The Life We Know

I have often wondered, like many other people, whether there is life after death. I have wondered what happens when the body stops breathing, when consciousness leaves the body, and when the life we know comes to an end. Then I try to look at life from the standpoint of a child in the womb.

A foetus develops from one stage to another, growing within a world it has never seen beyond. It has no idea that there is another world waiting for it. It knows only the environment in which it exists.

Then, one day, it is born.

From our perspective, birth is the beginning of life. But what if, from the perspective of the child, it is the end of the only existence it has ever known?

Maybe, death is not so different.

We are born, we grow, we experience childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and eventually we grow old. Then, at some point, death comes. We know what happens before death because we are living it. But what happens afterwards remains beyond our experience.

Then, the dead, from wherever they are, could look back at the life they lived in much the same way we look back at the womb. Probably, they might wonder what comes next.

But I suppose we will never know.

The child in the womb is also exposed to circumstances that can affect whether it survives to birth and what condition it is born in. Some babies are born healthy. Some are miscarried along the way.

Others are born with conditions that will shape the lives they eventually live.

The unborn child has no control over these circumstances. Its genetic makeup, its mother’s health, her choices, and the environment surrounding the pregnancy can all influence its outcome.

And perhaps our lives are not entirely different.

Some people die as infants, some live with disabilities from birth, some die young, others live well into old age. Some are born into wealth, others into poverty. Some grow up surrounded by love, while others grow up in environments that wound them deeply.

Yet we often speak about human beings as though everyone begins life with the same freedom to choose who they will become.

I am beginning to question that.

We make choices, certainly. But we make them from within the education we have received, the experiences we have had, the families we were born into, the environments that shaped us, and the information available to us at the time.

We often look back at something we did and say, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

But how did we come to know that we shouldn’t have done it? Because we lived through it. The person who made the decision at the time did not yet possess the knowledge that the person looking back now possesses. Had we known then what we know now, we would probably have
chosen differently. But we did not know.

And that is one of the strange things about being human: we make decisions with the knowledge we have, and then judge ourselves with the knowledge we gain afterwards.

A child cannot decide to return to the womb once it has been born. Whatever exists before birth belongs to a reality it can no longer access.

Maybe death is like that. When we die, we do not return to this world because this world has simply ceased to be the place in which we exist. Maybe there is nothing beyond death, maybe there is something, maybe what comes next is so different from this existence that we would not even recognize it as another form of life. I do not know, and none of us can know until we get there. But there is something strangely comforting about the thought that we may simply be standing at the
edge of another unknown, just as we once stood at the edge of this one.

The child in the womb cannot imagine the world waiting outside. We cannot imagine what is waiting beyond this one. Maybe life is simply one unknown preparing us for another. And perhaps the question is not only, “What happens after death?” It could also be: What if we have been asking
the question from the wrong side of the door?