genuinely accept that my life will end one day, what becomes important now?

That changes the question completely.

Death Has a Strange Way of Making Us Look at Life

When someone well known dies, particularly someone whose films or music have been part of our own history, the reaction can seem surprisingly personal.

We didn't know them.

Yet perhaps their song played during a particular summer. Their movie reminds us of someone we loved. Their face belongs to an era when we were younger and thought there was an endless amount of time ahead.

Their death doesn't only remind us of their mortality.

It reminds us of ours.

And maybe that is why I thought about The Book Thief.

When Death Tells the Story

Markus Zusak made an extraordinary choice in The Book Thief: Death narrates the story.

Yet Death isn't simply there waiting for people to die.

Death watches us.

Against the horror of Nazi Germany, Death observes human beings capable of cruelty, courage, love, fear, kindness and contradiction. And somehow, by placing Death outside human life looking in, Zusak makes ordinary moments of living seem more precious.

Perhaps that's what stayed with me.

We spend so much time asking what Death might have waiting for us that we sometimes forget to consider what Death might see if it were watching us now.

Would it see someone waiting for life to begin?

Someone holding onto an argument that stopped mattering years ago?

Someone postponing something because there will surely be time later?

Or would it see someone who understood, at least occasionally, what an extraordinary thing it is simply to be here?

Perhaps We're Asking the Wrong Question

I don't know what happens after we die. I'm comfortable admitting that.

I can read philosophy, spirituality, science and accounts of people's experiences. I can wonder. I can change my mind. I can question everything.

But eventually I have to come back to the only part of existence I can actually do something about.